Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes breaks down emotional eating, eating for reasons like boredom or anger rather than hunger. Seven strategies include keeping a mindfulness journal to spot patterns, identifying triggers and swapping them for serotonin-boosting activities, chewing gum to activate your relaxation response, and eating from a plate at a table instead of snacking from bags.
Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video on 7 Ways to Stop Emotional Eating. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Emotional eating means eating for non hunger reasons, including boredom, anger, depression, guilt, grief, etc. Emotional eating is not about getting too hungry and binging when or eating too much because it's yummy. Those are different issues. People who eat too much because they just love food, that might not even be a problem for them. People who binge or eat too much because they let themselves get too hungry, that's a totally different issue. Emotional eating is eating to help yourself feel comfortable or to comfort yourself and feel safe. When we were little, you may have gotten a cookie after you skinned your knee and your caregiver cleaned it up or after. Unfortunately, people pass on what happens. Everybody brings casseroles. At least in the south, that's what happens. A lot of times our culture has associated distress with soothing with food, and people can carry that on into adulthood if they don't learn other coping mechanisms that are at least as useful. So what are some of these coping mechanisms or tools that you can use to stop emotional eating? The first one is what I call a mindfulness journal, or you can call it a nutrition journal or whatever you want. The purpose of this is to put some time between the craving or the urge to eat. When you're eating, put some time between the emotion and help you get into your wise mind so you can make a conscious decision about whether you actually want to eat or you need something else. So in the mindfulness journal, you're going to identify when it was, what time of day, why are you wanting to eat? If you're hungry, great. If you're sad, if you're bored. If you're just craving something, okay, put that there. What do you want to eat? This will give you an idea. If you're noticing that you're regularly craving salty foods, that may give you an indication about a underlying nutritional deficiency. It may not. You may just crave salty foods when you get anxious, but it's helpful to look at patterns. How will eating whatever this is that you want to eat make you feel better? And what are three alternatives you could do right now to help you feel better? What are three other things besides eating? Take a bath, Play with your dog, Go on a walk, Call a friend. What's going to work for you? Keep that mindfulness journal and force yourself to complete it anytime you're eating. During non meal periods, another technique is to identify and anticipate triggers and prevent the cravings. Identify Alternate activities to increase serotonin, dopamine and gaba. When we eat especially high fat, high sugar foods, it causes our body to surge Serotonin, dopamine and sometimes gaba, sometimes endorphins. So it gives us this feeling of pleasure. It gives this of gives us a feeling of contentment in some ways. So we want to recognize what things might make us feel unsafe or upset and how can we address them in order to do something besides emotional eating? Planning ahead of time goes a long way. If you have a rescue plan in place for when you start feeling anxious or when you start feeling bored, it's going to go a long way to helping you start taking steps toward conscious eating. Chew gum. And I've talked about this in other videos, but chewing gum, even if it's not bubble gum, actually helps trigger the relaxation response. It triggers stimulates the vagus nerve. So chewing gum, not only can you not eat and chew gum at the same time, but chewing gum can also help you relax. So that can be a interim step for a lot of people who just desperately want to have something to chew when they're feeling anxious or bored. If they chew on the gum, it gives them a flavor to focus on and it helps stimulate that vagus nerve. Remove temptation so you're forced to choose a different behavior. If you tend to emotionally eat junk food, then try not to keep junk food in the house or at least keep it somewhere where it's harder to get to so it's not just sitting right out on the, right out on the counter where you see it every time you walk into the kitchen. Start training yourself to only eat off a plate, sitting down at the table, not out of the bag, not standing at the pass through and not on the sofa. You're going to sit down at the table and put food on a plate and that's what you're going to focus on eating. When you start doing that, then sometimes when you're tempted to emotionally eat, you're like, okay, I've got to put it on a plate and sit down and, and I don't really want to sit at the table right now. I'd rather be in bed or on the couch. So do I really want food that bad? Eat a healthy diet. And I know that may sound kind of counterintuitive. The foods that we eat are broken down to make the hormones and neurotransmitters that help us feel half happy and relaxed and give us energy and all those things. If you're not eating a healthy diet, then you're more likely to have an imbalance in your neurotransmitters, which may make you more predisposed to being emotional and engaging in emotional eating, and finally reduce your overall stress level to reduce dysregulation. If you cope with stress, anxiety, depression, boredom by eating, then if you start figuring out other ways to reduce your stress, then you're not going to have the need to try to self soothe with food now. You're not going to make your stress completely go away. That's not going to happen. But a lot of times, most everybody I've worked with, when we've gone through their stress inventory, we found that there were things that they actually could eliminate. There were stressors, there were things they were ruminating about, they were there were ways they reacted to situations that we were able to work on. So they were triggered for emotional eating, they were triggered less often. If the videos on this channel have been helpful for you, please support us in our mission to make high quality, practical content available to everybody. You can support us by donating@docsnipes.com donate joining the YouTube channel@docsnipes.com join or purchasing a thanks on any videos that you particularly like. Emotional eating represents a way of coping with distress Emotional eating can turn into food addiction if it starts causing problems in one or more areas of your life. If you start choosing to stay home so you can eat instead of going out with friends, or if after you emotion you eat because you're self soothing, you feel too tired and bloated or uncomfortable to do things that you normally would do, then we might start seeing it move into food addiction. The techniques discussed can be helpful in the moment, but ultimately it's going to be important to address those underlying issues, those things that are causing you anxiety and grief and whatever other emotion you're trying to soothe with food. Because until you have other skills and tools to deal with it, or until you address that issue, then it's still going to serve as a trigger. Other videos you might find interesting include Emotional eating@doc snipes.com eating-list and this goes through all the videos that I've done on various eating disorders, intuitive eating, etc. A lot of people emotionally eat because they have a high level of anxiety and if that's you, check out the list doc snipes.com anxiety d master that will take you to a master list of videos on anxiety treatment. And if you're a Counselor, there's a CEU course on emotional eating@allce.com eating CEU.
