Do you feel like gorging in loads of food especially junk food when you are emotionally stressed and feeling low? You have to think if you are an emotional eater – learn to manage your eating tendency whenever you are feeling stressed because it is not good for your health. When you feel like gorging in snacks, ice-creams, colas, cakes and fried food it does not always mean that you are hungry – it is just that you are not able to manage stress and your body starts developing a strategy of coping through eating.

Managing emotional eating can be tricky and real challenging because you have to first accept the fact that you are an emotional eater. It is tough to decide if you are an emotional eater but with honesty and patience you will be able to help yourself.

Emotional eating is the problem of many people who turn to food to comfort themselves. They feel food will heal all their emotional problems and slowly it becomes their habit to eat. Emotional eating is most often the result of boredom, depression, chronic anger, stress problems due to interpersonal relations, conditions of poor self esteem and loneliness. It results in overeating which ultimately means gain in weight. Emotional eating conditions can be the result of the following conditions:
• In parties:  Too much eating after being encouraged by others, after an argument in a social gathering or just due to feeling of inadequacy in the surroundings...especially in parties.
• Urge to eat due to tension, anger, stress, boredom and often to ‘fill the void’.
• Due to negative thoughts and no will power to do things positively.
• Eating because of scope.. such as walking down a lane everyday where there is a fast food joint.

Now, the main question which arises here is how we manage such emotional eating pangs.
• Start maintaining a food diary. It shall help to keep a record of how many times you ate, what you ate and why you ate. It shall help you to identify the emotions which caused you to eat so much.
• Lack of support and emotional loneliness is often linked to emotional eating – hence you have to make efforts to build your own network.
• Join support groups, meet friends, spend time outdoors as interaction is a good way to relieve mental stress.
• If you feel there is an urge to snack, just go for a walk outside like a 5 minute walk – it will prevent you from eating and will be good for your body also.
• Try to relieve all anxiety by regular exercising, meditation, deep breathing and also guided visualization. You can also consider activities like yoga and tai chi.
• Sleep at least 8 hours in a day to relax your mind and body.

You can easily control emotional eating by right way of lifestyle and eating urges suppresion.

Image courtesy:womansday.com,  nutritionalhealthsciences.com