“Why am I so hungry before my period?”
“Why do I eat so much a week before my period starts?”
“Is it normal to be super hungry during ovulation”?
“How to control my mood swings during my period?”
“Why am I crying all the time before my period?”
Many women ask these questions and look for answers to them. If you are one of them, you don’t need to search any longer. You’ll find the answers in this post.
This post will show you mood-boosting activities so you can lift your mood without eating.
Many people use food to improve their mood when they are sad, stressed, anxious, bored, lonely, tense, agitated, or even just exhausted by the end of the day. Food is often used to suppress negative emotions or distract ourselves from these feelings. Food can make you feel calm and relaxed temporarily.
It´s ok to eat emotionally occasionally, everyone does that. The problem is when eating becomes your main coping mechanism. It’s beneficial to learn and use other mood-boosting activities too so eating won’t be the first thing you want to turn to.
Is emotional eating always bad?
When people talk about emotional eating, it is always how to stop it or figuring out why you do it in the first place. It typically comes with the thought that it is a terrible habit you must stop immediately, but this isn’t always the case.
Eating because of how you feel isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It depends more on how often you do it and whether or not it is the only thing you can turn to.
It’s also a sign that you have something in your life that you are not dealing with. It’s an opening towards a better life if you pay attention to what makes you eat when you’re not hungry.
From this post, you’ll learn all the basics you need to know about emotional eating:
“When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment, I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.”
-Oscar Wilde.
Let´s talk about feelings today. Specifically how to cope with emotions without food, i.e. how to deal with your uncomfortable feelings without eating.
As I mentioned in a previous post, emotional eating is one of the main reasons you might not be able to lose weight. You know how to eat healthily, you stick to your healthy habits most of the time but when something happens and triggers some uncomfortable feelings inside of you, you turn to food and overeat or even binge and you gain the weight back.
To prevent this from happening, you need to know what triggers these feelings and how to cope with these emotions without food.
In this post, I´m going to talk about the main mistakes you do while answering the question of why you are not losing weight.
But first, I wanted to let you know, that you can finally end the search for the “perfect diet” and lose the extra weight for good without feeling restricted by taking the Healthy Habits for Permanent Weight Loss course.
Ok, let´s talk about diets (to prove to you that you don´t need a diet 😊)
The thing is, you can lose weight with any diet. The food part of weight loss is actually simple, even though everyone thinks they need to find the perfect diet that will solve all their weight problems. I used to believe that too.
But the more important thing is what´s going on inside your head. But let´s not get ahead of ourselves.
Let´s have a look at the popular health-based diets:
As you can see in the intersection of the Venn diagram, there are a few common things between these health-focused diets.
They all promote eating:
These are the only things you need to pay attention to if you want to lose weight, be healthy, and have a lot of energy. In addition to this, if you want to eat like a caveman or not eat meat at all or avoid all fats or pour olive oil on everything, it´s your decision (you don´t need to do any of that by the way).
Of course, you can also lose weight by counting calories or macros or controlling your eating window with intermittent fasting. The question is how sustainable they are. How long can you count every bite you eat before going crazy or giving up?
What I teach in this course is to start with the basics I listed above in the diagram, put your lab coat or detective hat on, treat eating as a game or experiment, gather data, and based on the outcome tweak your diet according to your food preferences, metabolism, age, lifestyle and other factors until you reach your goal. You don´t need to follow other people´s rules, you can decide what works for you. You are the boss, you are the authority. I´m only here to teach you how to become the boss.
The problem is that people usually can´t stick to anything long enough to gather sufficient data.
Let´s say Susie has decided to cut out sugar and flour and she started to lose weight. But then she heard about macro-counting and thought that would be better because she could eat anything she wanted just had to count the macronutrients. She started this protocol and she realized that although it´s fun to eat the same foods as everyone else, it became really stressful having to measure everything she eats. She started to have anxiety about every bite she had and eating outside the house became impossible (unless she wanted to take her scale with her and measure everything).
But she is a clever woman, she likes to learn about new things so she kept researching and trying new diets in the hope of finding the “perfect diet”. Of course, all of the diets had some aspects that weren´t easy, so she couldn´t stick to them. She starts to doubt that there is a diet that would work for her. She feels frustrated that nothing works.
You can see, the problem is not the food, but to actually commit to doing something, learning to stick to your new habits, and be able to evaluate the outcome of your new habits as a scientist or a detective. Gathering data, evaluating it, removing emotions from the process, and based on the outcome keep going or changing direction, instead of just hopping from one diet to another.
I teach you how to do this in the course. There is a whole module about keeping commitments and learning to stick to your habits. This is essential for long-term results. What´s the point of losing weight if you gain it back all the time.
But let´s say you can keep your commitments and you have a sensible eating plan. Why are you still not losing weight? The two other things that can derail you from your weight loss plan are not being able to manage carvings and deal with emotions without eating. No matter how good is your eating plan and how many good habits you have if you keep overeating because you crave certain foods. You restrict certain foods so you crave them even more (we always want what we can´t have, it´s human nature) and when you can´t resist anymore you eat them in large quantities to make up for all the lost and future opportunities. Because tomorrow you are going to start your diet again. This is also a topic of the course and I teach you how to manage your cravings.
But no matter how well you manage your cravings if you need to eat every time someone hurts you, or you are stressed, tired, sad, lonely, or even happy. Emotional and stress eating is another important topic of the course because learning to deal with your intense emotions without eating can be really challenging for some of us.
Meditation to help you feel your feelings
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.
After a while, you won’t need to listen to this meditation. Feeling your feelings becomes automatic and you will be free from emotional eating triggered by negative feelings. You’ll start eating your feelings much less often.
You can learn how to find what you are really hungry for and break free from emotional eating and binge eating from this workbook titled: How to stop eating your feeling.
These were my answers to the question of why you are not losing weight.
Don´t forget to have a look at the Healthy Habits for Permanent Weight Loss course to finally end the search for the “perfect diet” and lose the extra weight for good without feeling deprived.
In this post, I write about the connection between hating your body and emotional eating.
Many people go through life body shaming themselves because they are a few pounds or several pounds heavier than they would like to be or they are not where they were ten years ago.
Of course, hearing their own voice saying negative things about themselves in their head many times a day will make them feel miserable and they might even feel like a failure. A common way people deal with difficult emotions and negative self-image is ironically: (binge) eating. Eating is an inexpensive, quick, easy, and reliable way to temporarily take away the pain and hurt of how we feel.
It´s not your fault that you struggle with food and overeating and your weight no matter how many times and how hard you tried to get this sorted out before. It´s not your fault!
You almost certainly tried diets in the past that told you what to eat, what not to eat, when to eat, and how to exercise but they ignored what actually drove you to overeat.
These diets work for a while but then you just can´t stick to them anymore, you lose your willpower and return to your old habits. Why is that? Is it because you don´t have enough willpower? Or because you are weak and lazy? Or you just can´t stick to any plan? Definitely none of these!
It´s because you have not figured out why you tend to eat too much food when you are stressed, angry, lonely or even happy. They tell you what to eat but first, you need to find out what´s eating you. Without knowing this, no amount of willpower will be enough to stop you from overeating. You have been searching for the answer in the wrong place. It´s not your fault.
This article will be sharing a few ways to know the difference between physical and emotional hunger.
Do you find yourself standing in front of the fridge or cupboard and looking for something to eat? As we stay at home more and have more time to cook and eat, unnecessary snacking and overeating are almost inevitable. In this post, I listed some possible reasons why we might feel like snacking more than usual.
Don’t beat yourself up if it happens to you, it’s completely normal. 🙂
However, if you want to reduce the occurrence, you might want to pay attention to your hunger. In my previous post, I said that we should ask ourselves whether we are physically or emotionally hungry before we start eating.
The problem is that we might not be able to distinguish between physical hunger and emotional (boredom, anxiety, stress, habitual, etc.) hunger or eating for pleasure. This can be really difficult if you use food regularly to distract yourself from or to suppress your feelings.
Looking into how you feel about eating is the first step in the direction of tackling these issues.
When you reach for something to eat, you want to know the real reason why you’re standing there in front of the refrigerator.
I listed some signs that can help you distinguish between emotional and physical hunger.
This post will help you find your triggers for overeating and binging.
If you’re reading this, then chances are that you’ve probably begun the process of trying to find out why you are eating so much and why can’t you stop eating. Your overeating or binging habit may have started to affect your health and waistline too.
First I want to acknowledge that you’re taking these first steps to gain control over the habits that have formed over the course of a few years, and for some, a lifetime. Well done you!
So what can you do to get back in control and start eating normally again?
Copyright © Rita May 2022. All rights reserved.
