Stop Emotional Eating to Lose Weight

There are many reasons why diets fail, including that they’re usually not conceived to offer results in the long run, but rather almost instantly. However, even granted all conditions are met for a sustainable weight loss, we might still have problems with dropping that last five or ten pounds and that’s because, on some level, we’ve become accustomed to dealing with emotions through food, Shape magazine says.

Health experts and nutritionists agree: many of us use food to deal with the things happening in our life and we’re not necessarily talking here of movie-like scenarios where we break up from our boyfriend and eat an entire bucket of ice cream in one sitting. On some level or another, we all have moments when we deal with emotions with the help of food, even if only on rare occasions like, say, when we crave some chocolate to boost our mood.

Consequently, in order to lose weight, we need to make sure we’re not eating for the wrong reasons, so to speak. “We’ve all heard the phrase ‘emotional eating.’ It brings to mind the heartbroken woman working her way through an entire box of chocolates after being dumped, the homesick college student finishing off a large pizza, or the recently laid-off friend making her way to the bottom of a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips while trying to pay her bills. But most emotional eating takes place on a far more subtle scale – which may be the reason you can't drop those last 5, 10, or 25 pounds,” Shape writes.

“About 75 percent of the people who come to see me for weight-loss advice eat to deal with their feelings. But because it’s such an unconscious act, they often don’t even realize they’re doing it,” Jane Jakubczak, R.D., coordinator of nutrition services at the University of Maryland, says for the same publication. Linda Spangle, R.N., author of “100 Days of Weight Loss,” agrees, seeing mindless munching as the top cause for the failure of a diet. “In my experience, emotional eating is the top reason diets fail. You get into a pattern where every time you feel anything – sadness, loneliness, anxiety, boredom, even happiness – you turn to food,” Spangle explains.

So, in order to make sure that the combination of diet / healthy eating and working out does not fail, we also need to learn to change our relationship with food, if it’s one that leads us to overindulging when we don’t know how to cope with certain emotions. For more on this, as well as for concrete steps to take into this direction, please refer here.