How to Manage Emotional Food Cravings Along Your Path to Making Peace with Food

We all have food cravings. You know, that feeling where you just want something sweet, or salty or crunchy, or maybe all three in one! But why do we have these cravings and what can we do about them? Occasional food cravings are normal, however if you struggle with emotional eating, the cravings may be emotionally driven. It is vital to become emotionally aware in order to differentiate what type of craving your are experiencing. This will allow you to make a conscious choice in the moment of a craving. 

A general food craving is a message from your body. It may be trying to send you the message that you are dehydrated, that you have a nutritional deficiency, or that your energy dip may be related to a blood sugar imbalance. These are all really useful messages that are important to notice. When you truly listen to your body, you receive and understand these messages with clarity. A general food craving may also indicate that your daily diet is boring, uninspired, dull in flavor and lacking in a wide range of nutrients. The good news is, you can do something about all of this!

An emotional craving is different. An emotional craving is due to experiencing an emotion and not wanting to be present with it. There is a big difference. If you are experiencing a general food craving, you might be satisfied by having a small amount of what you are craving or a healthier version of what you are craving. With an emotional craving, this is often not the case as the food serves to numb the emotion only temporarily.

An emotional craving is far more difficult to manage and can lead to mindless overeating, weight gain and negative feelings about yourself and your body. The challenge is to begin to allow yourself to experience your emotions and have an alternative behavior aside from eating in order to manage your emotions.

When emotional eating has become deeply engrained as a behavior and your primary go-to coping skill to manage your emotions, it can take a long time to effectively manage and change it. If emotional cravings that lead to emotional eating do not become managed, it can lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety and a low self-esteem.

Here are some examples of common emotional cravings:

• When you are feeling lonely, food will be your friend and keep you company.

• When you are feeling anxious, food helps to calm you down and temporarily occupy your mind.

• When you are feeling sad, food becomes your comfort.

• When you are feeling bored, food gives you something to do with your time.

• When you are feeling down, food becomes your pleasure.

One strategy to begin to understand what may be driving your food cravings is keeping an emotional cravings journal. This is a place to write down, acknowledge and process your emotions in order to more deeply understand the why underneath and at the root of your craving. Another strategy is having a supportive person to talk to. This may be someone you trust, or someone such as a therapist or health coach to provide support as you work through your emotional cravings. Learning to manage, accept and experience your emotions will help you heal your relationship with food.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, my focus is working with women who struggle with emotional eating. I have put together a 3-Step Emotional Cravings Protocol that helps to stop the cycle of deeply rooted emotional eating patterns. If you would like a FREE copy, sign up for my newsletter on my website so you can begin managing your emotional food cravings today.

Making peace with food is possible. If you find you would like more support along your path to healing, contact me as I have a number of ways to help support you along your journey to a healthy relationship with food as well as with yourself.

Mindful Eating

Have you ever finished eating an entire meal and you don’t remember tasting one bite? Have you ever gotten to the bottom of a bag of chips and wondered how you got there? These are examples of mind-less eating. Mindful eating is just the opposite. Mindful eating is offering yourself the time to savor your food. Mindful eating is pausing for a moment to be grateful for your food. It is taking the time to notice the aromas of your food, to chew your food thoroughly and really taste your food. When you eat mindfully you notice the impact your food choices have on your body and your mind.

To understand mindful eating, it is helpful to understand mindfulness as a practice. Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with a nonjudgmental awareness. It is being completely grounded and present in the here and the now. The past can only exist as a memory within your mind and the future can only exist as a fantasy within your mind. When you engage with the present moment, you are truly aware and awake in your life. When you bring this concept into every aspect of your life, you become more peaceful and content.

Living mindfully allows you to be conscious and clear as you make any choice. When you bring mindfulness into your mealtimes, you will be more in tune, conscious and clear about what you choose to eat. Remaining nonjudgmental is essential. When you are calm and grounded while eating, you are more likely to assimilate the nutrients in your food. Digestion begins before you even take a bite. Allowing this process to be peaceful, mindful and pleasurable will enhance your life in many ways.

When you tune out the stressors such as your cell phone, TV, emails and social media, and tune into your experience of eating, you will create a closer relationship with your food. When eating mindfully, you will notice your hunger and full cues with more awareness. This creates freedom to make a choice in the present moment. Eating mindfully offers the opportunity to recognize how your food choices make you feel: mentally, physically, emotionally, energetically and spiritually. Mindful eating is extremely powerful and helps to reduce and heal emotional, stress and disordered eating.

To begin integrating mindful eating into your daily life, try this practice starting today. Begin with one meal or snack and commit to eating it mindfully. Turn off your cell phone and any other distractions such as the TV or loud music. Take a few slow, steady and deep breaths. Look at your food, take a moment to be grateful for it. Notice the aromas of your food. As you begin to eat, become aware of the textures of your food. If you are eating with your hands, place your food down between bites. If you are using a utensil, place it down between bites. Practice chewing slowly and thoroughly, really tasting and savoring your food.

When you are finished with your meal or snack, reflect on the impact of your food choice. Tune into the physical sensations you experience after eating this food. Take some slow, deep breaths and notice if you feel satisfied by what you ate and how full you feel. Notice if you enjoyed what you ate. Become aware of your energy and mood following this mindful eating practice. Thank yourself for taking this time to eat mindfully and to tune into your body. As you continue to bring mindful eating into your daily routine, notice the impact on your relationship with food as well as with yourself.

6 Steps to Break Free From Emotional Eating

Are you ready to break free from emotional eating? If so, you are not alone. So many struggle with a complicated, dysfunctional, and unsettling relationship with food. This arduous relationship with food triggers a food-focused-stress-inducing internal dialogue constantly running through the mind. Thoughts such as: “What should I eat?” “I shouldn’t have eaten that.” “What is the best diet to lose weight?” “Should I log my food on an app?” “Should I count calories?” “I can’t believe I ate that.” “Do I need to skip lunch to make up for the cake I had last night?” “Is bread good or bad?” “Low-fat or low-carb or neither or both…?” Sound familiar?

This internal dialogue goes on and on and creates anxiety, stress, and feeling, well, just generally bad about yourself. These negative emotions then cause even more discomfort internally and a sense of being overwhelmed. These uncomfortable emotions likely result in mindless, stress, and emotional eating. The negative cycle then continues: food is the problem and yet food is the solution. If this sounds familiar, I assure you, there is hope to finally break free from the vicious cycle of emotional eating.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, I primarily work with women who struggle with an emotional attachment to food and consider themselves to be stress-eaters. These six steps are always where we begin to embark on the process of healing from the deepest roots. As you heal your relationship with food, inevitably, you heal your relationship with yourself. These six powerful steps create the opportunity to make peace with food, once and for all. This approach takes you directly to the root, clears it out, and allows the opportunity to plant new seeds of a renewed vision for your life, inner strength, empowerment, self-awareness, and resiliency. Begin to follow these six steps to break free from emotional eating today.

Step 1: Create your vision and set specific goals

Creating your vision is determining what you want your relationship with food to become. Once you create your vision, you will set goals with action steps. These action steps are the specific steps you take in order to meet the goal. They set you up for success as action is the only way to move forward, to change, to align with your vision in order to reach your goals.

Step 2: Stop dieting and eat REAL food!

Diets are restrictive and often set you up for a binge because there is always an endpoint to a diet. Diets that focus on weight loss alone are not sustainable throughout your life. The changes need to be sustainable and eating REAL food is just that. When you focus on balanced, whole food nutrition, you naturally focus on what to eat, not what not to eat. The more whole and healthy your food, the healthier and happier you will become. Having balanced nutrition in a non-restrictive manner ends the deprivation-over indulgence cycle.

Step 3: Become emotionally aware

Emotional eating is driven by just that, emotions! Emotions are information about how you are experiencing your life. When you shift to become emotionally intelligent and aware, you will no longer fear experiencing your emotions. A tool that can help is journaling. Keeping an emotions journal gives you a place to express the emotion and explore why you are experiencing the emotion. For example, if you feel angry, you might write: I am angry because I am not ok with how (someone) treated me. This allows you to be present with your feeling and respond to it accordingly rather than avoid it, which will only send you back into the emotional eating cycle. Learning to identify the emotions, understand their purpose, and be present with them creates emotional awareness, freedom and peace internally.

Step 4: Get exercise and movement into your life

Movement and exercise are powerful mood lifters. If you are struggling with overwhelming emotions, exercising-- or any movement will significantly impact your process of breaking free from emotional eating. Find what exercise/movement you enjoy, that you don’t view as a chore, and do it today. Even 10 minutes of moving your body can significantly impact how you feel.

Step 5: Create a Positive Nourishment List

A Positive Nourishment List is a list of things you enjoy, you view as a treat, and that bring you a sense of fulfillment, calm, joy, and nourishment that DO NOT include food. When feeling stressed or experiencing an uncomfortable emotion, access your list and do something to help divert your energy away from emotional eating. This list will help you cope more effectively with your emotions.

Step 6: Mindful Eating

When you are present with your food you are less likely to overeat and more likely to feel satisfied. Mindful eating is just that, being present with your food without judgment or distraction; no phone, TV or social media. This allows you the opportunity to taste your food, to take in the aromas, textures, and sensations. When you are eating mindfully, you are not judging your food, not concerned about the calories, and not overthinking about what you are eating. This creates the opportunity to notice your hunger and full cues more intently, which allows you listen to your body. Emotional eating distracts attention away from the body, mindful eating allows you to be present in your body. Try challenging yourself to eat one meal or snack mindfully every day and notice what happens!

Follow these 6 steps to begin
finding freedom from emotional eating and
make peace with food today!

Want to learn more? I will be offering a 6-week online course that guides you through these steps and enhances the process of making peace with food. You can also check out my book: Wholistic Food Therapy: A Mindful Approach to Making Peace with Food. As you implement these 6 steps to freedom from emotional eating, I look forward to hearing about your progress!