The fast way to stop eating your feelings and start making decisions that benefit your health
Emotional eating is one of the hardest habits to break. Even the healthiest people you know can have emotional triggers that tell them to run to the pantry and binge eat cookies in the dark. But, there’s a big difference between having an urge and acting on it. When you learn to stop that urge from turning into an emotional eating event, you’ll learn how to be the boss of your health.
Emotional eating is one of the most common ways we deal with stress. It can feel like an impossible habit to break, especially when we can’t get rid of the stress in our lives - and let’s be honest, motherhood is always stressful! Luckily, this isn’t true! It’s 100% possible to stop eating your feelings and I have two hacks that will help!
Before we dive into my fast hacks for ending emotional eating, you need to understand a little bit about habits and how we develop and change them.
How habits work
Ending bad habits, such as emotional eating is hard, but it’s not that hard. The key to changing any bad habit is the same: you have to interrupt the pattern.
Habits are broken down into four steps:
The cue
The action
The reward
The aftermath
The cue is the emotion, the thought or the experience that triggers the urge. You may not even be conscious of your cues right now because they’re so ingrained into your everyday life. However, we need to start recognizing our cues if we want to change - more on that later.
The action is what you do once you’re triggered. Do you eat, shop, watch TV? Most of the time we’re using the action to mask the pain or emotion that the cue triggered. The actions determine if we’re dealing with the cues in a healthy or unhealthy way.
After the action is the reward. The reward causes a hit of dopamine, the happy hormone, to flood our brains and take away the unwanted feeling we had. The problem is that the reward is only temporary - meaning that it only makes you feel better for a little while. Once the reward is over, you’re left with the aftermath.
When the aftermath hits, you’re forced to deal with the cue and the action. Are you still upset? Did you pile on that problem by reacting in an unhealthy way? The aftermath usually sets us up to repeat the habit cycle.
You feel guilty for your actions (overeating, spending too much money, staying up late watching TV) and it sets off a new cue that triggers the whole cycle over, and over, and over again.
Good news, the trick to ending unwanted habits doesn’t require sheer willpower - because willpower can only last so long. The real way you break a habit is by breaking the link between the cue and the activity. When you break that link in the physical world, you also break that link in your brain so that you don’t keep repeating actions that hurt you!
There’s only one downside to the habit cycle. The cues most likely won’t go away. No matter how healthy you get, you’ll still have cues. And your initial reaction might still be to turn to that old, unhealthy habit. However, once you understand this process you can use the tools below to make healthy choices that will help you rather than hurt you!
Break the habit cycle through movement
The absolute best tool you have to break the habit cycle is movement. Like I said before when a cue is triggered, the brain starts looking for an endorphin hit. Moving your body is one of the healthiest ways you can give yourself that hit.
If you’re feeling like you need a release or joy, or something to bring your mood back up, then get up and move that booty, mama! The great thing is that any movement is going to help!
You can schedule your workouts for 2 p.m. if you know that you hit a daily low at that time every day. Going and working out can give your body not only the dopamine hit it’s looking for but it can help increase your energy so you can power through the rest of your day!
If you need to break the unhealthy habit cycle in the moment, try one of these ideas:
Turn on music and dance
Go for a walk around the block
Do some air squats
Try desk yoga
Get up and clean something in your house
Try and spend at least five minutes moving your body. By changing that action you’re going to see a different result and a different aftermath than you’re used to. Take note of these and compare them to what you used to do.
Create a food plan to prevent emotional eating
Another trap that emotional eaters fall into is that they know that they want to eat but they can’t make healthy decisions in the moment. If you know that you’re going to need a snack throughout the day, or that you’re going to be faced with a stressful situation, then make a plan ahead of time of what you’ll eat.
The key here is that it needs to be something that will provide that dopamine hit. If you hate hard-boiled eggs, and that’s what you planned to eat for a snack after a stressful day, then it’s not going to give you the good feelings you’re looking for. It’s going to annoy you, and you’ll end up in the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru line.
However, if you know that after dragging all of your kids through the grocery store, you’ll get to go home and enjoy a peanut butter cup, you’ll stick to it. The idea of that peanut butter cup will carry you through the of the day and you’ll feel satisfied and happy when you get to eat it.
One of my Macros Made Easy Mamas was telling me how she conquered her afternoon hanger by planning ahead. She noticed that by the afternoon she felt drained, and exhausted. She would normally head to the pantry for a pick-me-up treat. But it kept throwing her nutrition goals off. So, that night she made her nutrition plan for the next day and she decided that she would eat an apple and peanut butter as her afternoon snack.
The next day she stuck to her plan and she was excited about that apple and peanut butter. It fueled her for the rest of the day (hello protein, fats and carbs!!) and it was something to look forward to.
Having a plan is a crucial part of a healthy life. And when you plan ahead, it will help lower your stress and anxiety. You won’t be forced to make a last-minute decision about what to eat anymore! You’ll know how your food is improving your life, rather than taking away from it.
If you’re ready to tackle your unhealthy or emotional eating habits and want to surround yourself with women who will cheer you on and support you fiercely, then let’s chat about my Macros Made Easy Program. In 12 weeks we tackle the mental and physical challenges that are standing in the way of you living your healthiest life. You can reach your goals, and I can help you get there!
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