stress reduction – With Ease

Practicing gratitude to stop emotional eating

Balanced Life Emotional Eating Healthy Lifestyle

Gratitude helps you see the positive aspects of your life, brightens your mood, and consequently reduces the need to eat to feel better.

How we feel – how happy we are, how stressed we are, even how well we sleep – may seem like it’s out of our hands, but it is actually often a choice we make. We can choose to be grateful for what we have and feel more blissful. Or we can choose to focus on what we’re lacking, who has wronged us, and what’s not going our way. And guess what? We’ll feel miserable. We may blame others, circumstances, or fate for our unhappiness. But at the end of the day, it’s often about us and the choices we make.

One of the simplest ways I find to be able to shift my mood is focusing on gratitude. Of course, sometimes that’s easier said than done.

But as a motivation to practice gratitude more often let’s see the benefits of gratitude, how you can easily integrate it into your life, and how practising gratitude helps to stop emotional eating.

Discover Freedom from Emotional Eating through Hobbies

Emotional Eating

Discover how having a hobby can help you take the first steps towards freedom from emotional eating!

The content of this blog post is taken from my podcast interview with Hobbyscool. You can listen to the podcast here:

Emotional Eating: Breaking the Cycle with Science, Psychology, and Hobbies With Rita May

How having a hobby can help with emotional eating?

Savour Life, Not Food

Having a hobby can serve as a better way of releasing stress than eating. When people are very busy and tired they need to prioritize self-care and a hobby can be a great way of spending some time to do something they enjoy.

The more you enjoy your life, the less you need to escape from it using food, alcohol, or social media. So if you have some fun hobbies, you feel better and you don’t need food as an emotional crutch.

Loneliness

Hobbies can be a good solution for loneliness too because you may meet other people engaging in the same hobby. You can do the hobby together or join online communities and make friends with people who have the same hobby.

Boredom

And if you eat because you’re simply bored, instead of using food as entertainment, you can take up a hobby or two. When you think: I don’t know what to do, maybe I should eat…, you can remind yourself that you could also practice your hobby instead.

Having an interesting hobby that you’re looking forward to doing makes boring tasks more tolerable too. You know that after finishing the boring task you can do something fun.

It can be a good reward after a stressful day as well instead of rewarding yourself with food.

Healthy distraction

Of course, hobbies can also work as a distraction from eating when you start giving up emotional and compulsive eating. When you have the urge to eat you can distract yourself and keep your hands busy with your hobby.

Distraction is actually not what I teach to my clients as a permanent solution since it’s not always possible to do (especially if you’re at work) and I also believe that it’s better to learn to feel your feelings instead of avoiding them.

We also need to find the underlying issues for emotional eating and solve those problems instead of covering them up with eating or hobbies. Because covering up is like putting a useless band-aid on an infected wound. You can’t see the wound anymore but it’s still there and it’s getting worse under that useless band-aid.

But a healthy distraction, such as a hobby, can be a good tool to start with until you develop emotional fitness and solve the underlying issue.

Planning activities you enjoy

After working with me for a while food becomes a much less important part of my clients’ lives and suddenly they have a lot of free time that they previously spent thinking about food, diets and criticising and torturing their bodies. Often when I ask them what they want to fill this time with they have no idea because they got used to spending that time researching the latest diet, planning their new meal plan or finding some magic solution. That’s why I ask them in advance to think about hobbies and activities they enjoy but don’t have time to do now so they can have a list of activities to choose from later.

Which hobbies help to reach freedom from emotional eating?

Journaling

Journaling is a relaxing hobby, to start with. When you’re struggling with some challenging emotions or are just trying to process a bad day, writing about what is happening can help improve your mood and lower stress. It also helps you process your feelings and notice patterns of behaviour that might affect your emotional state.

There are many ways journaling can help you.

Food journal to uncover your triggers

If you want to discover what triggers your emotional eating I highly recommend writing down in your food journal how you feel before and after eating, what happened before eating, how stressed you were that day, how much you slept, relationship issues, and any other factors affecting you.

I designed the free journal below for you to be able to do exactly that. You can download it here.

If you see your eating habits, your feelings around food, mealtimes, and events written in your journal, you may notice the recurring situations that cause you to overeat.

Brain dumping

Another great way of journaling is a brain dump.

This simply means you write down whatever is on your mind, and keep writing until you feel lighter. Getting those thoughts out on paper helps you release some of the tension, and you also gain a little more clarity.

Gratitude Journal

You can also write down in your journal what you’re grateful for.

You can write down 5-10 things every day. Turn this into a daily ritual that you do every morning or evening, and you will notice the difference it makes very quickly.

Exercise

Another good hobby is exercising. I’m not talking about completing a difficult fitness challenge or pushing yourself to do some extreme form of activity you hate.

Instead, find some workouts that you actually enjoy. These can help you improve your mood exponentially, and it’s good for your physical health as well.

Maybe you want to try

Walking or hiking (or skiing if possible)
Dancing
Yoga or Pilates
Weight lifting
Playing with your kids or pets
Bike riding in nature
Gardening

Meditation

Another great hobby could be meditating. There are many good meditations on YouTube and there are meditation apps too. For my clients, I make personalised meditations and brain rewiring audios to help them reprogram their minds and replace their old unhelpful beliefs (such as “I can’t do this”, “I‘m destined to be fat”, and so on) to more helpful and empowering beliefs.

Here you will find 1 video, 2 audio recordings and more than 300 written affirmations beautifully formatted on printable pages. You can either listen to or read these mantras every day to reprogram your unconscious mind around your relationship with food and your body.

Art and creativity for freedom from emotional eating through hobbies

Colouring is a nice relaxing hobby too to release stress. There are colouring books for adults too.

Art, photography, painting, playing an instrument, knitting, or learning any new skills can help release endorphins and make you feel better.

If you’re struggling with emotional eating, you don’t have to face it alone. Take the time to explore activities that can help you cope and manage your emotions in a healthier way and see how you can take the first steps towards freedom from emotional eating through hobbies.

If you need support, join my private Facebook Group and consider working with me. I have a 12-week 1 on 1 coaching program to help you eliminate emotional eating. Book a free call here if you would like to talk with me directly about your issues.

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Taking a deep breath can make you more anxious and stressed

Balanced Life Emotional Eating Healthy Lifestyle

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.

43 stress relief gift ideas for overwhelmed people

Balanced Life Emotional Eating

Are you looking for a Christmas present for a stressed-out loved one or for yourself? You are at the right place. Check out my list of 43 stress relief gift ideas for overwhelmed people. I’m sure you will find something that you like. Happy browsing 🙂

43 stress relief gift ideas for overwhelmed people

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What to do when you are overwhelmed by negative emotions

Balanced Life Emotional Eating

Negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, frustration, embarrassment, guilt, anxiety, you name it, can pop up in our lives unexpectedly at any time. Sometimes we become completely overwhelmed by these negative emotions. They might be caused by the people around us, the traffic, our jobs, an illness, the weather, and so on.

Unfortunately, we cannot control these circumstances but we can control how we react to them.

If you feel like you have no control over your reactions and emotions, don’t worry. These tips will improve your ability to mindfully walk through your feelings in a productive way.

I will show you how to develop the skills to feel your emotions without letting them control your behaviour.