Do you feed your feelings with emotional eating? If you over eat when you feel upset, down, bored, excited, happy, confused, malaise, uncertain, joyful, bored..., then you are feeding your feelings.
Can you look at each of those feelings as a different persona? Sound strange?
Yes, there's Mr. Joy, Mrs. Boredom, Ms. Confusion, Master Upset and they are all looking for someone with whom to have fun. And they find a lot of people with whom they can have fun.
No wonder that the latest obesity statistics are:
* Eight out of 10 over 25 are overweight
* 25% completely Sedentary
* 76% increase in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 yrs old since 1990
* 58 Million Overweight; 40 Million Obese; 3 Million morbidly Obese
* 78% of American's not meeting basic activity level recommendations
These feelings are having a hell of a lot of fun and what does the poor emotional eater do? Answer: Binge on carbs.
What good are diets, healthy eating habits, focusing on priorities, deep breathing, meditation, relationship advice, advice to feel good about you, yoga... when it's the emotions themselves that are the culprit?
The quandary is that advice is not the answer even to dealing with the feeling of emotion. I can imagine someone saying, "Take a deep breadth when you're bored, frustrated, or angry." Not that it might not help, but it will help no more than all the other advice.
It is the beliefs about these emotions where we will find the answer. That is, why they should be not felt or avoided, or we don't deserve them or why they don't help.
The heavier the person is the more incapacitated he/she is to feeling certain emotions or feelings. In fact in many respects we are emotional cripples--crippled at some age in our growing up. This could have happened at any age and with any emotion.
Psychologists may define this as post traumatic stress disorder depending on how incapacitated one is.
This would generally apply to the severely obese--70 or more pounds overweight|Generally those who are 70 or more pounds overweight are emotional incapacitated in one or more areas]. The good news is that once it's identified, it's really no big deal. Essentially the subconscious mind has been locked at a certain age in regard to its ability to feel certain emotions. The task is through education to bring the subconscious mind up to date to agree with the conscious mind and hypnosis is a very effective tool to accomplish this.
Let's not forget about those who are only 15 or 20 pounds overweight--they too could be semi incapacitated. The object is to become boring for Mr. Emotion.
To achieve your goals, it's important to ask questions? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised resources and experts you've consulted?" Using the same recycled fad diet advice is clearly insane. It's more important to gain a grasp on how to handle emotional eating--eating emotional stress than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you're a student, you'll be a better student. If you're an assembly line worker, you'll be a better assembly line worker; a mother, a better mother... Overall, you'll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.
Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified, a prominent figure in the field of hypnosis and stress managementwith his best selling cds at http://www.DStressDoc.com and http://www.PanicBusters.com For more information on how to eliminate binge emotional eating please visit http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm
