Mindful Emotional Eating: Leverage More Coping Per Calorie

You have two options in regard to emotional eating: you can try to eliminate it altogether or you can try to make better use of it by making emotional eating more conscious. The latter would be consistent with the goals of harm reduction, a humanistic form of psychotherapy that offers a pragmatic risk-reduction approach to managing problematic behaviors.

Three Principles of Mindful Emotional Eating

If becoming a mindful emotional eater is the goal you'd like to pursue, the following three principles will help you transition from mindlessly-reactive emotional eating to mindfully-conscious emotional eating in moderation:

1) when eating to cope with emotions, accept emotional eating as a legitimate coping choice, not a coping failure;

2) when eating to cope with emotions, follow a predictable eating ritual, with clear start and end points;

3) when eating to cope with emotions, remember that emotional eating does not have to mean emotional overeating.

Following these guidelines will help you approach emotional eating with a greater sense of control.

Ritualize Emotional Eating

Habits, routines and rituals offer a soothing, stabilizing sense of predictability and help us feel in control of the moment. Emotional eating episodes are often haphazard and unstructured. To help you rely less on food and more on the activity of eating during your emotional eating episode, I encourage you to ritualize and structure your emotional eating "protocol."

I encourage to always begin by stating to yourself (out loud or internally) that you are making a conscious choice to cope by eating and that in doing so, you are giving yourself a permission to not feel guilty or disgusted with yourself afterwards since emotional eating is, however imperfect, a viable form of self-care. Decide in advance not to judge yourself.

Following this statement of intent and the permission to cope by eating, identify how you feel and what you are trying to cope with. You might follow this by stating your expectations of how you wish to feel after you eat. Then, consciously consider what you will eat and decide on a "dose." Then, with mindfulness of the process, eat.

Take your time to savor and appreciate the flavor of the food as well as the subtle changes in your state of mind and body. Pause to check to if you have attained a desired emotional state; if not, proceed with another serving and check again. When you feel you have attained a desired state (whether you use psychological or somatic/physiological markers for that), allow yourself a realization that you have once again been able to successfully self-soothe with food.

Congratulate yourself on another coping success.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D. is the author of Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time (New Harbinger, 2008) and of "Present Perfect: From Mindless Pursuit of What Should Be to Mindful Acceptance of What Is" (in press, New Harbinger Publications, in stores in July 2010). He is in private practice in Pittsburgh, PA. For more information visit www.eatingthemoment.com and sign up for Pavel Somov's monthly "Mindful-not-Mouthful" Newsletter

 

 

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Comments

[justbstill]

Excellent advice! I have heard many women say that when they are mindlessly eating/bingeing, they feel like they are having an out of body experience. Bringing awareness to this event is a wonderful way to elicit possible change, maybe one teaspoon at a time.

[Pavel Somov, Ph.D. - Huffpost Blogger]

Thank you for your input!

[Pavel Somov, Ph.D. - Huffpost Blogger]

Dear Lisa: I respectfully disagree. Your suggestion of low calory choices makes general sense but this is not what I mean by mindul emotional eating. I suggest that if you have made a conscious choice to engage in mindful emotional eating, what you choose to eat is less important than how you eat. For emotional eating to work, it has to satisfy the desire that you have - but in moderation. So the issue isn't the "what" but the "how" of emotional eating. So, if you want to self-soothe with ice-cream, that's entirely fine. A scoop of ice-cream or a cookie won't kill you. Indulge on the quality of the experience and in so doing you will optimize the coping per calorie ratio. Your suggestion is straight from the classic self-denial playbook. If you decided to cope by eating and then you choose a "healither" choice, then right off the bat you are compromizing the very notion of eating for comfort. A choice of a less palatable, less desirable low-calorie food might actually lead to emotional overeating.

I hope this helps,
Be well and thank you for your well-intentioned input.
Pavel

[lisacain]

I like the idea to admit and alter your feelings on emotional eating. I would also add that if, for example, you are eating for comfort - it is good to look at the actual foods that you choose. Try to choose the foods that are better for you. For example, choose chicken soup instead of ice-cream (both are comfort foods - and one is alot more nutritious and less calories than the other).
Lisa
http://www.snacksnoop.com