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It’s Not Your Fault That You Comfort Eat. Want to Know Why?

Sep 23, 2016

We’ve all been there.

Those times when you find yourself staring down the biscuit barrel hoping to cheer yourself up with a chocolate hobnob or custard cream that soon turns into the entire tin.

Or when you pile a few extra roast potatoes onto the plate after a long, hard day, or scoop an extra-generous serving of your favourite dessert onto your plate and then feel incredibly guilty afterwards. Or those nights you creep downstairs to raid the kitchen cupboards for practically anything you can lay your hands on.

After all, you deserve it don’t you? It’s just a teeny tiny treat and you’ll go back to eating clean again tomorrow, won’t you?

But we all know what happens tomorrow. You promise yourself that you’ll be ‘good’ and you try your hardest to exert some kind of self-control when cravings strike. But for all that effort, you still end up right there, searching for solace in a generous helping of unhealthy food.

And it’s not like you don’t realise that what you’re doing isn’t such a great idea, because you do. It’s not exactly rocket science. But when it comes to stopping, it can be a whole different matter. It’s almost like your body takes on a life of its own, and you have no choice but to follow, willing or not.

So let’s get something clear. It’s not your fault. And succumbing to comfort eating doesn’t make you greedy, worthless nor any other kind of negative adjective that might come to mind. You are a victim, trapped in a vicious biological cycle that was designed to help you to survive, but is only making you overweight and unhealthy.

Having said that, it isn’t impossible to escape its clutches, but it’s going to take a whole lot more than promising you’ll be ‘good’ next time. You need to tackle that comfort eating head-on, getting to the root of the problem instead of treating just the symptoms.

As a result you’ll shed that extra weight, boost your energy, achieve better health and also feel better about yourself than you have in a long time. Let me show you how.

Our bond with food

Our eating habits are about much more than ingesting the right kind of nutrients for our body’s needs and getting rid of those hunger pangs. More often than not, we equate food with love.

Right from the time we were born, we have associated food with love, whether from the rich sweet milk we drank, our parents or grandparents’ favourite recipes, or the ‘treats’ we received when we were good, usually in the form of a sugary snack.

So when we experience negative emotions like stress, sadness, loneliness, isolation, bad self-image and so on, we naturally seek comfort and reward in the form of food. It’s helped in the past and it will help again. At least that’s what we presume whether consciously or not.

Does comfort eating work?

You could say that comfort eating does the job well. After you eat like this, you do feel better, emotionally brighter, and you find ourselves feeling more alert and energetic too. You get a nice big dose of dopamine, the pleasure hormone which feeds into the rewards centres in your brain and reinforces the comfort eating cycle, keeping you wanting more and more ( in much the same way as drugs or alcohol does).

When we eat these kinds of foods, our bodies releases insulin to cope with the changes in your blood-sugar level. Any excess sugar gets stored directly as fat, either in the liver or on your waist and hips. And once you see the pounds piling on, you often feel worse about yourself, experience more negative emotions and actually want to eat more. So the vicious cycle continues.

And after all of that excess food, you might also develop a common condition called reactive hypoglycaemia, which is when your body becomes more resistant to the effects of insulin and so your pancreas needs to make more insulin to cope. The result is a lower blood-sugar level, feeling ‘down’, tired and altogether irritable and of course more cravings for those carbs. We’re more likely to experience these blood sugar fluctuations when it’s ‘time of the month’, leaving us more vulnerable to comfort eating.

So what do we do? How do we break free of this vicious cycle and get our lives back? Let me help.

Breaking the cycle

Wanting to make positive changes and stop comfort eating just isn’t enough. You need to take positive action shape new healthy habits, as well as tackling any emotional issues that might lie beneath it all to break free of the vicious cycle of comfort eating.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Identify your trigger

For most of us, our comfort eating comes in a pattern and is the result of a particular emotion, or set of emotions. First you need to identify what they are. Start by keeping a food diary, writing down anything that passes your lips, including the details of where, when, what time of day, what triggered it, how hungry you were (on a scale of 0-10, 10 being famished) and also, how you felt afterwards. Quite often, the simple action of getting it down on paper can be enough to get that all-important awareness, and take steps to change it.

Step 2: Positively channel your emotions

Completing the previous exercise should have given you a clear idea of what exactly triggers you to reach for that biscuit tin time and time again. The next step is to learn how to channel your emotions in a positive way, instead of turning to food. The most effective tools you can use include mindfulness meditation, positive visualisation and other self-hypnosis techniques.

Step 3: Break behaviour patterns

The best way to break the behaviour pattern itself is to use a technique called ‘stop-look’. It involves you pausing before you eat anything and asking yourself if you are hungry, or if you are just ‘fancy’ something. Then look a little deeper and ask yourself if you can see a pattern. Doing this should help you identify the times when you are eating for emotional reasons, and give you the opportunity to channel your energy into something else instead.

Step 4: Diet and lifestyle tweaks

You can also tackle your comfort eating by choosing other healthy diet and lifestyle habits. These include enjoying enough sleep for your body, getting outside into the fresh air and sunshine every single day to boost your vitamin D levels, getting more exercise and eating more foods rich in the B-complex vitamins which help strengthen your nervous system and improve your mood, leaving you less likely to need to turn to food in the first place.

Comfort eating can hold a tighter grip on your life that you might imagine, and it can be challenging to break free. But by being honest with yourself and how you are feeling, learning effective tools and techniques to positively channel these emotions and also developing new healthy habits, you can escape this vicious cycle for good.

For a helping hand to get through, please drop me a line and say hello. I’m always here to help.

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