Feeling hungry every time you eat? Or are you just eating out of habit, or worse – out of sadness or boredom? Falling into the trap of emotional eating can make differentiating real physical hunger from emotional cravings difficult, and overcoming this requires assessing emotional eating and learning to view food as fuel.
Intervention Techniques for Emotional Eating
Using intervention techniques can help address the issue of emotional eating and form healthier eating habits. Let’s dive into these simple yet effective techniques that can help you or your loved ones break free from emotional eating.
Emotion-based Intervention Techniques
Understanding why you’re engaging in a mind-body technique and knowing how to do it correctly are essential when implementing any intervention. Here are a few examples of mind-body techniques that you can use in the moment to determine if you’re eating due to an emotional need (craving) or physical hunger.
Sit, Feel, and Identify
Before eating, practice identifying your feelings, especially when craving a specific food item (like donuts, pizza, or other comfort foods). Slow down, sit for a moment in silence, and listen to your thoughts. With real hunger, any food can satisfy your craving, whereas emotional cravings tend to target specific foods.
Reduce Anxiety-Based Food Cravings
Anxiety can make you feel overstressed, constantly worried, and restless, which often leads to seeking comfort places and craving comfort foods. Deep diaphragmatic breathing and relaxation techniques are very powerful in reducing anxiety-caused food cravings. Take deep breaths with a steady cadence of four seconds inhalation and eight seconds exhalation to reduce stress and anxiety, relax your body, and decrease comfort-food cravings.
Reduce Depression-Based Food Cravings
Sometimes it can be challenging to know whether you are anxious or depressed. While clinical depression requires professional diagnosis and treatment, you can identify and reduce depressed or blue feelings that lead to unhealthy food cravings. When experiencing a food craving due to feeling blue, refocus your thoughts and emotions with positive associations, such as playing uplifting music or looking at photos that generate pleasant memories of people, places, and events. Socialization and physical activity can also help lift your mood and energy, reducing food cravings.
Additional Craving Techniques
What if you can’t determine the craving mechanism, or experience too many of them? Here are some powerful techniques to reduce cravings and get you back on track:
Mindfulness: Experience the act of eating fully in the moment, slow down, and taste mindfully to increase satisfaction and create healthier eating habits.
Operant Conditioning: Also known as Task Interference, this method uses mental tasks to reduce food cravings, like imagining unrelated events to interrupt the food-image/emotion connection.
Attention Redirection: In social settings, engage in conversation with others as the primary activity, focusing on interpersonal connection rather than food consumption.
Ask Yourself Questions: Before consuming a food or beverage item, ask yourself questions like, “Am I really hungry, or am I thirsty?”, “Is this what I want?”, “Will this feel good in my body?”, and “Will this make the situation better?” These questions will help you slow down and consider if eating will improve your emotional state or if other techniques would be more beneficial.
By taking action to uplift your energy and emotional state, you’ll be more likely to make better eating choices and approach food as fuel rather than comfort.
