Compulsive Eating – Identify Your ‘Triggers’
And Find Own Solutions! 

Any compulsive eating sufferer will know that certain things can ‘trigger’ us into over eating or into a full-blown binge eating episode!

picture by wsilver flickr.com

We are all affected by our environment and surroundings, by the people we spend time with, and by our moods and feelings. Without realising it, all of these things can affect how we behave and how we eat.

By being able to recognise our own triggers and learning why they influence us in the way they do, we can start to make real changes to what may have become lifelong habits.

Compulsive Eating triggers can be:

• Situations – for instance… the work canteen; going out with friends; being alone at home; walking past fast-food outlets; spending time watching television; opening that cupboard for the tin of soup where the biscuits are also kept… 
  
  
• People – for example… friends who might encourage us to eat this way or that way; family occasions; the boss at work who puts us down all the time…
  
  
• Emotions and Moods – being angry or upset; feeling bored; periods of depression, stress or anxiety; hormonal changes such as during a woman’s menstrual cycle…

• Certain types of food – how often do we hear people say things like “if I have one piece of chocolate / biscuit / cake I’ll have to finish the whole packet”…Its easy to laugh this off, but it can actually be more complex than we may at first think. For certain types of food will have personal emotional associations for us, and there are also nutritional and biochemical reasons why some foods may affect us differently from others.

And any of the above can often be connected or interact together:

For instance – we might find that dealing with someone (or even just thinking about them) triggers our emotional eating – so the person could be viewed as the trigger - but really it is the emotion that they bring out in us, our thoughts and feelings in relation to them, which are the true triggers. And eating has become our way of coping with those emotions.

Everyone is affected to a certain degree by these types of things, but in eating disorders, such influences have a far more powerful affect.

So How Can We Identify Our Own Compulsive Eating triggers?

Using a food diary, or keeping some similar type of journal is one of the most effective ways to really pin-point what is influencing us in our eating habits.

But we don’t have to just write down WHAT we eat and WHEN. We can use it to record WHERE we are at the time; how we are FEELING (especially just before an episode of binge eating for instance); and what we are DOING at the time (for instance, we might discover that we have a tendency to over eat after coming home from a social event, or before meetings at work, but we might not have made the connection by simply writing down WHAT we were eating).

Okay, SO THEN WHAT?

Once we have kept our food diary for a couple of weeks, looked back through it and identified any patterns and connections, we can then set about doing something about it.

Write down one of the compulsive eating triggers you have identified, and then make a list of as many possible alternatives that you can think of - things that you could DO differently - to avoid or remove the trigger from your situation, or to change how you feel and react to it.

A useful way to approach this is to write these down as If/Then plans.

For instance:

Try to come up with AS MANY ideas as possible so you have different strategies to compare and try out.

Every compulsive eating trigger for every person will require its own individual solution, which means that only YOU can come up with your own meaningful answers.

And of course, the whole point is to then try out our alternative coping strategies and see what changes!

If things improve, then keep doing it and move on to look at one of your other triggers (if you have any more). If nothing changes, then you can try out another of your ideas instead.

And don’t forget – it can be really useful to talk these things through with someone such as a trained counsellor, especially one experienced in eating disorders. A counsellor or therapist will not try to tell you what you should or should not do, but rather support you in coming up with your own solutions.

After all, the only real expert about you – is YOU!

So I hope you can see that by learning to identify our compulsive eating triggers, we can start to form our own solutions to our binge eating or emotional eating problems.