How to Get a Grip on Emotional Eating

1.  Change your relationship with food. Instead of eating with your feelings or mood, enjoy your food from a health or fitness perspective as part of your nutritional plan.  View your food as energy and fuel.  

If we eat food only for enjoyment or comfort, it quickly turns into a series of bad choices of overeating which results in weight gain and internal inflammation.  

In reality, food is medicine.  It’s meant to nourish, correct, and heal.

2.  Re-engineer your food environment.  Get junk food out of the house.  If it’s not in the house, you can’t eat it.  Open your refrigerator.  It is filled with ‘convenience’ foods?  Or earth-grown real foods?  There’s nothing normal about any food that has traveled down a conveyor belt in a factory and ends up on a store shelf wrapped in plastic.

3.  Avoid Avalanche Foods.  Avalanche foods are those that you can’t stop eating.  Once you take a bite, IT’S ON!   Chips, crackers, cookies, etc. are “foods with no brakes.”  Know yourself, have a sense of awareness, and distance yourself from the temptation of your avalanche foods.

4.  Eat like an Athlete.  If it makes you feel like crap, stop eating it.  If it makes you feel sluggish, bloated, and guilty, stop eating it.  You know what I’m talking about  - a sausage McMuffin covered in gravy with side of cheese hash browns, or some other toxic poison they call food.

Make choices that optimize health and performance.  Eat with awareness (instead of mindlessly consuming calories).  Eat high-performance foods.  Drink lots of water.  Listen to your body.  Exercise self-discipline like an athlete.

 
5.  Meal Prep.  This is the practice of preparing your meals ahead of schedule for several days.  Having pre-prepared meals on hand helps me from making poor food choices throughout the day, controls portion size, and helps me reach my nutritional goals.