If you are familiar with my work, you will know that one of my areas of specialty is emotional eating/food addiction. One thing I can count on at this time of year is clients coming to me worried about how they are going to cope over the holidays without using food for emotional reasons.
Why we eat for Emotional Reasons During the Holiday Season
We are over-extended
We often experience extra demands to make others happy: we want to find that perfect gift, which sends us into the frenetic energy of shopping which can be very busy and stressful. We also socialize more during this season. This can be fun, but also energy-sucking, more so if we are dealing with difficult people. This is especially hard for highly sensitive people who tend towards introversion. These folks end up becoming overstimulated from such events and reach for food to calm them down or to numb out.
Dealing with family can be very difficult
Whether it is the family we were born into, or the one that we inherited through a partner, this intense time of year can dysregulate us emotionally. A lot of it has to do with our unfinished emotional business from the past. For a primer on how to successfully navigate family at this time of year:
How to Minimize Emotional Eating Over the Holidays
Check in with yourself regularly
Use my Emotional Eating Diary! I have gotten so much wonderful feedback over the years from people who told me that it completely changed their relationship to food for the better. If you feel that this would be too much to expect of you right now, don’t worry. It only takes a few minutes and the rewards are well worth the effort put in.
Practise mindful eating
I am a big proponent of mindfulness in all areas of life. But I find it especially helpful when dealing with unconscious behaviours like emotional eating. I will leave you with my top 10 strategies for mindful eating:
- Only eat while sitting.
- Set a place for yourself at the table with a placemat, cutlery, napkin, and a glass for a beverage.
- Eat away from your work area — in a lunchroom, restaurant, or outside.
- Eat with chopsticks — it will automatically slow you down.
- Take a few deep breaths before you eat to calm and center yourself.
- Chew each bite at least 30 times before swallowing
- Give thanks for your meal and appreciate that you have food to eat.
- If you are eating with others, avoid upsetting conversation over meals and instead, practice eating quietly and mindfully with the other person.
- Turn off the phone at all mealtimes so you won’t be interrupted.
- Eat at the same time every day for each of your three meals and make sure it takes you a minimum of 20 minutes to eat a meal.