Are You Overdoing Comfort Food?

Comfort Food. You know what I'm talking about... you feel a little down or even very upset or anxious and you reach for some kind of food that makes you feel better. It soothes you. It calms you down. You do feel better. And there is nothing wrong with using food this way. Once in a while. Where it becomes a problem is when you use food this way a lot. How do you know if you are over-using comfort food? Are you heavier than you want to be? Then you are over-using comfort food. It's that simple.

This overuse of comfort food is what I call emotional eating and is the number one cause of people being overweight. And the great news is we can stop it.

How Does Comfort Food Work In Your Life?
In order for you to understand this all a little better, let's figure out how comfort food and emotional eating work in your life. I want you to think of the last you used comfort food to make yourself feel better. Ok, got the memory? Now try and go back before you ate and ask yourself what was going on in your life before you reached for the comfort food. This can be a little harder to remember so let me give you some hints. Did you have a fight or a disappointing conversation with your significant other or with a member of your family? Was there some stressful incident at home or at work? Were you getting down on yourself about your appearance, or relationships, or work, or competence, or finances? Even if you can't remember, I can tell you this for sure, no matter what triggered your reaching for comfort food, the effect of the triggering event or thought was, you felt bad. And of course no one likes to feel bad, so the easiest thing you can do to make yourself feel better is to eat. And so that's what you did and you did feel better. For a while. My experience tells me that sometime after you were feeling better, you began getting angry at yourself for over-dosing on comfort food. This is a vicious cycle. You feel bad. You over eat. You feel better. Then, you feel bad for having overeaten. And pretty soon you're eating again.

You Can Stop Overeating For Emotional Reasons.
As I said earlier, you can stop your over use of comfort food, stop your urge to overeat. But you really can't do it alone. You can only stop emotional eating when you stop feeling powerless to stop the bad feelings that have you reach for comfort food on a regular basis. That is easier said than done. Because these feelings of powerlessness are deeply rooted, it will take some work to conquer them. I've spent most of my professional life developing a simple, easy-to-use system that will help you overcome your feelings of powerlessness. 25,000 people have successfully used my programs to lead fuller, happier and more productive lives.

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Gerry said...

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