Tackle Emotional Overeating
Get Back In Touch With Your Inner Feelings. 

Emotional overeating can often result when we do not feel able to handle our emotions, or feel frightened of the emotions themselves (especially anger and rage or other powerful feelings).

Many people with binge eating or other eating disorders will be able to identify with this.

Dealing with emotions is a huge subject that experts write whole books about, but I’d like to touch on a couple of important points here.

There are some practical exercises that can be very useful for someone with an emotional overeating problem to practice.

NAMING FEELINGS:

Emotional eating can occur when we avoid focusing on our real emotions and needs and turn to food instead. We can become so alienated from our emotions in this way that we might not even be able to say WHAT we are feeling.

This exercise can gently help us to start re-focusing on exactly what we are feeling, and what our ‘emotions’ actually ‘feel’ like.

Take a piece of paper and make two lists -
· First, try to list all of the POSITIVE emotions that you can think of.
· Secondly, write down all of the NEGATIVE feelings you can think of.
· Now spend some time going through your lists, and think –
· When was the last time I felt this way?
· How did I experience that emotion it? – for instance, was it pleasant or scary, did I get physical sensations, and if so, where in my body?
· How would I describe that feeling of emotion to someone else?

‘RIDING THE WAVES’:

This exercise teaches us to observe our emotions ‘mindfully’, to notice what is going on with our emotions, and to notice how they come, build, and then fade.

Now this is pretty impossible in the ‘heat of the moment’, but you can practice by re-imagining a previous emotional experience:

Choose a time that wasn’t particularly traumatic, and if possible, choose one that did NOT end up being diverted into an eating binge.

• Go through the events in your mind again…
• how did the experience start?
• What happened next? How did it feel?
• What did you do?
• Then what happened?

Focus on remembering or re-imagining the emotions you were experiencing and what they actually felt like. Think things through to when the emotions subsided.

We often feel frightened by the intensity of our feelings, which is why so many with emotional overeating problems swallow those feelings back down with food, but it is important to remember that THOSE FEELINGS ARE STILL THERE – they have just been repressed and diverted into a problem with food.

So when we think about it – if those emotions are inside us, then they can’t do us any more harm than they already are doing, so we may as well learn to deal with them properly. We will then be able to deal with our binge eating problem and move on with our lives!

While thinking back through an emotional event as described above, we will probably notice how the feelings started, then grew in intensity to a peak or crescendo – (and this is the important bit) – then the feelings subsided and faded.

When someone has become frightened of their feelings, it can be because they have lost sight of the fact that emotions WILL subside – and it is important to focus on this fact. This is so that, next time we start to feel a way that makes us anxious or scared, we will know that IT WILL PASS.

Being able to notice our feelings in a ‘mindful’ way, and recognising the fact that they WILL pass, can be important steps for someone struggling with an emotional overeating problem.

“YES”, “NO” EXERCISES:

This is a great way for us to be able to ‘chip away’ at our lack of assertiveness, and learn to be able to express our needs to others.

Every day, try saying – ‘YES’ to something you would usually say ‘No’ to, - or ‘NO’ to something you would usually say ‘Yes’ to.

Now, these don’t have to be big things – silly, insignificant things will do – for instance:

• For one day, you could say YES to putting on your best perfume…
  
  
• Another day, you could try saying NO when your husband repeatedly asks for a cup of tea…
  
  
• The next day, try saying YES to having a coffee with your colleagues after work…
  
  
• Or say NO to looking after the grandchildren for the weekend, again…
  
  
• Saying YES to an extra half hour in bed…
  
  
• Or NO to another evening stuck in front of the television…

Spend a few minutes trying to think of all the things you usually say ‘No’ to that really you would like to say ‘Yes’ to, and visa-versa.

Now…I hope people don’t rush off and say YES to an illicit affair they’ve been dreaming of after reading this!

The point is to choose SMALL things, and then put them into practice. This will start to break down our fear of expressing ourselves and of speaking up for what WE want and need.

In this simple way, we will be re-connecting ourselves with our emotional needs. And, another important point - as we become more assertive in our day-to-day lives, we often find that we become more assertive in our relationship to food – so that one day we really will be able to say NO to binge eating or emotional eating!

I hope that anyone who has a problem with emotional overeating may find these exercises useful. It would be good to discuss them with your counsellor or therapist if you have one. If not – try them out, keep practicing them, and see what happens.