If you are stressed out, suffering from problems in your relationship,seeing financial stress, or just not happy with the overall direction your day has gone, it can be quite tempting to turn to food for comfort.
If you're trying to lose weight however this starts the cycle of self-sabotage so many of us recognize.
Here are 3 tips to help you regain control of your hunger signals.
1. Start a Journal
Journaling can be an effective way to distract yourself from eating and to spot patterns in your eating habits. Do you reach for ice cream at night and donuts during the day? What if you removed ice cream from your house and donuts form your office? If you spot the pattern you can reduce your temptation.
There are loads of pretty journals, but copy paper and a stapler work just fine. No excuses.
2. Come Up With Alternative Activities
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The second way to help combat emotional eating is to look for other activities you can be doing in its place. For example, next time you're feeling like you need something to munch on, consider doing your nails, cleaning the car, or going for a walk.
With a list of activities already prepared, you will be able to distract yourself in the time of need. If you have an activity that can be done anywhere, like filing your nails, you can make an automatic association with filing nails any time the emotional hunger pangs hit.
Choose activities that work for you. Not everyone wants to file nails andnot everyone a=wants to do a set of 10 push-ups. But do consider trying something new. Add some new activities to your possible distractions so that you have something to learn which will give you even more distraction.
3. Decrease The Frequency Of Your Down Time
The busier you are the less time you have to think about food.
So fill your schedule with activities that will keep you active and away form the emotional triggers. If you find that spending time with certain friends or family members triggers the temptation to eat, then find other people to be around or find activities that can be done solo.
I'm not recommending that you avoid your loved ones, but plan activities that allow you to be away from your triggers. Those who love you will understand.
Try to fill your free time with hobbies that will keep you away from food rather than hobbies that allow you to eat while you do them (watching TV, reading, etc).
BONUS! 4. Stock Your Pantry With Healthy Alternatives
Finally, if you're still really struggling to beat this problem and absolutely must have something to eat, then the next smartest move is to focus on stocking your pantry with foods that won't break you.
This way you control what you will eat before the temptation sets in. This will help you stick to your plan and minimize the damage of emotional eating.
Chopped vegetables, fresh fruit, and air-popped popcorn can all work as healthy snack options to use in a situation like this.
By recognizing your challenge upfront and planning ahead with solutions to fix it, you're one step closer to putting it behind you.
Awesome bunch of comments that keep coming back to the question of relationship between food, stress and anxiety so let's start to unravel that mystery.
Are there particular foods that soothe stress/anxiety? ?Many of us reach for something with crunch, a little salty and perhaps a little greasy . . . bag of chips anyone?
While we probably know deep down that those items are not going to help us, we may not fully understand what the body is doing in response to the chips. Not only will chips not quell your stress, but also they are likely to cause cellular damage which increases the stress on your body. So instead of getting a little relaxation, your body doubles up on stress. The opposite of what you wanted.
Here's what is going on:?Starting with the potato chips . . . the potato is a starchy food. As such it has a high glycemic load. The glycemic load is based on a food's glycemic index value (85 for potato) and compares how much your blood sugar level raises and for how long.
The importance of the glycemic index and load is that they influence the release of insulin by your pancreas. So, when you eat a high glycemic food your blood insulin remains elevated all day.
But is that a problem?? Insulin influences almost all of the other hormones in the body. High levels of insulin reduce the amount of insulin growth factor binding protein-3 (IGFPB-3) which is the protein that modulates cell growth and vascular development. In other words, IGFBP-3 helps your veins and arteries repair themselves, determines when your skins cells die and a whole bunch of other very useful things. High levels of insulin use up the IGFBP-3 which means your body's ability to repair itself diminishes.
Complications that arise as a result include inflammation and for some specifically the inflammation that leads to acne. It's not that the potato chip caused acne, it's that the potato chip caused the cascade of hormonal responses that united to cause acne. The same principle has been seen in action within the arteries. The swelling of arterial walls which thenrestricts blood flow is caused by a series of hormonal responses. A food like potatoes can start the hormonal snowball rolling.
How do you compare foods??The *glycemic index* (GI) is a scale from 1 to 100 that measures how quickly carbohydrate foods are broken down into glucose. To minimize the glycemic response, you need to choose low GI foods. Like a potato, but with a much lower GI rating, the yam (GI rating of 37) could be a substitute if you must have a "potato chip" to quell your stress.
You can thinly slice the yam, sprinkle with a little bit of natural sea salt and a very little bit of olive oil and voila! in 10-15 minutes you have a better chip.
If you can give up on the chip altogether, even better. But better to make baby steps with alternative foods if you are not 100% on board. Yams can be a healthy part of your diet.
