by Stephen Lau
Compulsive eating is a psychological disorder that uses food to cope with disturbed emotions.
If you want to lose weight, avoid compulsive eating, which often leads to frustration, guilt and shame.
How you may develop compulsive eating
If you regularly use food to deal with your emotional problems or stress, you may unconsciously develop compulsive eating. Your emotional problems reflect your internal imbalance; food only aggravate the disharmony.
If you go on a diet, you may become more vulnerable to developing compulsive eating. Dieting creates deprivation, which may make you feel deprived of the enjoyment of eating. If you have less self-control, you may easily succumb to the desire of wanting food during a diet. Failure in dieting— or worse, with repeated failures in one diet after another — may create frustration and self-deprecation, leading to depression. When you are depressed, you may turn to “comfort food” for emotional relief, and thus creating a vicious cycle of emotional disorder and compulsive eating.
(For more information on emotional disorder, visit my website: Rethink Your Depression.)
If you have developed the habit of resolving your weight problems through purging (using fingers or laxatives to induce vomiting after overeating), you may subsequently develop anorexia and/orbulimia. In other words, compulsive eating may lead to the development of other eating disorders.
Are you at risk for compulsive eating?
You may be at risk for developing compulsive eating if you have the following traits:
- low self-esteem
- poor or unrealistic self-image
- self-denial
- pursuit of perfection
Compulsive eating
Compulsive eating is emotional hunger, not physical hunger. The pain from compulsive eating isemotionally and mentally excruciating and devastating. That is also one of the reasons why some women who have weight problems and compulsive behavioral problems would not want to marry due to the fear of passing their emotionally devastating genes to their offspring.
However, it must be remembered that emotional hurt can never be healed with food, and healing the body begins with healing the mind first. (Visit my web page: Mind Healing.)
Your eating patterns are a reflection of your life patterns. That is, given that eating is one of the most repeated patterns in life, any unhappiness in life is naturally expressed through the patterns of eating. Therefore, what you eat affects more than your weight and health: it reinforces all the negative patternsin your life. To illustrate:
If you do not make time to prepare a healthy meal, you probably will not make time to clean the house.
If you cannot resist the temptation of drinking a soda, you probably cannot resist the temptation of buying something you do not need with the money you do not have by using an over-charged credit card. (Visit my website: Smart Credit, Smart Money Management to find out how to manage your money to avoid undue financial stress that may lead to compulsive eating.)
In short, how successful you are in life is reflected in how successful you are in handling your food, in particular, compulsive eating.
Avoid compulsive eating
To avoid compulsive eating, observe the following:
Make a daily commitment to focus on changing your lifestyle. Make an agreement with yourself that you will spend some time each day to think about how to adopt healthy living and change your eating habits to eat healthy again. (Visit my website: Healthy Living Healthy Lifestyle.)
Detach yourself emotionally from food. Eating cannot and will not solve your emotional problems.
Eat only a set number of times each day. It is just like making fewer shopping trips to the supermarket will save you money; likewise, eat fewer times — just close your mouth! You need to develop a business-like approach to eating, and disciplined eating pays off.
Set regular mealtimes: breakfast, lunch, and dinner — with 4 – 5 hours in between. Never-ending mealtime is a recipe for compulsive eating and overweight.
Make your food choices based on your nutritional needs. Understand that the purpose of eating is to give your body nutrients, and neither to make you “feel better” about yourself nor to alleviate your guilt.
Avoid reading cookbooks or watching cooking shows. They increase your appetite for food more than they increase your culinary skills.
Keep yourself busy to take your mind off food. Knitting and gardening often do wonders, if you find exercise too strenuous.
Compulsive eating hurts not only yourself, but also your loved ones too. Compulsive eating hurts relationships. (Visit my blog: Healthy Relationships.)
Understand that no one can lose weight for you. Take full responsibility for your actions and choices. The food is there, but it does not mean you have to eat it.
Follow the suggested portions outlined on a food package. They are there for a valid reason — to make sure you will not overeat. Don’t nurture the feeling that no one has the right to tell you how much to eat.
Avoid the fear of saying “NO” — an essential part of healing and recovery. Enjoy what you eat is different from eating everything you enjoy. Think about that! Learn how to change gradually your eating experience.
Avoid low self-esteem. Hold up your head and be confident, irrespective of your size and shape. Low self-esteem is often the culprit in compulsive eating. Just stand tall, push your body back, and hold your head high! (Visit my blog: Self-Help Self-Learning for Self-Improvement.
Avoid the allurement of food advertisers, who often use human characteristics to make you become emotionally attached to their products through a human relationship with food. All commercials aim at creating the craving for food, which is the source of compulsive eating.
Avoid being food garbage: don’t finish the leftovers, especially those of others; it is a biological, not a moral, decision.
Quantum Mind Power shows how you can completely eliminate the negative “voices” inside your head that tell your to purge or not to eat. Quantum Mind Power may help you unlock your subconscious mind to overcome eating disorders to reclaim your health. Master your mind power! This is one of the best programs on harnessing your mind power.
Craving Secrets: A step-by-step guide to overcoming junk food cravings, to beating common cravings, such as artificial sweeteners, beer, candies, chocolate, coffee, cookies, and soda! Stop your cravings to end your compulsive eating!
Copyright©by Stephen Lau
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