Do you feed your feelings with emotional eating? If you munch when you feel down, upset, bored, excited, happy, confused, joyful, uncertain, malaise, bored..., then you are feeding your feelings.
Can you look at each of those feelings as a different persona? Sound strange?
Yes, there's Mr. Joy, Mrs. Boredom, Ms. Confusion, Master Upset and they are all in search of you for fun. And they find tons of individuals with whom to play their games.
No wonder that the latest obesity statistics are:
* 58 Million Overweight; 40 Million Obese; 3 Million morbidly Obese
* Eight out of 10 over 25 are overweight
* 78% of American's not meeting basic activity level recommendations
* 25% completely Sedentary
* 76% increase in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 yrs old since 1990
These feelings are having a hell of a lot of fun and what does the poor emotional eater do? Answer: Binge on carbs.
What good does it do to talk about diets, healthy eating habits, priorities, deep breathing, meditation, relationship advice, advice to feel good about you, yoga... when it's the feelings themselves that are the culprit?
The quandary is that advice is not the answer even to dealing with the feeling of emotion. I can imagine someone saying, "Take a deep breadth when you're bored, frustrated, or angry." Not that it might not help, but it will help no more than all the other advice.
It is the beliefs about these emotions where we will find the answer. That is, why they should be avoided or not felt, or why they don't help or why we don't deserve them.
The heavier the person is the more incapacitated he/she is to feeling certain emotions or feelings. In fact in many respects we are emotional cripples--crippled usually at some age in our social development. This could have happened at any age and with any emotion.
Psychologists may define this as post traumatic stress disorder depending on how incapacitated one is.
This would generally apply to the severely obese--70 or more pounds overweight|Generally those who are 70 or more pounds overweight are emotional incapacitated in one or more areas]. The good news is that once it's identified, it's really no big deal. It's that the subconscious mind has been frozen at a particular age in regard to its ability to feel certain emotions. The object is to bring the subconscious mind through education. Hypnosis is a very powerful tool to accomplish this.
Yet, while one may not be physically incapacitated with 70 or more extra pounds, one could be mentally frozen with 15 or 20 pounds that never go away. The object is to become boring for Mr. Emotion.
A realistic approach to managing weight involves asking important questions "What is missing? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised resources and experts you've consulted?" It is clearly insane to keep using the same recycled advice regarding fad dieting when the results are not permanent. Would it not be more beneficial to get a handle on emotional eating--eating emotional stress than to focus on the scale? Besides 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 teacher, you'll be a better teacher. If you're a hair dresser, a better hair dresser; a mother, a better mother... 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 field of hypnosis and stress managementwith his top selling cds at http://www.PanicBusters.com and http://www.DStressDoc.com His aim is to make it possible for anyone to manage emotional binge eating. For more information please visit http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm