Emotional Eating and Weight Loss this is how to achieve a better body
This is about how to stop emotional eating or emotional overeating.
We have psychological methods that enhance your ability to boost your metabolism and lose body fat.
We also offer a free email-series on how to cure emotional eating and emotional overeating.
Simply request the series by using the link box further down this page.
The series will arrive direct by e-mail.
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Emotional eating and negative emotions
Thinking about eating driven by negative emotions means thinking about emotions. Emotional overeating is an emotional disorder or imbalance that can have serious negative consequences on your health and hinder weight loss.
Some emotions are positive (good, pleasant), and some are negative (bad, unpleasant). Emotional overeating is usually caused by using food to try to outweigh negative emotions.
Emotions are normal. Emotions are important. Many people value positive emotions so much that they believe they are intimately connected to the meanings of our lives.
For example, the positive emotions generated by the love they share with family and friends sustain many people in troubled times.
On the other hand, some people who commit suicide do so because they feel overwhelmed by negative emotions and cannot find any other exit to their suffering.
Unfortunately, many people are slaves to their emotions. Many of us constantly try to savor and hoard positive emotions, while trying to protect ourselves from negative emotions.
We try to attach to emotional highs, and we struggle to endure and prevent emotional lows.
It is the futility of this fundamental mindset that sets the stage for emotional overeating, which comes from not understanding how to dissolve negative emotions.
Emotions are important, but over-eating is a symptom that we often don't deal well with our emotions. Though it is impossible to preserve positive emotions and to prevent negative emotions, many of us continue to pretend that it is possible. Unbalanced eating is just one outcome of this pretense.
Emotional eating is a symptom of an underlying problem.
It often leads to weight gain and hinders weight loss. Learning how to flourish emotionally eliminates emotional eating as well as other problems caused by negative emotions such as fear, anger, or loneliness.
An analogy may be helpful here.
For example, and this is just one example, suppose that growing older makes us sad. The skin on our faces has lost the bloom of youth.
Well, what are we going to do about growing older? We cannot stop ourselves from growing older!
We may not like it. At times it may upset us emotionally; it may stimulate us to overindulge on comfort foods such as refined processed carbohydrates.
Aging is unavoidable. If we dwell on our vanished youthfulness, we'll just make ourselves miserable. We certainly won't retard aging.
Here's the key realization: it's not aging that bothers us; rather, it's our thoughts and evaluations about aging that bother us.
John-Roger and Peter McWilliams: "Whenever he thought about it he felt terrible. And so, at least, he came to a fateful decision. He decided not to think about it."
Isn't it better to make peace with reality than to resist the inevitable? Instead of becoming angry, depressed, or resorting to overeating, we can resolve to age as well as possible by learning how to let go of the thoughts that torment us.
Unlike aging, emotional eating is not inevitable. We can use emotional overeating as an opportunity to improve our life emotionally. There's no reason to get stuck with emotional eating.
So, what do the wise do when it comes to emotional suffering?
Overcoming your emotional eating
They examine emotions in order to learn how to master them. It is only by examining emotions and understanding how to dissolve them that flourishing emotionally becomes possible. This is the way to end emotional suffering automatically.
Since emotional overeating is a habitual behavior, eliminating its cause automatically eliminates the need for it.
It is our choice: we can remain slaves to our emotions or we can do what is required to free ourselves from their tyranny.
Overeating is not the problem; rather, it's a consequence of the problem. It's caused by not understanding how to dissolve the emotions that cause the eating problem. So, understanding how to dissolve emotions and regain balance permits emotional flourishing, diminishes emotional suffering, stops emotional overeating, and enables you to lose weight.
Meditation is the art of freeing yourself from compulsive thinking.
Without realizing it, we are addicted to incessant thinking. Since thinking is usually about the past or the future, it pulls us away from present moment awareness. That separation creates suffering.
That suffering causes emotional eating as well as other problems such as racing mind insomnia, low self esteem, and unnecessarily difficult interpersonal relationships.
Take the emotional eater test
How can you tell if you are suffering from emotional eating? Since emotions poison clear thinking, it may be difficult to recognize that you are.
Positive answers to the following questions may be an indication of a difficulty:
Are you unhappy with your life?
Are you unhappy with your body?
Is timing and content of meals haphazard and unpredictable?
Do you frequently have food cravings?
Do you often consume "comfort" foods such as refined processed carbohydrates?
Our minds are not separate from our bodies.
Chemical imbalances in our brains can cause emotional instability. However, this can be rectified. The program presented on our free website promotes proper brain functioning. In fact, by itself, eating healthy foods can be enormously helpful in overcoming emotional overeating.
For example, eliminating refined processed carbohydrates and consuming sufficient fat burning foods from natural sources eliminates carbohydrate cravings. Moreover, it produces weight loss.
If you are unsure what these foods are, you will find page links to a list of fat burning foods and a list of refined processed carbohydrates awaiting you at the bottom of this page.
The emotional eating remedy (email-series)
Our email-series is free and, if you use it, can really make a huge difference. If your brain is healthy and you would like to understand how to dissolve emotional suffering of all kinds, simply request the e-mail series via the link box.
You'll learn how anyone can overcome emotional over-eating in order to lose weight, which is just one benefit of freeing yourself from compulsive thinking.
We also answer the question, "What is an emotion?" You might think that psychologists long ago figured out the answer, but the astounding truth is that they have not.
With the exception of Richard Lazarus, most psychologists seem not even to be looking in the right direction. So, unfortunately, much advice they give about emotional flourishing is very poor.
Without first understanding emotions, it is hard to understand how to cure emotional suffering. Fortunately, beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre, recent philosophers have understood that emotions are our own doings: essentially, they are evaluative judgments that have a specific purpose.
We also explain how emotions can poison our lives. Most importantly, we answer, "How are emotions mastered?" We explain how they can be dissolved, which is a middle way between venting them and ignoring them.
It is by following that middle way that you'll diminish your emotional suffering and its consequences. Treating this eating habit effectively requires learning how to dissolve the emotions that cause it.
Meditation is a great way to manage stress. If you are too stressed, your levels of the hormone cortisol will be too high. That promotes abdominal fat storage.
Why be too stressed? Why be too fat?
Listed below are the next pages in this section. The pages are about when stress can cause weight gain, the list of fat burning foods for weight loss, and the list of refined processed cabohydrates.
