Emotional Eating - Be Fantastic

Getting rid of your gremlins around food is not easy. Of course you have lots of help – diet books, slimming clubs, gym instructors (some of whom definitely have never been overweight), not to mention family members who give helpful advice while disdainfully looking at your hips.

And have you noticed how the skinny ones (family members or gym instructors, it doesn’t matter which) exude an air of moral superiority. And you’d like to hit them round the face with a wet fish, or worse!

But of course you are far too nice a person to do this, so you go home, fuming and quell your feelings with cream cakes.

And now you have fallen back into the trap of emotional eating. Which makes you feel worse. At this point you may say,

That’s it for the day, I might as well eat what I like now (tough if its breakfast time, you’ve got a long day of calories in front of you).

Or you might say, 'What’s the point, I’ll always be fat'.

Or maybe, 'I’ll diet tomorrow but I need that cake NOW'.

However you language it, you KNOW you’re eating to deal with your feelings – true emotional eating. But however much you feed your waistline, food isn’t the right thing to feed your emotions.

What you’d like to do is get a wet fish and do some judicious slapping. What you need to do is deal with the emotions in some way other than food.

So here’s an exercise to help you do that and get the emotional eating under control:

1. Find a wet fish (just kidding)

Here’s the correct version:

1. Get in touch with what emotion you are actually feeling. There may be more than one but we don’t want a complete thesaurus. One or two will do.

2. Just rest in the ‘now’ acknowledging the emotion you feel.

3. Tell yourself it is OK to have these negative emotions – even though they may not serve you well they are an accurate description of how you are feeling now.

4. Let the emotion go.

5. Take a deep breath and give yourself a hug. A hug may be physical or emotional, you will know what to do.

6. Say "I am fantastic" and believe it. Associate this with something you can do that is fantastic – World class belly dancer aged 15, or able to tell a crocodile and an alligator apart at 50 paces, or historic capacity to giggle when threatened – whatever you do that’s fantastic associate it with this statement - I AM FANTASTIC!

Now go and enjoy your day, resting in the knowledge that your fantastic-ness is inside you and is yours forever (though if you use the Food & Joy Coaching techniques your fantastic-ness will only increase).

(c) 2009 Liz Copeland