When we turn to food to numb our emotions, this is referred to as emotional eating. When you are stressed, do you open a big bag of chips and eat the whole thing before you’ve realized it? Do you reach for chocolate when you feel sad, defeated, or unmotivated?

Emotional eating can also trigger binge eating. Binge eating is when you eat several servings of food in the same sitting. Binge eaters often eat until they feel sick or are so full that they can’t move. Usually binge eating is also an attempt to numb emotions. Have you ever eaten a whole pizza in one sitting? This is considered binge eating.

To manage emotional eating and binge eating, I suggest you try the following things:

1) Pay attention when you emotionally eat or binge eat. What are the triggers? Is it sadness, disappointment, envy, exhaustion, stress, anxiousness, anger, shame, depression, boredom, frustration, fear, etc? Are you unable to control yourself around certain foods? If so, remove these foods from your house, car, office, etc immediately! If you remove your trigger foods, it will be harder to sabotage yourself.

2) Once you know what your triggers are, make a list of things besides eating that you can do to take care of yourself when you feel those emotions. Keep this list handy (in your purse or in a note on your phone) so you have access to it when the next urge to emotionally eat and/or binge eat comes.

3) Find healthy substitutes so that you can still eat something that satisfies the urge to emotionally eat, but it won’t derail your progress. Some examples of healthy substitutes are: Skinny Pop popcorn, organic dark chocolate with peanut butter, smoothies, baked tortilla chips with salsa or guacamole, apple with nut butter and cinnamon.

What are you waiting for?  Life is too short to continue holding yourself back any longer. Take a small step today to change your life.