Emotional Eating Therapy
Weight loss isn't as simple as eating less and being more active, if it was there would be nobody with a weight issue! For many people, there's an emotional factor at play (and therefore the term ‘emotional eating’ is often used). It’s your emotions that drive your behaviour and make it difficult to stick to a healthy diet. Emotional eating is an incredibly common problem that many women suffer from. It can be challenging to overcome but with the right coaching and treatment, it IS possible to change your mindset, stop emotional eating, and lose weight for good.
What is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is eating food in response to a negative emotion - stress, sadness, anxiety - to help make you feel better. You might know it better as 'comfort eating'.
It’s not driven by genuine physiological hunger and it tends to involve excessive consumption of foods that should be eaten in moderation, such as chocolate, sweets and crisps.
People who eat emotionally find it hard to stick to a diet plan because the urge to find comfort in food is so intense.
Food can distract you from your emotional pain and make you feel numb or uplifted for a short while. However, you often feel worse not too long after comfort eating, particularly if you're struggling with your weight.
Emotional eating often leads to weight gain and makes it difficult to lose weight. This can make you feel guilty, ashamed and unhappy with your physical appearance, and it can contribute to low self-esteem. With these negative emotions come fresh compulsions to overeat to try and make yourself feel better, and you find yourself trapped in a cycle of overeating, weight gain, and negative emotions that can be difficult to break.
What is emotional eating therapy?
Since emotional eating is triggered by the urge to push down unpleasant emotions, it's important to face those emotions head-on. Therapy for emotional eating involves getting to the root cause of these emotions, which might be past experiences, unpleasant memories, or negative thought patterns that lead you to feel sad, anxious or stressed. The root of the problem can then be tackled and you can work on adopting a fresh and more positive way of thinking.
Given that 95% of what you do is operated at a subconscious level (and is what determines your feelings) and that your subconscious thinking is made up of a set of beliefs you established in childhood that drive your behaviour for the rest of your life you have to understand and get rid of these beliefs in order to change your behaviour by starting to question – and ultimately – change them.
This is why willpower is a finite resource because it operates at the conscious level. When you try to use willpower to change a behaviour it doesn’t take long before the subconscious beliefs kick in and override the willpower. Then you get frustrated with yourself and the emotional eating begins again to make you feel better.
But until you know the subconscious beliefs driving your behaviour it’s an impossible task to change.
You can’t fix what you don’t understand, you’re trying to beat something you can never win against. And until you start questioning your beliefs (working out what that emotional hunger is) and changing them the unwanted behaviour will remain.
But, when you begin to get to the root cause of what’s going on and ultimately get rid of the emotional urge to eat it becomes easier to stop overeating and live a healthier lifestyle. If weight loss is the goal it is significantly easier to shift excess pounds without the emotional factors at play. On top of that, when you stop emotional eating and regain control of your relationship with food this has a direct impact on improving your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Do I need an emotional eating coach?
Here at Fresh Forward, we run a rapid transformational therapy programme called Beat the Binge led by an experienced emotional eating coach. Our award-winning programme lasts for 12 weeks and combines 1:1 sessions, group coaching, online modules and personalised hypnotherapy. It’s designed to help you face your past, identify and resolve the root cause of your comfort eating, and stop emotional eating forever.
Beat the Binge is an intensive plan that requires real commitment to transforming your mindset. It will help you stop overeating, lose weight for good, feel more confident in yourself and more comfortable in your skin and feel great naked!
Check out the Beat the Binge programme now to learn more.