How Keeping An Eating Diary Helps Emotional Eaters
Stress eating is a common condition amongst people of all ages and is done to assuage emotional needs and problems rather than actual hunger. Those who identify themselves as emotional eaters may view food as a type of comforting friend they can turn to when life becomes too overwhelming.
While they eat they feel safe and at ease, but the underlying problems are still there. Since much of this eating is emotion driven, you may find it difficult to pinpoint what exactly sent you to the fridge or the pantry in the first place.
An Eating Diary
Keeping an eating diary is one way to help you gain insight into your behaviors and the emotional triggers that set them off. By keeping an eating diary, you can identify important connections between when you eat, how much you eat, and why you eat when you aren't physically hungry.
An eating diary is simply a journal that is used strictly to chronicle what you eat, when you eat, and how much you've eaten. Those who keep such a diary include details such as:
- Meal times
- Portion sizes
- Feelings before, during, and after eating
- Nutritional value of the food
- Thoughts surrounding the process
For example, an emotional eater may find that immediately following a fight with a loved one, they have a meal. They might see that before the meal their emotions were running high, and afterwards, they felt comforted and calm. By simply keeping a log of these events, what is really fueling your eating habits can become suddenly clear.
How Do You Know If You're An Emotional Eater
We've all had those days when we eat when we're bored, go out for ice cream after a bad breakup, or even visit the pizza parlor to celebrate a victory, but does that make you an emotional eater?
The truth is that emotional eating is much deeper than a snack or outing following a significant event. It is often ongoing and accompanied by a severe influx or drop of emotions.
The following questions can help you figure out whether your eating patterns are ordinary or driven by emotional ups and downs:
- You eat when you feel stressed
- You eat despite not feeling hungry or even feeling full
- You see food as a reward
- You eat until you're stuff no matter what
- You eat in order to feel calm and at ease (usually when feeling sad, angry, anxious, bored, or agitated)
- You feel you have no power over food and how much your eat
- You immediately feel safe when you eat
When any patterns or connections become clear, you can then move forward by changing some of your coping skills to cut out eating when you aren't initially hungry.
Emotional eaters do not have to suffer with the physical problems this condition can bring. Instead, they can get themselves back on track through focused mindfulness and proactive steps such as therapy, exercise, and other healthy coping practices.
Russell (Rusty) Hart is the founder of the Health, Fitness & Sport Club, a website devoted to the promotion of health, fitness and wellness. The site encompasses a wide variety of health and fitness activities including general health matters, pilates, yoga, CrossFit, treadmill training, running, kettlebell, swimming, baseball, camping, hunting, HIIT, triathlons, extreme sports, equestrian and more. Should this subject matter be of interest you can visit the HF & S Club home site where you'll find over 1,300 quality posts with new posts being published daily. To quickly access those that are of interest you can select any of 20 Categories broken down by over 260 Sub-Categories for easy access. You can also visit visit any of the HF & S Club's four Stores all of which feature 1,000s of sports and health products at the very best prices.
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