Emotional eating can ruin your life with dozens of extra pounds. Emotional Overeating can affect your self worth causing you to constantly sell yourself short, miss out on a social life, and contribute to low self esteem.
The good news is that when you know how to deal with emotions effectively, emotional overeating can be eliminated and those extra pounds gone bye-bye.
However, to do so, it's important to know that there are three kinds of over eating. First there is habitual eating, the second is emotional eating, and the third is self defeative eating.
How the process works. We first begin by assuming the tempatation to overeat is habitual. Eating out of habit is being at a certain place at a certain time--like stopping at McDonalds every morning. The best way of handling habitual eating is awareness. For instance, a basic thinking technique wherein you ask yourself if you really want to stop.." Your answer is either "Yes, I want to stop, " or, "No, let's skip it."
If the answer is "No," you pass by and it was habitual eating that you eliminated. A "yes" answer means that you stopped for the McDonalds and that it is emotional eating with which you are dealing.
The way out of emotional eating is to first recognize the emotion when you had the temptation of eating. You isolate that emotion and choose to feel it instead of diluting it with food.
Because emotions themselves are stressful for most emotionsl over eaters, it's important to learn more about them before expecting success.
Once you've mastered the art of emotions, if it's emotional eating, you then leave food out of your life for the moment and have freed yourself of emotional eating.
If however, you still eat, then you're looking at self defeative eating. Self defeative eating is actually a fear of being thin because you might not live up to your expectations of yourself. In other words, the excess pounds becomes an excuse for not achieving friends, success, skills...
Overcoming self defeative eating is to focus on your fears concerning the future. build self confidence and self esteem, read self help books, listen to self help cds, take adult education classes... Of course these are great things to do anyway, emotional over eater or not.
An effective approach to losing weight involves asking important questions "What is missing? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised from experts you've consulted and the books, you've been reading?" It is clearly insane to keep dieting when the results are so poor. It's more important to gain a grasp on eating emotional stress--how to handle emotional eating than it is to read the scale. Obviously focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you're a sales person, you'll be a better sales person. If you're an assembly line worker, you'll be a better assembly line worker; a father, a better father... Overall, you'll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.
Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified, a prominent figure in the area of hypnosis with his best selling hypnosis and stress management cds at http://www.PanicBusters.com and http://www.DStressDoc.com His goal is to raise awareness in using hypnosis for self overcoming emotional eating. To learn more about emotional eating please go to http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm