4 practical ways to prevent Emotional Eating
Don't let emotions control your appetite. Do this practical way to prevent emotional eating.
The emotional culminating is usually expressed with anger or silence without saying anything. But not infrequently, some people vent emotions by eating a lot without a long thought. This behavior is known medically with the nickname emotional eating.
Broadly, emotional eating is interpreted as eating behavior without being known as a ' runaway ' event of the emotions that are being experienced. This diet is usually decorated with a menu of foods or beverages containing high in sugar, calories and fat.
Instead of good, emotional eating can instead increase the risk of overweight or obesity, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, even heart disease, and stroke.
You do not want to experience the detrimental things that can even threaten the safety of the understanding of emotional eating, right? If that is the case, do this as a way of preventing emotional eating:
1. Know the pattern of emotional eating
Not only when angry, but emotional eating can also happen when you are in a condition of stress, anxiety or fear. Therefore, the first way to be done to avoid this behavior is to recognize a situation that could trigger it.
For example, you tend to want to eat while the workload is overloading, when anxious when it will be a presentation or other condition. When you will face the situation, try to shift the focus of the mind to do other things more positively. For example relaxation or meditation.
Meditation can help calm the mind so that levels of emotion or stress can be more restrained. Alternatively, do some light sports like walking or jogging. Exercise can trigger the body to release endorphins, a happy hormone that makes the body more relaxed.
2. Create daily Food Records
Making a daily food record can also be a spared solution to emotional eating. This diary should contain the type, time of portion and feeling experienced when you consume the food.
The existence of this note is expected to make you more easily evaluate the daily diet, do introspection and control yourself in the latter days.
3. Fill the refrigerator with healthy food
If emotional eating is so difficult to control, you can try controlling the type of food you choose. In order not to have a bad impact on health, choose a healthy food type such as fresh fruit slices, vegetable salad, wheat chips or baked nuts.
Instead, eliminate foods that contain sugar and high calories around you. Thus, access to unhealthy types of food can be prevented when emotional eating arises.
4. Search for busyness
Emotional eating can sometimes be triggered by no busyness. Therefore, in order not to happen, seek positive busyness that can shift the focus of your mind.
Examples of the busyness that can be done are rearranging the work table, arranging the room at home, making a simple decoration or gardening. This simple activity effectively dampens the desire to eat, because the thoughts are distracted on other things.
These ways you can try to avoid emotional eating. If the complaint is still a frequent occurrence, even if you have a strong effort to prevent it, do not hesitate to take medication to a psychologist or doctor of psychiatry.
However, you should try to prevent emotional eating from happening on an ongoing basis. Because this behavior not only provides a negative influence on mental health but also causes a lot of harm to the overall physical condition.