A Plan to End Emotional Eating
By Sara Butler
Emotional eating is a problem for more people than you may realize. If you find yourself struggling to make good food choices, you binge eat or overeat and feel as if you can’t control it, then you may have a problem with emotional eating. There is something you can do to combat this impulse and it’s simple: Plan ahead. That’s right, planning your meals in advance is one of the most important things you can do in order to control your impulse to eat fueled by emotion. Here’s how to do it.
Willpower
Willpower is a word that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to healthy eating, but it’s a bunch of baloney. You’ve probably been relying pretty heavily on willpower thus far in your life when it comes to eating and it’s not worked out so well. The reason it doesn’t work out isn’t because you don’t have willpower – the reason it doesn’t work out is because you’re not providing support to yourself in order to make good decisions.
You can support yourself and your willpower by planning your meals ahead of time. When you take the time to plan out your meals, you take the pressure off yourself and your willpower. This allows you to reach your goals.
Stress
If you wait until the end of the day to make your food choices, then it’s probably not going to work out for the best. By the time you get to the decision-making stage of the day for dinner you’ve been through a stressful day where you’ve had to make a million other tiny decisions. Spend less time worrying about this decision and plan your meals ahead of time.
If you eat emotionally then you know that stress is a big contributor to it. When you take steps to reduce stress in your life where you can, then you’ll help your eating habits and your mental health. When you plan your meals out for the week, then you won’t need to worry about what’s going to be on your dinner table.
Get Started
You can start slow if planning out a whole week feels overwhelming. All you have to do is take a minute or so each night before bed to make a list of what you’re going to eat the next day. By writing it down you’re allowing yourself to visualize the foods you’re going to be eating which may help you to stick to your plan. When you’re ready just start planning out meals for a day or two and eventually the whole week.