Emotional Eating: Feeding your Feelings

(Adapted from www.webmd.com)
When you're happy, your food of choice could be steak or pizza; when you're sad, it could be ice cream or cookies; and when you're bored, it could be potato chips. Food does more than fill our stomachs; it also satisfies feelings. When you quench those feelings with comfort food when your stomach isn't growling, you're giving in to emotional eating. "Emotional eating is eating for reasons other than hunger. Instead of the physical symptom of hunger initiating the eating, an emotion triggers the eating”.
How to tell the difference?
Emotional hunger comes on suddenly; physical hunger occurs gradually.
When you are eating to fill a void that isn't related to an empty stomach you crave a food such as pizza or ice cream, and only that food will meet your need.
Emotional hunger feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly with the food you crave; physical hunger can wait.
Emotional eating can leave behind feelings of guilt; eating when you are physically hungry does not.

Overfeeding emotions:
A well-respected dietician Judy Jakubczak feels that 75% of overeating is caused by emotional eating. Now, dealing with those emotions is important (and difficult), but over time this leads to long term success. To gain control, one method is to keep a food record and rank your hunger from 1 – 10 each time you put something in your mouth. This will tell you when you are eating emotionally vs. responding to physical cues.
Managing Emotional Eating:
Make a list of things to do when you get the urge to eat and you're not hungry. Try to do another enjoyable activity.
Try taking a walk, playing cards, clean a room, do laundry, or anything you feel is productive that will take your mind off food.
If you do get the urge to eat, eat something other than ‘junk' food.
If you have a large container of cookies or chips, put them into smaller portions in a smaller container, and you will only be tempted to eat that smaller portion.
It's interesting that when it comes to comfort foods like desserts, ‘your memory of a food peaks after about four bites. If all you have is those four bites, a week later you'll recall it as just a good experience than if you had polished off the whole thing.' So, have a few bites of cheesecake then call it quits. You'll get equal pleasure at less cost to your health.

As with all eating, emotional or otherwise, it's moderation that works. Learn to feel satisfied, and unlearn the feelings of being full, or worse, stuffed. You can do it; just keep trying and don't ever give up!
Dr. Doug