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Canberra Today 25°/28° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Good eating / Coming to your emotional rescue

MANY of my clients struggle with emotional eating. It’s a common experience and many people can relate to feeling low and looking for comfort in food and drink.

Clare-Wolski
Dietitian Clare Wolski.

The pattern is often very similar. We might start the day with the best intentions for our food choices, but as the day (or week) goes on, work gets hectic, we feel overwhelmed with family commitments and there are just not enough hours in the day.

We start to feel really low or stressed out. We want to make ourselves feel better or we think: “What’s the point?’. We buy those foods that we have been trying to avoid and we overindulge. Afterwards, we feel sick, we feel like we’ve failed and that we will never reach our goal. So, we do it all over again. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s holding many of us back from our health and fitness goals.

Emotional eating habits are learned behaviours. We pick them up from the habits of others, from our own past experiences and from our beliefs about food and our bodies.

The good news is that we can unlearn these habits and relearn others. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it is do-able

To effectively change emotional eating habits, it’s important to understand what drives them. We can’t expect to change a behaviour without changing the factors that cause it to happen. That would be like expecting to have a holiday in Fiji without buying a plane ticket.

We need to ask:

  • What emotions trigger my emotional eating?
  • What is the thought process that makes me eat when I feel that way?
  • What are the beliefs I have about food, my body and my emotions?
  • Is my diet setting me up to fail at controlling emotional eating?

These are difficult questions to answer off the cuff. We need some tools for effective self reflection:

  • A food journal. Unintentionally restricting our food intake during the day can cause us to become overly hungry (or “hangry”). This can make stressful situations seem worse and make it more difficult to say “no” to that box of charity chocolate in the work kitchen. Keeping a food journal can help us to see our daily intake clearly and then make changes to include more filling foods throughout the day.
  • A thought journal. We are rarely aware of our own thoughts when it comes to emotional eating habits. We operate on autopilot. We also speak to ourselves in very negative ways. Writing down our thoughts can help us to identify whether our thoughts are logical, helpful or even true. Once you have written down your thoughts, ask yourself: “What would I say to a friend if they were thinking these things about themselves?”

If you struggle with emotional eating, try keeping a journal of your food and your thoughts and determining what your drivers are. Working with a qualified health professional, including a psychologist or dietitian can help you to address these drivers and stop eating for emotional reasons.

Clare Wolski is a practising dietitian at The Healthy Eating Hub, call 6174 4663. healthyeatinghub.com.au/about-the-hub/healthy-eating-team/clare-wolski-apd/ 

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