Do you do hunger eating or emotional eating?

As a kid we all learned the three basic needs of a human being; air to breathe, water for thirst and food for hunger. However many times many people start eating more and more not to satisfy their hunger, but to compensate for their emotional stress. This eating habit is generally referred to as emotional eating or stress eating and often leads to the development of the emotional eating disorder. So now the question arises, how do I know if I am an emotional eater? Let’s see.

Identifying emotional eating

To identify emotional eating in an individual, there are many emotional eating scales available online which you can take. But apart from that, there are a few symbols that you can recognize in yourself to know whether or not you are emotional eating like:

• There is a sudden urge to eat something which is very at the moment call.
• You crave for very specific things that you want to eat and not just anything satisfies you.
• You lack concentration and awareness about what and how much you are having which often leads to overeating.
• Just stomach fulfillment doesn’t satisfy your hunger and you keep eating until you reach a point where you can have no more.
• After eating you feel guilty and regret your decision to eat so much.

How do I stop emotional eating?

Now that we know how to recognize emotional eating, let’s find out ways to stop it:

• Meditation: Meditation or yoga helps you lift stress and manage it in a more healthy way and thus stopping you from going for emotional eating or stress eating.
• Mind manipulating: Do not keep comfort and junk food in your easy reach. The requirement of efforts into getting more food manipulates your mind to some extent to stop it from emotional eating.
• Resist boredom: Many people start emotional eating out of boredom. In such case try a distracting activities such as playing, dancing, reading painting etc. that keeps you from eating without hunger.
• Break associations: When we associate some activity (example watching TV) with eating, every time we perform the activity we feel like eating without being hungry. Thus make sure that no such associations are formed by concentrating only on eating while eating and not doing anything else.

So understand your eating and food habits better and have a healthy and fit future.