Amira Salsabila |
Haibunda
Wednesday, 08 Feb 2023 17:55 WIB
Emotional eating is when a person uses food as a way to cope with feelings rather than to satisfy hunger. Emotional eating can unknowingly affect your weight, health, and overall well-being.
While it’s not often people find a connection between eating and how they feel, understanding what drives emotional eating can help a person take steps to change it.
Some people often turn to food when they are stressed, lonely, sad, anxious or bored. Mild daily stress can cause a person to seek comfort or distraction in food.
Causes of emotional eating
Launching from the page Healthline, almost anything can trigger the desire to eat. Common external reasons a person does emotional eating are as follows:
- work stress
- Worries about finances
- Health problems
- Struggles in relationships
People who follow strict diets with a history of dieting are potentially more likely to overeat when stressed. Other internal causes are included as risk factors emotional eating are as follows:
- Lack of introspective awareness, being aware of how you feel.
- Alexithymialack of ability to understand, process, or describe emotions.
- Emotional dysregulation, inability to manage emotions.
- The hypothalamic pituitary-adrenal stress axis is reversed, an underactive cortisol response to stress.
The dangers of emotional eating
Disturbance emotional eating is a cycle. This cycle can cause mental and physical health side effects, including:
- Excessive fatigue
- Increased belly fat
- Weight fluctuations
- Stomach pain, cramps, or other digestive problems
- Preoccupation with food
- Feeling out of control
- alone
- Difficulty differentiating between emotional and physical hunger
Stress, along with emotional eatingcan also increase the risk of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart conditions.
When cortisol builds up with excessive stress, it can increase your blood glucose, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels. These changes also contribute to arterial plaque accumulation and coronary artery disease.
Meanwhile, cortisol can also affect metabolic function, which can make it difficult to lose weight. Obesity is a contributing factor to each of these conditions and can cause even more stress.
Conditions like high cholesterol or diabetes don’t happen overnight or just because you indulge once in a while.
More immediate signs that stress is taking a toll on your body are sleep problems such as insomnia, muscle tension, muscle aches and migraines. If stress and related problems such as emotional eating If not treated long enough, heart health may begin to suffer.
5 Ways to deal with emotional eating
It can be difficult to change such habits emotional eating, but that could possibly be changed. Below are some ways to help you deal with it.
1. Move the body
Moving your body can be a powerful way to manage stress and anxiety. This activity helps reduce the levels of stress hormones in your body.
Apart from that, it can also release endorphins to elevate mood. An exercise routine can help manage underlying emotional triggers for eating. No need for intense exercise, consider taking a five-minute walk or some light stretching.
2. Try mindfulness
Mindfulness has many benefits for mental health. This is a powerful way to manage anxiety and depression. It has also been shown to reduce stress eating.
If you find that stress, a bad mood, or anxiety are triggers for your cravings, practice mindfulness can help mom.
3. Watch your appetite
If you have been on a diet for most of your life, it can be difficult to adjust to hunger and satiety cues. It takes some practice to begin to realize what physical hunger and fullness really feel like.
Noticing physical hunger cues can help you notice when you’re eating for emotional reasons.
4. Get support
Consider getting additional help from professionals. Find a dietitian with experience supporting people with disorders emotional eating. They can help you identify eating triggers and find ways to manage them.
A psychologist can help you find other ways to deal with difficult emotions as you move away from food use.
5. Create a meal schedule
Scheduling meals can help you physically withstand hunger. Feeling full can also help curb feelings of hunger emotionally. Scheduling meals doesn’t mean you need to prepare meals for the week.
Instead, consider creating a weekly meal plan that includes breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Then, set what time to eat each meal.
So, those are some things you need to understand about emotional eatingi.e. overeating when stressed. Hopefully useful, yes, Mother.
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(asa)
