Seven Tips to Break the Cycle of Emotional Eating

See if you recognize this cycle: Emotional eating leads to poor food choices. These poor choices lead to feeling bad about ourselves. Feeling bad about ourselves leads to more poor food choices. So destructive, isn't it. Let’s take a look at how to combat a common emotion such as stress with good nutrition and break that nasty cycle.

Eat Breakfast: Skipping breakfast is the worst decision you can make. Breakfast jump-starts your metabolism and produces enzymes needed to metabolize fat to lose weight. It also helps to maintain stable blood sugar which helps to maintain stable emotions.

Replace Coffee with Green Tea: If you’re a coffee junkie, you may not realize that if you ingest high levels of caffeine, your mood will soar only to then plummet, leaving you craving more caffeine to make it soar again, causing you to lose sleep, suffer health consequences and, of course, feel more stress. Green tea (decaffeinated) is full of antioxidant and free-radical scavenging properties making it a must-have for the health conscious.

Sparkling Water: If you’re a soda drinker, you’re adding caffeine, sugar, or if you are a diet soda fan, artificial sweetener to your body everyday with negative consequences. Water on its own may not feel like the treat you crave so that is where sparkling water comes in. Water is good for your health, your skin, helps to prevent headaches and has the added benefit of helping you to feel full thus helping you to resist treats.

Healthy Snacks: A baggie full of carrot sticks, pretzels, apple slices, or almonds can help you deal with the times of the day when you have the munchies. By having healthy foods readily available on which to snack will help you to resist going in search of something less healthy to deal with your cravings.

Brown Bag It: Portions in restaurants are notoriously large and it is so tough to opt for steamed veggies when french fries are available. Bringing your own lunch is a sure fire way to keep nutritionally conscious. And it still gives you time to take a walk around the block perhaps?

No Caffeine After 2pm: Caffeine consumed with dinner can interfere with your sleep at night. Lack of sleep slows down your metabolism leaving you feeling sluggish.

Stock Your Pantry and Refrigerator with Healthy Choices: Plan a menu of healthy meals and snacks at the beginning of each week, list the ingredients you’ll need, and shop for everything once a week. That way you know you’ll have what you want when you need it, and you won’t have to stress over what to eat each night; you’ll already have thought of it! Keep cookies and treats at a minimum so you won’t have temptations staring at you each time you open the cupboard.

Ask Dr Shook takes a look at emotional eating, food as an addiction, exercise, nutrition, as well as review of many popular diet plans in her specialty track entitled: Change Your Relationship with Food…Change Your Life. Healthy diets are out partner in combating the stress in everyday life. It's time to put an end to self-sabotaging behaviors!