In this post, I show you 5 reasons for overeating and a tip on how to stop it.
You know the situation, when you start something new – a healthy lifestyle, a fitness program, a project, or learning a language – you reach a certain level and you either stop there or fall back to a previous level (overeating all the time, stopping the project or language course halfway through). This leads to disappointment and you may become angry at yourself or even hate yourself for being a failure.
You sabotage your attempts to improve yourselves or your life and you have no idea why you keep doing this, you might even feel like something is wrong with you. Why are we acting like our own enemies?
As an example, let’s discuss a typical health-related self-sabotage topic: overeating.
When you eat highly processed food that is full of addictive chemicals, you simply can’t stop eating it. This is simple chemistry, it’s not your fault. The food industry spends a lot of money developing these foods to make you buy more of their products. Their researchers combine additives, fat, white flour, salt, or sugar to make these extremely addictive foods.
Many people can’t stop eating these foods, they either overeat them or they must eat them every day because they are addicted to them.
However, if you have been avoiding these foods for weight loss purposes and you restricted yourself for a long time, it might just be the end of your willpower. When you can’t resist your favorite food any longer you overeat. Why? Because you know that you won’t be able to eat this food again for a long time, and you want to make up for the past and future lost opportunities as well. You probably might as well eat everything else you were not allowed to eat and you promise yourself that you will never eat these foods again. You will start your diet again tomorrow and you will be “good”. But again, it only lasts until your willpower lasts.
A similar reason for overeating is a perfectionist mindset. You ate something you didn´t want to/”shouldn´t” and you feel like you might as well eat whatever else you didn´t let yourself eat before because your diet is ruined anyway. You will start again PERFECTLY tomorrow. Until you fall off of the wagon again.
If you usually don´t have a problem with eating only one or two cookies, one piece of chocolate, or a few chips, but sometimes you have the urge to overeat just about anything you can get your hands on, then there is an emotional reason for your overeating.
Often the problem is not what you eat, but what is eating you!
So what are the typical reasons for emotional overeating?
I can’t eat my favorite foods anymore.
I can’t go out with my friends if it involves eating together.
I won’t be able to keep the weight off and people will laugh at me.
People will treat me differently when I’m slimmer (my overweight friends or family members will not like me anymore).
I will have to finally find a partner, I won’t have the excuse of being “too fat and nobody likes me” anymore.
I can’t suppress my bad feelings with eating, I will have to face my feelings, problems and will have to find a solution for them.
I will not have the excuse “I’ll do it when I get thin” available for me anymore.
Sometimes women try to protect themselves from a past (sexual) trauma by growing a “protecting” fat layer, so men wouldn’t see them as desirable anymore.
Lack of love,
lack of attention,
lack of self-worth, self-confidence
loneliness,
boredom, monotony (lack of excitement, goals),
lack of sleep,
lack of coping mechanisms (stress, nervousness, anxiety, worry).
You need to chew on something constantly because you can’t say something that you want to.
You always need to eat something after an argument or fight to release the pressure.
When you are stressed, you crave food, you want to chew something, preferably something crunchy.
(I was definitely in this last group.)
You had to eat everything from your plate when you were a child.
Your parents, grandparents comforted or rewarded you with food, or you always celebrated with food.
When you got home from school you always had something sweet (e.g. cookies) for a snack. Now every time you get home from work you crave something sweet.
You need to eat something when you watch TV.
You snack on the food while you are cooking.
Hedonic overeating
It is fine to overeat on special occasions when the food is so delicious we don´t want to stop. However, if we do it all the time and it leads to weight gain that we are not happy about we need to diversify our joy. We need to find other activities that give us pleasure other than food. Find other activities that make you happy and fulfilled.
Research shows that if you crave soft, creamy, comforting foods (cakes, ice cream, peanut butter), most likely you eat to fill a lack in your life. However, if you crave crunchy food, such as chips, peanuts, cookies, pretzels, you eat from anger or to suppress something you would want to say.
Have you found your reason for overeating, self-sabotaging your diet or fitness plan? Good. Now you probably think, OK, now I know the reasons for overeating, but how can I stop it or prevent it?
What you need to do, is look into your head, tidy up your thoughts, and clearly see your motivation, otherwise, you will just keep self-sabotaging your efforts. If you try to reach something with only willpower, you will have a tough time, because in the battle between nature and willpower, always nature wins.
You have to change your mindset instead, and then everything will come easily and naturally. You need to clearly see why it’s important for you what you want to achieve and in which ways will it make your life better.
Sit down for a few minutes, quiet your mind, and imagine how you will feel when you reach your goal. Use all your senses to visualize your success.
Image the feelings you will feel (e.g. proud, confident), see yourself as you confidently wear your skinny jeans, shorts, tight top, or bikini, see how good you look in photos, see how you play with your children, how you enjoy your favorite sport (or dance, hiking, para-shooting, scuba diving), hear how others praise you and touch your flat tummy, tight legs, firm bum 🙂
This visualization can be used for other goals as well, for example, seeing yourself leading your successful project/business, seeing your clients buying and enjoying your products, etc.
Make these images/little “films” as vivid and exciting as possible. Really feel the feelings! Feelings have the strongest motivating power. Repeat this visualization daily, until it burns into your mind.
Next time you feel the urge to self-sabotage your success, quickly quiet your mind for a few seconds and remember the visualized image. If you have practiced visualization for a while, these few seconds will be enough to stop you from ruining your results and efforts.
Try to observe your feelings (only observe, do not relive them!) that led to the self-sabotaging urge. Nervousness, anxiety, tiredness, or maybe boredom? What made you feel this way? Which one of the above reasons initiated your urge? Had your environment a role in it? Don’t try to change your feelings, or blame someone. Simply observe these feelings, acknowledge and accept them. This will help you in the future to recognize the urge and the root cause of it and to stop the urge in time. You can’t change your feelings, but you can definitely change how you react to them.
I also talk about what triggers your overeating episodes in this post:
I give 5 more easy tips to help you prevent self-sabotaging your success in my next post:
Check out my How to Stop Eating Your Feelings Workbook to discover what you are REALLY hungry for and finally break free from emotional eating and binge eating.
You can read a free chapter of the workbook HERE.
If you need help with finding out your specific reasons for overeating and breaking these habits consider booking a free call with me here: Free consultation
This free training will show you the exact steps to stop feeling out of control around food and eliminate emotional eating, stress eating, and binge eating.
Also, check out this very interesting article about self-sabotage from iNLP Center. It describes the AHA Process that can help you get out of your own way.
Do you have a good tip on how to stop self-sabotaging your self-improvement efforts? Please tell me in the comments.
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