From Stress to Success: How to Manage Emotional Eating for high-achievers

From Stress to Success: How to Manage Emotional Eating for High-Achievers

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

 

Many high-achieving, successful people often face the challenge of overeating and emotional eating, even though they excel in other areas of their lives. In this blog post, I introduce the W.I.S.E.R. model as a tool to manage emotional eating for high-achievers.

 

From Stress to Success: How to Manage Emotional Eating for High-Achievers

 

You’re driven by ambition, you are a successful self-made person but often find yourself struggling when it comes to managing your relationship with food. The pressure of your demanding career, your relentless pursuit of goals, and the constant juggling of responsibilities can lead to heightened stress and overwhelming emotions. Turning to food as a means to numb or distract yourself became your go-to coping mechanism.

However, as you recognize the detrimental effects of emotional eating on your overall well-being, you want to find healthier ways to navigate intense emotions and stress.

In this blog post, I’ll introduce and dissect the W.I.S.E.R. model, offering step-by-step guidance on how to apply it when confronted with intense emotions and the urge to turn to food for comfort. It’s a great tool to manage emotional eating for high-achievers. By the end of this blog post, you will have actionable insights and practical tools to help you navigate challenging moments and cultivate a healthier approach to emotional well-being and eating habits.

 

How to Manage Emotional Eating for high-achievers

Taking a deep breath can make you more anxious and stressed

Taking a deep breath can make you more anxious and stressed

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

 

Taking a deep breath to calm down may not work for you and it can make you more anxious and stressed. When it comes to breathing and anxiety, slow and steady wins the race. By focusing on extending your exhale and practising diaphragmatic breathing, you can promote feelings of relaxation and reduce stress in your body and mind.

 

“Taking a deep breath” to calm down is NOT what you need

As a busy, high-performing person, you often find yourself constantly on the go, with a never-ending to-do list and high expectations to meet. This can lead to feelings of overwhelm, stress, and anxiety.

To cope with these overwhelming feelings, many people turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as overeating, binge eating, or drinking. You may find yourself reaching for sugary snacks or junk food to help you cope with your emotions or turning to alcohol to unwind after a long day.

Unfortunately, these coping mechanisms only provide temporary relief and can lead to long-term health consequences.

One of the most common pieces of advice given to help calm anxiety and reduce stress is to “take a deep breath.” However, I recently learned that quickly taking a deep breath can actually worsen the symptoms of anxiety by upsetting the delicate balance of gases in our bodies.

Taking a deep breath to calm down doesn't work

interior design to help you break free from emotional eating

Interior design to help you break free from emotional eating

Optimizing our environment (using interior design principles) is a powerful tool to help us develop new habits.

I work with my clients to change on six levels to break free from emotional and binge eating. One of the levels is their environment.

When I worked with Adriana Gómez Navarro, Holistic Interior Designer, on her eating habits, she had brilliant ideas about making small changes in her home to help her build the new eating and thinking habits I taught her.

I loved her ideas so much that I asked her to write a guest post about them so you can benefit from her tips too.

Check out her post below about how to use Interior Design to help you break free from emotional eating.

 

Interior Design to help you break free from emotional eating

My name is Adriana Gómez Navarro, and I am a holistic interior designer. Beyond creating beautiful spaces, my work is about well-being and designing for the changes people want to see in their lives. We shape environments, and then as we live in our spaces, the environment shapes us back.

 

I met Rita a couple of years ago and loved her guidance while reviewing my habits and impulses around food. We both agree that forcing new habits doesn’t work. Instead, it’s best to flow towards desired outcomes. We both help our clients look at their experience to identify, in their armour of beliefs, why they are stuck in bad habits that don’t allow them to have the life they want.

 

Interior design to help you break free from emotional eating

overeating to improve your mood

Overeating to improve your mood – does it work?

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?

 

Can you improve your mood with overeating?

You need different solutions

 

You are successful in your life but struggle with food

You are successful in your life but struggle with food

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

 

Smart, successful people, like you, despite all they’ve accomplished, sometimes can’t figure out how to stop overeating.

CEOs, entrepreneurs, professionals, researchers, physicians, lawyers, coaches, and leaders know how to solve complicated problems, lead the work of other people, win big contracts, save lives, solve legal issues, and coach other people on various topics, but they feel powerless around food.

You’re always busy, your job is stressful, you may even travel a lot, plus you raise a family. To build your career first, you may have had children later in your life. Now you’re in your late 40s or early 50s and have to face the problems associated with your busy career, perimenopause, moody teenagers and ageing parents at the same time.

The eat-to-soothe stress habit became your release.

You can read about how stress-related overeating works and how this habit forms here.

Related post  How stress-related overeating works
Related post  43 stress relief gift ideas for overwhelmed people

You are successful in your life but struggle with food

how stress eating works

How stress-related overeating works

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

How stress-eating works

Acute, short-term stress decreases appetite.

However, when stress persists (chronic stress), a hormone called cortisol is released.

Cortisol increases hunger due to the imbalance of ghrelin and leptin hormones, leading to overeating.

Numerous studies show that cortisol also affects food preferences, i.e. increases cravings for foods high in sugar or fat, or both.

 

how stress eating works

5 ways to start living mindfully to stop emotional eating

5 ways to start living mindfully right now to stop emotional eating

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

 

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.

how to avoid weight gain during the holidays as an emotional or compulsive eater

18 ways to avoid weight gain during the holidays as an emotional or compulsive eater

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

 

How to avoid weight gain during the holidays as an emotional or compulsive eater

 

Chances are you feel very sceptical reading the title and you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, right, as it could ever happen…”

But what if I told you it can be done? What if you had some science-backed techniques to help you? Then, would you believe me?

What have you got to lose?

These are my top 18 ways to avoid gaining weight during the holidays.

Let’s get started!

can mindful eating help with emotional eating

Can mindful eating help with emotional eating? A mindful approach to curb emotional eating

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

Mindful Eating to Help Curb Emotional and Binge Eating

If you have developed the habit of emotional or binge eating, in other words, you immediately crave a specific type of food or volume of food when you are stressed, sad, anxious, upset, bored, or even happy, mindful eating can help you tremendously. Especially if you find yourself mindlessly eating a large amount of food without even tasting what you are eating.

It is important that you try a variety of things until you figure out what helps your own issues with emotional eating, but mindful eating is a great tool.

Related post  All you need to know about emotional eating
Related post  Are you really hungry? The difference between physical and emotional hunger
How to stop eating your feeling due to fear of feeling your emotions

How to stop eating your feelings due to fear of feeling your emotions

free training to stop emotinal eating and stress eating

 

Are you afraid to feel your emotions so you eat to numb them?

Do you want to know how to stop eating your feelings? Keep reading.

For many people, expressing difficult emotions or admitting they have “negative” feelings like sadness or anger feel difficult or even impossible. Most people, understandably, don’t want to feel anxious or hurt, or upset. So they choose to ignore or suppress these feelings. They numb their feelings with food, or distract themselves with the neverending cycle of overeating and restricting.

And the most significant reason they do this is because they’re afraid to feel their emotions.

In this post, I’ll discuss why we fear our uncomfortable emotions and how to learn to embrace our feelings. This will help you stop eating your feelings and have a better relationship with food.