Are You An Emotional Eater?

A lot of people have been mentioning the term "emotional eating" and it makes me ponder how I handled it when losing my own weight. For years I'm sure I practiced emotional eating and that led to being 100+ pounds overweight. But, I also know that most of it was being too lazy to plan, too caught up in what my peers were eating, and just plain old boredom. I guess those are emotional eating issues, but let's look a little deeper into the topic.

The terms emotional eating and self sabotage get thrown out there everytime we slip up or eat out of lack of self-control. So, a lot of times we "term" our eating with these labels to make it easier for us to accept failure. The plain truth is we don't have good habits and we are not properly preparing ourselves for the tough times. For example, which is easier to say to yourself:

"I went out for drinks with my friends. That led to too much eating and too much drinking. Now I feel crappy. Why do I do this to myself? I just seem to sabotage my good work during the week. This week I'll do better."

OR

"I went out for drinks with my friends knowing that it would lead to my inability to say no because I did it for the last three weekends. When everyone else is having a good time I am not going to be the fat girl sitting there drinking water and enjoying the drunks. I'm going to drink with them because then I won't draw attention to the fact that I'm not like everyone else. In fact, I'll eat whatever they are eating because it's fun, it will mask the fact that I am ashamed of how I look, and it will keep me from sitting at home alone on a Saturday night."

Souds brutal, but we say the first thing because we don't want to admit the second. The same dialogue can be applied to our family. What about this?

"I did good all weekend until Saturday night when I had been running around with my demanding kids all day doing everything the family needed to do rather than getting up early and grocery shopping for healthy food. The last thing I want to do is cook a healthy dinner so I ordered pizza. I could have just made myself a salad but I ate the pizza because Momma needs a little break too. I mean, my husband can eat what he wants and no one cares so why should I? I'm going to eat this pizza and relax for a few minutes while someone else does the cooking and clean up."

You see, if we actually lay out plans and then do the actions that require us to stay on plan then we are taking responsibility for oursevles and that's hard for a lot of people. Most people would rather focus on their faults so they can justify what they do. Rather than getting up at 6am on Saturday morning to hit the store before the kids wake up, you sleep in and impulse eat that day saying "there's nothing I can do about being busy." BULL! 95% of the times you say there's nothing you could do there was SOMETHING you could do.

You can always find a reason to justify making poor choices. Just stop working so hard on being a failure and start working hard on being a planner.

1. Keep a food journal and track everything you eat, when you eat, and what's going on. Just keep a simple notebook and don't worry about your calories if you don't want to. For some people you just need to track what you are eating and exercise and the rest takes care of itself.

2. For each poor choice, make a plan to fix those occurances.

3. Make PLANS! I don't care if you have 1000 scaps of paper with notes on how you are going to eat and exercise, at least your time is spent thinking about improving yourself versus sitting around waiting for the worst to happen.

Tomorrow we will talk more about two of the situations that give us the biggest challenges: peers and boredom.

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Workout Journal: Back and 30 min. Elliptical

Wide Grip Pull-ups 6x12 sets with 3 negs on sets 3, 4, 5, and 6

Close Grip Pull downs 2x12

Hammer Strength Low Rows 4x10 with pulses for 10

That was all I could handle today. I'm a little draggy from the travel back from Vegas.