How To Determine Your Emotional Eating Set Point

You know what to do to lose weight.

If you didn’t know what to do, that you’re not doing it wouldn’t bother you nearly as much as it does.

What you want is to feel like doing it.

Which makes all kind of sense – as is your usual – since the things that we feel like doing (which is everything that we’re doing) happen over and over again because they feel easier to do and more beneficial to us than the things that we’re not doing.

When you eat when you’re not hungry, when you go beyond satisfied, it’s because you’ve made a decision that it would be better for you to do it than to not do it.

When you eat, whether you’re hungry or not, you eat  because it feels like something important is at stake if you don’t.

When you beat yourself up for eating when you’re not hungry, what you’re doing is beating yourself up about something you’d feel like kicking yourself for, for not doing.

If you call yourself an emotional eater, you eat when you’re not hungry if the thought of not eating makes you feel like you’re putting your emotional health at risk.

When you feel convinced that eating when you’re not hungry has more disadvantages than advantages, you will stop doing it, and not a moment before.

(If you call yourself an emotional eater, the moment before is a moment too soon.)

*Feeling convinced* are the operative words.   As you’ve experienced, telling yourself one thing when you really feel another won’t make any long-term difference – because you care too much to let it make a difference – in your eating when you’re not hungry.

And that’s where you come in.

Remember how you really are.

You were born addicted to food. (Fatally addicted, in fact.)

You were not born addicted to emotional eating.

You were born with a problem with emotional eating.

Used to be, you didn’t understand all the commotion around it.

You started out in this world eating because you felt hungry, effortlessly stopping because you felt satisfied, until you doing that became a problem.  For other people.

It was some time before you could understand the food come-ons that people were trying to teach you… the rationale they were proposing for you eating when you weren’t hungry.  But when it became possible, they made eating when you weren’t hungry a solution you could sink your teeth into.

“You can do what you want to do after you eat what I want you to eat.”  ”Just one more bite, it’s good for you.”  ”Have a cookie, you’ll feel better.”

But despite their best efforts, because you don’t have an emotional eating set point – or an amount of food that you’ve experienced you can eat that will transform bad feelings into good, or good feelings into better ones – you never completely made the connection.

You’ve had a problem with emotional eating forever, you’ll continue to have one for as long as you live.

My job is to help you see your problem with it, especially where you are effortlessly having that problem – because that’s the kind of problem you can really get comfortable with – and then make it an even bigger one.

(I cannot recall having more fun at work.)

When it becomes enough of a problem, you’re on your way to being faced with the problem of needing new pants.

Recent reports from my clients who are struggling to eat emotionally, aka, doing what comes naturally.

“Just got back from lunch, and I effortlessly left half on my plate…”

“I’m had a mini chocolate caramel egg when I was hungry because that’s what I wanted.  And I only had one and it wasn’t a battle!” 

“I just remembered there is top shelf coffee/toffee/whiskey flavored ice scream in the freezer that I haven’t touched since……????”

“Last Monday a co-worker brought in 2 dozen of her famous chocolate chip cookies. I did not eat them all. In fact over the week, I had only 3.”

Here’s “what happened last night. Lonely, bitten chocolate went into the garbage!! I can’t say I’ve ever done that before. It would have gotten eaten just on the principle that it was very very good, slightly expensive dark chocolate.”

“Before it was tea and toast (cup of tea with toast smoothered in butter) or chocolate but because I eat those things whenever I want to without feeling guilty, they’ve lost their appeal.”

“Nah, wasn’t hungry KP. Cakes, donuts, sandwiches and tortilla chips. But I just didn’t fancy them.”

Want these kinds of problems?  Operators will be standing by soon.

In the meantime, when it comes to you and food, what don’t you ever struggle with that you’d like to continue to see yourself not struggle with?  What is effortless, between you, and food?

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