A hack for emotional eating

A powerful view on emotional eating from Sleekgeek Co-founder Eric Chowles: (original post here)

"Emotional eating is a pretty normal and effective way of relieving emotional stress in the short-term. But it has consequences.

My best advice for anyone who is an emotional eater is to look for ways to add in other emotional management strategies.

Most people try to stop being emotional, but that's pretty hard to do. Especially in the short-term. And it's good to feel emotions...

So rather, see how you can "dilute" or "distribute" the load.

For example:

Imagine you had 10 units of emotional stress that you needed to relieve.

If you ONLY rely on food to manage your emotions, you have to eat a LOT to relieve all 10 units of emotional stress.

In fact, it might not even be possible to relieve all 10 units with food, so you then start snapping at people around you and being in a foul mood as a way to tolerate the left-over stress that doesn't get relieved.

But what if you did some exercise? That might relieve 3 units.

Then maybe you listened to some of your favourite music. That might relieve another 1 unit.

Now you only need to relieve 6 more units of emotional stress.

So maybe you do some meditation. Boom, 2 more units gone.

And then you spent some time talking to a friend or playing with your dog. Another 2 units gone.

Now there are only 2 units left.

The amount of food you have to eat to relieve 2 units of emotional stress versus the original 10 units is a lot less.

-

Then in the future, maybe you're proactive about this.

You might do some meditation or regular exercise or dance to happy music on a daily basis.

You build up a bit of a buffer so that you're sitting on -2 or -3 units of emotional stress. So something goes wrong and it's not the end of the world because it puts you at a barely noticeable 2 rather than a 4 or 5."