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True progress comes from nourishment, not deprivation. By giving your body what it needs to function properly, you remove one of the biggest obstacles to lasting weight loss: working against your own body.
Fail-proofing your weight loss journey begins with recognizing that restriction is not the same as nourishment. When you eliminate healthy fats, whole-food carbohydrates, and essential nutrients, your body doesn’t become more efficient at burning fat — it becomes unbalanced and stressed.
These issues, brought about by 'traditional dieting', can lead to emotional triggers that cause you to give up quickly and may eventually result in more stress or emotional eating.
Learn how emotions affect eating habits and what you can do to strengthen your emotional wellness.
Emotional eating is when people use food to deal with anxiety, stress, loneliness, boredom, or other life issues.
Feeling these negative emotions could lead you to crave certain foods to cope. More often than not, the foods you crave when you feel these negative emotions are unhealthy, and oftentimes the strongest food cravings hit when you're at your weakest point. Eating food to deal with your emotions can easily derail your weight loss journey.
Triggers are events or circumstances that cause you to react in a certain way, often without even thinking about it.
These circumstances can range from sights, smells, sounds, and feelings to people, places, activities, and situations. Identifying your emotional triggers can help you manage them in a healthy way. Once you learn more about your patterns and triggers, changing your response to them can become easier. Decide now what you can do when triggers occur so you can avoid making poor food choices when you aren't hungry. If you're able, you can go for a walk, meditate, call a friend, or drink a glass of water.
Chronically overeating could be a symptom of an eating disorder known as compulsive overeating. It is also known as binge eating. Compulsive eating can lead to weight gain, depression, guilt, frustration, and poor health. It can be characterized by a lack of self-control with food, consuming large amounts of food with the inability to stop, and the urge to eat all day.
Here are a few ways you can help overcome compulsive eating:
When you give in to intense urges to eat, you'll usually feel immediate gratification. But this is often followed by feelings of regret. Impulsive eating can be triggered by emotions, cravings, or a response to certain events. Chronic impulsive eating can sabotage your weight loss efforts and lead to weight gain.
How you can overcome impulsive eating:
Stress and anxiety can either motivate you into action or keep you from moving forward. There is no way to avoid all stressful situations, but you can be mindful of how you react.
Try to avoid overreacting or choosing unhealthy food as a coping mechanism. Emotional eating can be a vicious cycle, and a poor diet can contribute to experiencing even more stress and anxiety.
Emotional wellness is defined by how you view yourself and how well you deal with the stress and changes of everyday life.
Consistently “low” moods can make maintaining a weight loss journey challenging. The more you believe that you're capable of something and can visualize yourself accomplishing a goal, the more likely it becomes that you'll prove yourself right.
You can strengthen your emotional wellness if you:
There is a difference between occasionally feeling sad or down and clinical depression. Clinical depression should be evaluated and treated by a physician.
Take our Behavioral Health Quiz to identify how your emotional wellness, daily habits, stress, and anxiety may be influencing your weight. Find out whether you tend toward compulsive or impulsive eating, then implement practical strategies to help you break unhealthy patterns and build lasting, positive change.
It is possible to regain control over your emotional wellness and find healthy ways to process stress and anxiety.
Nothing stands in your way when you have the tools to make good decisions. You can do this! Implementing new strategies and a healthy eating routine can help you to manage your emotions better. Reflect on your decision to start this journey. Picture how your life will change for the better when you begin reaching your goals.
Respect and honor yourself and your commitment. You don't have to be perfect, you just have to make steady progress. Weight loss is possible with the right mindset and a proper plan. Remember, when you take care of your body, it will take care of you!
“I now have the knowledge about how I should be eating, and I understand my body more. I feel like the person that I should have always been.”
Make your best effort to remain on the path toward weight loss, better health, and wellness. By building healthy habits, you can become stronger both physically and mentally. The changes that you experience can have a positive impact on other areas of your life.