Emotional Eating Can Ruin Your Life

Emotional eating can ruin your life with dozens of extra pounds. Emotional Overeating can affect your self worth causing you to contribute to low self esteem, constantly sell yourself short, and miss out on a social life.

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.

The first thing to know is that there are three types of excess eating. The first type is habitual eating, the second is emotional eating, and the third is self defeative eating.

What do we do with this information? The first step is to assume the temptation is habit related. 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."

A "no" response means that you skip food meaning that it was habitual eating that you bypassed. If the answer, is "Yes," and you stop for the bagel, then you are dealing with emotional eating.

Handling emotional eating is to acknowledge the predominate emotion of the moment when you had the temptation of eating. You isolate that emotion and choose to feel it instead of diluting it with food.

Being that emotions are stressful for most emotional eaters, it's important to learn a lot more about emotions before expecting weight loss.

Master the art of emotions and you will leave food in the take out place.

If however, you still eat, then you're looking at self defeative eating. What is self destructive eating? It's a fear of being thin in that you might not meet your expectations on you. In other words, the excess pounds becomes an excuse for not achieving skills, success, friends...

To overcome self defeative eating it's important to focus on overcoming your fears of the future. Listen to self improvement cds, take adult education classes, read self help books, build self confidence and self esteem... 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 the books you've been reading and the experts you've consulted?" 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. 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 an a policeman, you'll be a better policeman; 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.