Emotional Eating--The Stress of Emotions
Posted: Friday, January 01, 2010
by Richard Kuhns
Stress Management Institute
Emotional eating has been identified as the single largest reason people gain weight back after they lost it and it's a well known fact that 95% of all those who lose weight gain it all back.
I read tons of articles and many books on how to overcome emotional eating. At first I was excited about what new tips I'd learn and was quickly disappointed.
Breaking Free from Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth, Shrink Yourself (Break free from emotional eating by Roger Gould, MD., and Taming the Chew by Denise Lamothe, Phy.D, H.H.D.
Would you believe that not one of these resources on emotional eating has a chapter on how to deal with emotions? Nothing about the cause of emotions? Nari an inference as to embracing emotions much less experiencing them.
Just go to google and set up alerts for emotional eating and you'll get article everyday re emotional eating. Unfortunately it's all old recycled advice from the fad diet era.
None of the books or articles recognize that emotional eaters don't eat because of particular emotions, but because of the stress the emotions place upon the over eater.
Yes, emotions are themselves stressful and the old stress management advice, i.e. do yoga, go for a walk, talk to a friend, count to ten, take a deep breadth, and so on just are simply silly advice for 95% of over eaters. It may be good advice but for the most part impractical. And none of this advice deals directly with the stress of the emotions.
For instance, do you like to feel upset? down? frustrated? confused? uncertain? malaise? bored?
anger?
How about love? joy? happiness?
Most people say "NO" to the first group of emotions and call them negative and they say "YES" to the second group of emotions and call them positive.
But do you know what you've just done?
You've just voted. You determined that there are some emotions you like and some that you dislike.
The reality is that emotions are different energy levels and it's our beliefs about them that make them bad or good. It's our beliefs about them that make them stressful.
Yes this is the stress that makes us emotional over eaters and contributes to eating excessively.
Can you think of how happiness can be stressful? How about a belief such as, "How can you be happy when there are so many people with much less?"
Because of beliefs of this nature--and there are many others--that keep us from truly experiencing happiness and thus the emotion is diluted with food.
A real approach to losing weight involves asking questions "What is missing here? Why are people not getting the results they are promised? It is clearly nonproductive to keep using the same techniques when the results are so poor. It's more important to learn to feel emotions and gain a grasp on breaking free from emotional eating than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person. If you're a homemaker, you'll be a better homemaker--a manager, a better manager. Stop emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life and is how you really lose weight or make weight loss easy.
Resource box: Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified, a prominent figure in the field of hypnosis with his top selling stress management and hypnosis cds at http://www.PanicBusters.com and http://www.DStressDoc.com His aimis to make it possible for anyone to manage emotional binge eating. To learn more please visit http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)It is important that we all give ourselves a special food treat once in a while, although eating too much for comfort is the major reason so many people are overweight! Being overweight sucked, but after reading your book, I lost 85 pounds! Words can not express how good I feel! This is a comment which I recently received about the book Lose Weight Using Four Easy Steps
Facilitating people to Lose weight is one thing--congratulations. Keeping it off is another. The more they know about how to deal with emotions, the more successful they'll be in keeping it off.
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