In this post, I introduce 5 ways to start living mindfully to stop emotional eating, binge eating and habitual overeating.
There’s no doubt you’ve heard of mindful living. It’s about being present in your day-to-day life and not letting distractions or worries take over.
In my previous post, I talked about the many benefits of mindful living and showed 4 signs indicating that you live your life mindlessly. Being more mindful also helps with emotional eating and overeating.
If you want to live more mindfully to be able to stop emotional eating but don’t know where to start, try some of these exercises.
Savour your foods and drinks – more mindful eating and drinking
Focus on how your food looks and what it’s made of, and notice things about what you’re eating. This will cause you to slow down and have control over how much you eat during your meal.
As you learn to savour the taste of the food, rather than shovelling it in and swallowing it as quickly as possible, you will have an enjoyable experience that allows your body to chew and digest your food sufficiently.
Mindful eating can help with emotional eating and living mindfully helps you stop overeating too.
Enjoy what you eat – practice mindful eating
Taste it.
Is it salty? Sweet? What flavours can you recognize?
What’s the texture like?
Practice chewing slowly, sniffing, and savouring your food at every bite.
Play a game of trying to identify all the ingredients of the dishes that you are eating.
If you cooked the meal and you know the ingredients try the following game instead. Imagine that you need to write about this food in a food connoisseur magazine. How would you describe it? What would you write about it?
Mindfully savour your drinks too
Is it coffee, tea, wine, or a refreshing smoothie?
Before you take your first sip, pause.
Smell your drink. What does it smell like?
Taste it. What flavours do you taste against your tongue?
What is the temperature like? Notice how the cup or glass feels in your hand as you take another sip.
Swallow slowly and concentrate on how your muscles contract as your liquid travels down your oesophagus.
This 7-minute visualization meditation video helps you start trusting your body again after years of dieting.
If you have been following diet rules for years and had to eat what and when your diet plan allowed you to eat it can be hard to start to listen to your body’s signals again.
This meditation video with beautiful images helps you eat and live more intuitively and mindfully while listening to your body’s inner wisdom. If you ever wish to become a normal eater and stop eating emotionally, it’s important to change your identity and reprogram your subconscious mind to that of a normal eater.
My Mindfulness to Food Freedom course shows you the exact steps to break free from emotional and binge eating and become a natural eater using mindfulness.
Go for a walk in nature
Feel the breeze on your skin and in your hair.
Do you hear any birds singing? Do you know what bird that is?
What flowers do you see?
Are any thoughts coming up? How do they make you feel?
Take ten minutes to notice your environment as you walk.
If you want, take a friend on your nature walks but agree to go in silence.
Bring a camera. Snap pictures of items that stand out. Is it the colour or the texture that attracted your attention?
Did you notice a shape or pattern? Was there a sound or smell that attracted you to this item?
Listen to music and observe your thoughts
Sit in your most comfortable chair and play some background music that relaxes you. You can look for spa or meditation music on YouTube. Classical music is also a good choice.
As you listen, focus on your breath. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Take deep belly breaths.
Pay attention to how your body may be going into resistance, by starting to itch and squirm. Adjust your posture or scratch if needed.
Notice how the thoughts and experiences that come up influence how you feel.
Allow the thoughts to come and go without trying to hold too tightly to them. Examine each thought like an observer.
Observing your thoughts to overcome emotional eating
Paying attention to your thoughts can also help when you have the urge to eat when you have uncomfortable emotions. I talk about how to do this in more detail in this post.
My workbook, How to stop eating your feelings, help you discover what you are really hungry for and break free from emotional and binge eating.
Use mindfulness to deal with frustration and problems instead of eating emotionally
When you’re feeling a lot of emotions at once, it can be difficult to be mindful. This is especially true if you’re experiencing frustration or a problem. But it’s important to try to stay aware and understand what you’re feeling instead of suppressing your emotions or distracting yourself from them by eating.
It’s normal not wanting to deal with these emotions. While emotional eating might seem helpful at first, the fact is that this approach is often harmful to your relationship with food. Instead, it can be helpful to deal with your frustrations and problems by staying mindful.
Start with awareness
Often, we want our emotions to be heard, so start by acknowledging how you feel. Try saying something simple to yourself like, “I’m angry that (person) did (action)”.
Take a few deep breaths.
Acknowledge other emotions you feel bubbling to the surface like overwhelm, anger, sadness, jealousy, etc.
I’ve made a meditation to help you sit with your feelings when you have the urge to overeat. Listen to this meditation often and you’ll learn how to process your feelings. You’ll be presently surprised to find that you won’t need to eat to suppress or numb them anymore. You can get it by clicking on this link.
Analyze your emotions
Where are these emotions coming from? Are they linked to something that happened recently?
It’s important to pause and ask yourself if your emotions are in proportion to what happened.
Sometimes, we react to a minor incident because we’re not acknowledging a problem in another area.
For example, someone spills coffee on your desk and you’re tempted to yell at them. But you pause and realize you’re angry because you received bad news in an email earlier. You just attributed those emotions to the coffee spill.
Look for alternatives
Frustration or problems sometimes crop up that can be solved relatively easily.
Consider if you can change the situation. Ask yourself what your choices are and which one is the best solution.
If you have no control over the situation worrying about it won’t change it. Try to let it go.
Reach out for feedback
If you have a coach or mentor you can contact, you should do that. Ask for guidance on how to tackle this problem.
Often a coach or mentor can provide a fresh perspective that can help you look at the situation in a new way. You can book a free call with me here.
Alternatively, you could reach out to your friends or a community that you’re part of. Your group can give you the benefit of several different perspectives and it can be helpful to know that you’re not the only one dealing with these problems.
Don’t berate yourself if you don’t handle every frustration or problem mindfully. Instead, acknowledge that you could have dealt with the situation differently and move on. Living mindfully to stop emotional eating is a process, it takes some time.
It isn’t about getting right every time or being perfect. It’s about getting into a more mindful state instead of eating automatically when we are triggered.
Try colouring
Choose a colouring page that inspires you.
How do the colours you have chosen make you feel? What does it feel like to move the pen, marker or pencil over paper?
What thoughts are coming up? How are these thoughts affecting you?
You may want to journal some of these emotions. It’s OK to alternate between colouring and journaling if it helps you.
You can try any colouring books and journals you like.
My Floral Coloring Planner is designed to help you journal about your feelings on the Brain Dump pages, as well as plan your weeks and days and track what´s important for you. It also helps you reduce stress by becoming more organized and by using the coloring pages to release stress.
Understand that you may feel uncomfortable the first few times that you attempt to practice being mindful instead of distracting yourself with eating. This is completely normal and just means that you’re not used to living in the moment. Keep doing exercises like the ones above regularly and you will eventually become comfortable with the concept of living mindfully and will be able to stop emotional eating and overeating.
This free training shows you the exact steps to break free from emotional and binge eating.
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