Overeating to improve your mood
It’s important to find mood-boosting activities if you’re an emotional eater. Overeating to improve your mood is only a temporary solution.
They say the third week of January is the gloomiest, most depressing time of the year (it’s cold and dark, etc.). I know it’s already the 4th week but does it really matter? It could be any day of the year.
But it doesn’t have to be.
We can find a few minutes every day to do something that improves our mood. Or we can learn to manage our thoughts and feelings to improve our baseline mood.
It’s especially important to find some mood-boosting activities if you’re an emotional eater and overeat to improve your mood.
Using food to escape an uncomfortable feeling, aka. overeating to improve your mood is only a temporary solution.
You know that, right?
Because that ‘something’ that caused you to feel uncomfortable is still there. You haven’t dealt with it. So it’ll trigger those same feelings again in the future.
If this habit of distracting yourself with food has resulted in weight gain, you’ll have even more negative feelings.
So you have your original issue plus negative thoughts about your body.
Eating to improve your mood doesn’t work very well, right?
You need different solutions
Have you noticed that nothing feels particularly hard when you are in a good mood?
Everything seems figure-out-able.
You have a better perspective.
You can more easily focus on the things within your control and let go of the things that aren’t, and your motivation is generally higher.
And life is just better.
Look, I’m not saying you have to be happy all the time. That would be ridiculous.
I get it – sometimes you just can’t be in a good mood. Me neither.
But know that you have way more control over your mood than you might think.
You’re not a victim of your emotions – you can take charge and do things to make yourself more likely to be in a good mood more often.
The goal is to raise your overall mood. By making small changes, you can train yourself to have better emotional reactions, even to difficult situations.
You can take charge of your feelings and do things that make it more likely you’ll be in a good mood.
For some mood-boosting activities, check out this blog post.
When you feel good you don’t need to use food as an emotional crutch
The feedback I get from clients is often mood based:
I feel so much better,
I’m calmer,
I feel confident and content with myself,
I’m happier,
I have more energy,
my mood has improved,
I am a better person to be around.
This baseline increase in mood drives behaviour changes that lead to weight loss too if that’s a goal.
When you feel good you don’t need to use food as an emotional crutch.
As you can see my coaching method isn’t based on deprivation. I’m all about abundance and pleasure. I want you to feel better.
If you work with me, you’ll look forward to eating because you’re hungry and the nourishing food you’re about to eat looks and tastes amazing, not to escape reality.
With time you’ll notice when a non-food source of pleasure will soothe you better than another bowl of ice cream or another glass of wine.
You’ll learn to enjoy your food without the extra serving of guilt, shame, and regret.
You’ll also learn how to develop emotional tolerance so you don’t need to escape from your uncomfortable feelings anymore.
You can also improve your ability to sit with your feelings without eating and improve your emotional resilience by listening to this 14-minute meditation. When you feel the urge to overeat to suppress uncomfortable feelings or distract yourself from negative emotions just listen to this guided visualization meditation. I’ll guide you through the process of feeling your feelings instead of eating them.
Client success
You’ll have amazing vacations (or any day) as my client:
“I did have a very successful vacation and wanted to share!
It’s the first time when I didn’t want to eat constantly out of boredom from driving.
I ate only when I was hungry.
I didn’t feel the urge to just eat mindlessly!
I didn’t focus on food or negative thoughts and was so fun to focus on everything else but food during the vacation.
I felt physically stronger than ever and my friend noticed – she was envious!
I think the best part of the week was the sense of positive self-image! It’s the first time I’ve felt confident and content with myself and it felt so freeing. It was so exciting to notice a new kind of “relationship” with myself.“
I know you are committed and you are so ready to be done with this problem and finally feel confident and content with yourself, and be able to enjoy all the foods without gaining weight.
It’s so much easier when you allow yourself to take someone’s hand and let them help you and guide you.
If you’ve read this far, I’d like to invite you to consider my private coaching program.
We hand-pick each other carefully and make sure that working together is a great fit.
I’m an introvert which means I’m a very good listener.
Come and tell me about your issues during a free discovery call. You can book it here.
I’m looking forward to talking with you. 🙂
