Signs of Emotional/ Unconscious Eating
- Isolating or eating alone, hiding what you are eating, making excuses for what you are eating
- Eating more, not paying attention to your fullness, allowing others to dictate your food choices, or influence what you are going to eat
- Crossing your own boundaries and goals with food to feel accepted, liked, loved, and to avoid confrontation
- Losing connection to your body when you are eating by eating past your fullness, eating when you aren’t actually hungry, or not paying attention to how much food you have consumed.
- Blaming others for having food around you, that it’s their fault for you eating
- Feeling out of control around certain foods, or like you can’t stop eating them
- Craving certain foods when challenging emotions come up and going to food instead of taking action for that circumstance
- Labeling your food as good or bad and then judging yourself in the same way for eating it
- Judging your value or worth as a person by the number on the scale
- Making excuses for why you can’t lose weight, constantly talking about being on a diet or going on a diet
- Using food as a reward
- Using food to numb out
- Eating and then hating yourself or your body for eating what you did
- Saying it’s unfair that you can’t eat whatever you want and comparing yourself to others who you think can eat whatever they want
- Obsessive thoughts around food, weight, comparison, and yourself, and your body
- Compulsive thoughts or behaviors around food, weight, comparison, and your self
- Needing to go exercise if you eat something “bad” or too much of something
- Excessive exercising to control the unhealthy food choices
- Eating as your only way to feel good or feel alive
- Feeling powerless, out of control, or like the victim to food
- Yo-yo dieting or fad dieting
- Always looking for the next diet to be on
- Gaining and losing weight repeatedly
- Not being sure what hunger/fullness feels like
- Punishing yourself by overeating or denying yourself food
- Believing that you can’t actually lose weight or change your patterns around food
- Not taking critical action in changing your health/eating when there is a health concern such as chronic stress or inflammation; weight gain has affected your energy, stamina, or quality of life; you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes or some other disease
- Food is one of the only ways you know how to express connection or love
- You feel more safe or comforted spending your time eating and isolating then interacting with others or going out and doing things
- A day doesn’t go by where you hate your body, wish to lose weight, think of another diet to go on, or feel overwhelmed by food
Reasons Why We Emotionally Eat:
- To be able to feel emotions
- To feel in control
- To procrastinate
- To keep ourselves small and inside a comfort zone
- We need victim mentality to feel significant
- We can continue to blame instead of take action
- We are afraid of what would happen if we lost the weight, we wouldn’t know who we are
- Weight is a form of protection, safety, and security
- The emotions, memories, traumas inside of us are too painful too face
- It’s our only form of excitement or feeling alive
- It feels too hard to look at ourselves honestly
- We can focus on food and weight instead of other areas in our lives that are scarier to look at- like why a relationship isn’t working or not loving the work we do
- We fear being in a healthy body because we might be noticed or attract attention
- Food is how we’ve been taught to connect and without it we feel we would have no way to connect with people
- Food is how we show or receive love, appreciation, validation, acceptance
- Food is how we feel understood or heard
- We feel alone without food and eating
- We don’t know how to self soothe or be compassionate to ourselves in healthy ways, food becomes our main tool of emotional survival
- We don’t know ourselves without food being a part of our lives
- We are chemically addicted to the highs and lows of sugar and refined carbs
- We’ve attached food to other enjoyable activities that are usually a form of numbing out as well- watching tv, reading, being on the computer, etc.
- We feel overwhelmed by making a change so we go back to what we know
- We think skinny or fit people are stuck up, arrogant, selfish, or bad in some way and justify being overweight as a way to rebel against those qualities
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