Overcoming emotional eating, emotional overeating, or compulsive eating, is possible. In these sections, you can learn how to stop.
In addition to our help pages, we have a free email-series on how to cure emotional eating, emotional overeating, or compulsive eating. If you would like the email-series, simply request it via the link box further down this page. The series arrive direct by e-mail. (We have a strict privacy policy. We would never share your e-mail address with anyone.)
Emotional Eating: Negative Emotions
Thinking about eating driven by emotions means thinking about emotions. Emotional overeating is an emotional disorder or imbalance that can have serious negative consequences to your health.
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 a lack of knowing how to dissolve negative emotions.
Emotions are important, but over-eating is a symptom that we often don't deal well enough 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. Learning how to flourish emotionally eliminates that symptom.
An analogy may be helpful here.
For example (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.
Though we may not like it, though at times it may upset us emotionally, though it may stimulate us to overindulge on comfort foods, aging is unavoidable. If we dwell on our vanished youthfulness, we'll just make ourselves miserable. We certainly won't retard aging.
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.
Unlike aging, emotional eating is not inevitable. We can use emotional overeating as an opportunity to improve our life emotionally. There no reason to get stuck with emotional eating.
So, what do the wise do when it comes to emotional suffering?
Overcoming Emotional Eating
They examine emotions in order to learn how to master them. It is only by examining emotions and knowing 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: the eating problem is caused by not knowing how to dissolve the emotions that cause the eating problem. Therefore, knowing how to dissolve emotions and regain balance permits emotional flourishing, diminishes emotional suffering, and stops emotional overeating. We show you the ways to do this.
The Emotional Eating 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?
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 processed (refined) carbohydrates eliminates carbohydrate cravings.
Emotional Eating Cure: Email-Series
Our email-series is free and it is here to help you. If you would like to understand how to dissolve emotional suffering of all kinds, and your brain is healthy, request the e-series via the link box.
Our information is designed to show you how anyone can overcome and permanently cure this pattern of eating. We also explain how to diminish and dissolve emotional suffering of all kinds.
We 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 judgments that have a specific purpose.
We also explain why 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.
Listed below is the next section. This is about when stress causes body fat, and fast fat burning tips.
