Emotional Eating

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Have you ever had a bad day or a bad week and just felt “I don’t care about my diet, and I don’t care about all of the work I’ve done this week\month – I just wanna eat and I wanna eat something bad.”? That was me earlier this week. And I’ll admit it – I caved and I ate something bad. It was like 5 minutes of gratification and then a whole evening worth of guilt. I did actually go to the gym that night, although I have to admit if I didn’t have my friend encouraging me to go it probably wouldn’t have happened. She said something along the lines of “let’s go burn some of it off and you can tell me all about it”. So I got a gym session and a free therapy session all at once. And truthfully I felt so much better after the gym session. Some oldies music was playing at the gym as we’re doing our squats for the crazy squat challenge I told her we should try (what was I thinking? Lol) – and there I was belting the music out and dancing to it.

I would have to say that this is my biggest problem – I pretty much always eat my emotions. And I will eat through ALLL of them. Happy, sad, angry, stressed and not just emotions. I also love any excuse to eat like a celebration or “hey it’s a sunny weekend lets pig our faces off!” Or even “we’re snowed in and can’t go anywhere, I’m bored so let’s eat!”

I’ll use any excuse to eat badly and when I’m finished I always have these feelings of guilt after. Which quite honestly depending on how bad they are those feelings of guilt can make me eat badly again, and it can be a vicious cycle to try to get out of.

So my new plan of attack is to try my best to handle my stress better. It’s been a whole month of going to the gym for four days a week. I’ll be honest I haven’t lost a lot of weight, but I find that overall I’ve been having better moods and it’s only been a month. I’m going to try to not let the little things stress me out so much and maybe try new ways to deal with them. Remind myself that I have great friends I can talk to (and a great husband), and that 5 minutes of my “eating high” won’t make my problems go away and I’ll just feel guilty after. Maybe if I keep the gym up I’ll have more feel good chemicals bouncing around my brain so I won’t run to food as an answer every time, and I think I’m also going to do what my best friend suggested and give meditation a try so that I can have more control over myself. (She has an awesome article about mediation for weight loss that can be found here). I’m just going to take it one day at a time and also try to remind myself that I’m human – I will make mistakes and that’s ok, to just keep doing my best and not to get so upset if I’ve had an off day. If you guys have any suggestions on how I can deal with my emotional eating I’d love to hear about it! Can’t have too many suggestions\ideas 🙂

Hope to talk to you all soon!

Tara

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