The Truth to Conquer Emotional Eating

The Truth to conquer emotional eating is to manage your emotions. Yet managing emotions is not such an easy thing to do. With all the practice we as humans have had--that's centuries and centuries, we're still pretty much in the dark ages.

And it just doesn't make sense for we are emotional beings. In fact our limbic emotional brain was developed before the reticular analytical brain.

What is known is that all through out history, man has tried to "control" his emotions. The reticular portion of the brain has attempted to suppress the emotional limbic brain. There hasn't been to much gray about it--you're either in control or you're not. So it's been more of a black and white thing.

One way to control emotions is to deny them. It must be from the Victorian age where everyone was in a looking glass being observed by everyone else. God forbid an emotional outburst. It would be associated with evilness.

Where ever it came from, i.e. the poor handling of emotion, the result is that in this century of advanced technological accomplishments, most of us are still emotional cripples.

Thus when we are tempted to eat, we don't look to the predominate emotion we're feeling, we look to it being a food or an eating problem. Yet, until we learn to manage our emotions the end result is weight gain.

Rather than make it into a food or a weight gain issue, the goal is to acknowledge which emotion is speaking to you. To conquer emotional eating is to first recognize the emotion that's associated with food. For in reality, you're not eating food, you're eating your emotion. Food dilutes the emotion. After all, when you're eating, you're not thinking, "Gee I feel bored and I hate this feeling. This is a terrible feeling and I wish I knew what to do about it. Blah blah, blah..."

No, you're thinking about how good the food tastes or how you're only going to eat a little of it, or how you'll not each so much tomorrow to make up for it, or how you shouldn't be eating it, or how little control you have...

That's diluting the emotion. You're thinking is mostly about the consequences of the food and very little about what you're feeling.

But how do you stop diluting the emotion and take the emotion straight? The answer is to simply feel the emotion. The problem is that we have had virtually an unlimited amount of training on how to avoid feeling the emotion. And it doesn't have to be bad emotions--this is also true for emotions such as happiness.

A progressive approach to losing weight involves asking important questions "What is missing? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised?" It is clearly insane to keep dieting when the results are so poor. It's more important to gain a grasp on how to stop 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 sales person, you'll be a better sales person. 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.