Food can be viewed as one of the greatest pleasures in life, however, it can also leave you feeling guilty and depressed if you're not eating mindfully or for the right reasons.
There are two different types of hunger. Real hunger, which is a physiological symptom of being hungry, and emotional hunger, which is a psychological symptom of craving a food to soothe emotions that you are feeling. How can you tell the difference?
With real hunger, real physiological symptoms such as a grumbling in the stomach, lightheadedness (indicating low blood sugar), low energy level or a headache will be present. It is easy to relieve the symptoms of real hunger by simply eating. If you truly were experiencing "real hunger", you'll feel energized and satisfied after eating a healthy portion of nutritious food.
Emotional hunger is usually brought on by an environmental, or an internal trigger, when there are no indications or symptoms that we are physically hungry. Emotional eating can be triggered when you are feeling upset or stressed, which causes a physical craving to "soothe" your emotions. Emotional eating can also occur in happier situations when you're celebrating an occasion such as a wedding or birthday. These situations can also lead to over consuming food and making unhealthy food choices. After eating emotionally, you'll normally feel guilty, still experience cravings, feel miserable and still be hungry as no amount of food seems to satisfy your need.
While we can not avoid celebrations or stressful situations, we can learn how to cope with these triggers that can lead to excessive calorie consumption and unhealthy food choices. The first step in tackling emotional eating is to identify the trigger which is provoking the emotional need to eat. In order to understand the emotions behind these triggers, they need to be dissected and unraveled openly and honestly which is where the food journal once again comes into play.
The food journal is an extraordinary tool for writing your food choices, the triggers that caused an unhealthy food choice and the emotions tied to those choices. Once you've identified what actually causes your cravings, you can create strategies to cope by either adapting or avoiding the situation all together.
By adapting to an emotional trigger, you'll replace the identified trigger with a different activity or change the situation. An example would be the stress of time management and the lack of "me" time. Emotionally, you may feel like you're always last on the list, there's never any time for you to take care of yourself, you're just "eating on the run" so to speak at any drive-thru that comes across your path to refuel your stressed body. The first step in effective time management is to identify the priorities in the situation, and let me tell you, YOU are a priority and deserve better.
Now that we've established that YOU are the priority, it's time to focus on organizing your time so that eating fits into your schedule without causing more stress. A situation change would be to pack your own nutritious lunch or dinner in a cooler so it's ready when you are hungry physically, not emotionally. You are more apt to eat more healthfully when it's readily available to you instead of grabbing the first thing you see or running through the first fast food restaurant. Packing your own food gives you the control over what you are putting into your body and not leaving it up to "whatever is available" at the moment. This is both cost effective and time saving....seriously, if you honestly added up the time it takes to talk to a box, pay an outrageous amount of money at another box and have someone hand you so called "food" through another box I'm sure you would agree.
I am encouraging you to spend a little time wisely on yourself, for yourself, to come up with healthy alternatives to combat stressful situations or triggers before they occur. Here's a strategy that works for me, I go for a walk to clear my head instead of sticking my head into the refrigerator when I'm upset. There's nothing like the power of friendship to help you deal with stressful situations so give them a call instead of calling for a pizza. If your friends aren't supportive or aren't willing to help you cope with stressful situations, it's time to find new friends. Seriously, isn't this what friends are for? All I'm trying to say is by making YOURSELF the priority, and focusing on the positive things YOU can do in the situation, YOU will gain the power over triggers to conquer and destroy!!! Now let's talk strategy :)
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