by Maria's Last Diet
You emotionally eat, so the research says, because you are trying to quell or distract yourself from negative emotions. Negative emotions are emotions that are unpleasant or even disturbing for you. These are emotions you don’t want to have, so you turn to food to make yourself feel better.
While food is an adaptive short-term remedy that lifts the spirits for many people, it is a dysfunctional solution when it leads to being overweight. In the latter case it is better to tackle your emotions directly without resorting to overeating or eating too many fattening foods.
What emotions might you be working on? Would it be feeling ashamed, powerless. trapped, left out, judged, afraid, untrusting, invalidated, controlled, bored, lonely, underestimated, pressured, misunderstood, depressed, anxious, intimidated, or worthless? Or would it be some other unpleasant or disturbing emotion that is not on this list, but it is on your personal list?
To pursue a more direct route to dealing with your negative emotions, you ought to try a number of approaches, none of which you would have to use by itself. You could certainly combine these different approaches. First off, you could develop better coping skills to contend with whatever negative emotion is causing you trouble. Secondly, you might practice tolerating the negative emotion better so you won’t experience it with the same old, overwhelming force. Thirdly, you could go back up the chain of events from the negative emotion that led you to emotionally eat to the situation that caused you to feel like this and think of how you might engage differently or even think differently about that situation. The idea being that behaving differently or thinking differently in the causative situation would result in feeling less negative, more positive at the far end of the chain.
Using Psychology to Lose Weight
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