What's Your Comfort Food?
Comfort food is what you reach for when you need a snack. You’re not hungry; you just had a stressful day juggling the kids, your grandkids, and/or your aging parents. Emotional eating is more common than you might think and is basically when your response to feelings (e.g., stress, boredom, sadness, or even happiness) is reaching for food.
Emotional eating, for many women, is often a distraction from what is really going on. Craving sugar, carbs or other comfort food is driven by your brain which is telling you that the food will make you feel better. Unfortunately, when you give into your craving for comfort food, the urge to eat often comes back stronger which leads you to even more overeating.
Why do We Eat Our Emotions?
Emotional eating is not about a lack of motivation or willpower, it’s about how our brain reacts to emotions. Our body releases a hormone called cortisol, which is released when we experience stress or negative emotions. Cortisol increases our cravings for sugary and fatty foods. Your body is basically trying to “solve” a problem by providing “relief” through food. Unfortunately, this temporary fix does not fix the root cause of the problem.
It is very easy for what we think is comfort for our negative emotions to become a habit. Reaching for food when we feel overwhelmed, lonely or anxious trains our brain to seek food. This cycle of “feeding your emotions” is hard to break because each time to eat to cope with negative emotions you reinforce your habit.
How to Break Free from Emotional Eating
Breaking free from emotional eating requires finding new ways to cope with your emotions. It is not about a lack of motivation or willpower, which is most often blamed when we can’t stop emotional eating. You must learn to understand your triggers and learn new way to cope with your emotions. As a Certified Life Coach, I help women find their way back to themselves by offering coaching that tackles stress head-on, boosts their energy and helps them take better care of their health – without sacrificing the love and care they give to everyone else.
By working together, you will learn to recognizing the difference between cravings and physical hunger and gain insight on what is driving you to eat. You will also find ways to manage your emotions that don’t require food.
Let’s work together to stop emotional eating for good! If you are ready to take the first step, schedule a 45-minute consult by clicking here. During the consultation, we will determine if we are a fit to work together and have a plan that will guide us through future sessions as we work to break you free from emotional eating.
Let’s work together to start your journey to a healthier relationship with food today! You do not have to do this alone…
