Emotional and Stress-Eating

There’s a lot of talk about self-compassion when it comes to emotional and stress-eating.

When your eating is driven by emotions rather than hunger, berating yourself doesn’t help. It’s more likely to spike your adrenaline, which drives your brain into thinking you’re not safe. As I mentioned in this blog , then your brain sends you looking for fuel to get you to safety. That’s likely to be something high-sugar and high-fat. You’re better off to be nice to yourself.

Some people have trouble getting their heads around the concept of self-compassion. You can also think of it as kindness.

If you find yourself halfway through a pie or the third piece of Christmas cake that you’re eating in response to a trigger, and you start to mentally beat yourself up, listen to what you’re thinking and try prefacing it with this:

“I’m going to say this to myself kindly.”

If you’re used to thinking that you have to be hard on yourself to deal with emotional and stress-eating, and that kindness equates to weakness, consider this paper. It concludes that self-compassion significantly improves outcomes when managing diabetes.

Self-compassion and kindness have a major role in dealing with emotional and stress-eating. It’s one of the most challenging things for my clients to take on board. Practise it over the holidays.

Photo by Adam Nemeroff on Unsplash