How to self-regulate your emotions?

Emotional eaters are compensating for a lack of emotional regulation. When a person is unable to acknowledge and address their feelings, eating can actually serve to regulate emotions.

If we continue to eat, over time, you can fall into a cycle. You become dependant on food for soothing which leads in general to more health problems.Besides the behaviour of eating when you are not hungry, emotional eaters use words such as “sinful”, “tempting”, “I have cravings” to describe their relationship with food.

When you are truly hungry you don’t say it’s “sinful”. When you are truly hungry there is no shame in eating is it? It’s only when we overeat for other reasons that we feel guilty for doing it.

Emotional eaters also tend to :

1. Have low self-esteem

2. Try to do things perfectly (perfect clean eating)

3. Deprive themselves of food4. Lead high stressful lives that often lead to zero stress management

Some of the ways how to stop Emotional eating:

1. Acknowledge the problem by asking yourself: how many times have I overeat this week?

2. Assess your emotions and don’t try to brush things under the carpet, find other ways how to help yourself (sports, mediation, journaling, talking to someone…). The moment you allow yourself to feel and think about your emotions, you will feel less inclined to eat.

3. Move more & eat (don’t try to skip meals)

4. Get professional help & talk about it