Essential Tips to Stop Stress Eating Now
To effectively stop stress eating, it’s essential to understand that it’s a common response to stressful situations, where emotional eating becomes a go-to comfort. This approach, however, is unhealthy and can lead to weight gain, depression, and low self-esteem. Acknowledging this behavior is the first step towards adopting healthier stress management techniques.
Focusing on healthier food choices is paramount in combating stress eating. Instead of gravitating towards junk food like chips and sweets during stressful times, consider maintaining a food diary. This diary can help you track your eating habits, identify your triggers, and guide you towards making more nutritious food choices. By swapping junk food for healthier options, not only will your mood improve, but you’ll also notice a decrease in appetite and a boost in overall health.
5 Tips to End Stressful Eating
Food Choices
The first tip to stop stressful eating is to eat healthily. We turn to junk food for comfort during stressful times such as potato chips, chocolate, candy, and anything sweet. You can create a food diary to track your progress of what you eat, when you eat, and what times you are hungriest and figure out your trigger food.
You don’t want to eliminate all of your favorite foods because this will only tempt you more. But what you do want to do is to make healthier food choices, by swapping your junk food for healthy food you will feel better, and eating healthy helps decrease your appetite and improve your overall health.
Exercise
The second tip is to exercise, on average when people are stressed, they feel depressed and overwhelmed, exercising will help manage stress and keep you healthy. You don’t need to run to the gym or a treadmill, you can simply work out at home, go jogging, running, play a sport, or walking to help overcome this.
This will help your overall health and exercise has been reported from studies to help have stress-busting benefits according to Mayo Clinic, it pumps your endorphins. The more physical activity you have the more production of your brain receives feel-good neurotransmitters called endorphins.
Meditation
The third tip to end stressful eating is to meditate, meditation is a powerful tool used for stress, anxiety, and depression. Meditation will help lower your stress levels and bring you into a relaxed and soothing mood even if you only meditate for 5 minutes, you will feel a difference. It is best to meditate every day to help cope with stress.
You can download the app Calm which has been recommended by many therapists to help with stress. This is a healthy and very effective way of dealing with stressful eating because you will have a new outlet to turn to instead of eating.
Prevent Boredom
The fourth way to end stressful eating is to prevent boredom, aside from stressful situations many people turn to food and are unconsciously eating because they’re bored. To prevent boredom, do activities throughout your day. You can buy some art supplies from your local art store and you can paint, draw, try out pottery, knitting, or even sewing.
There are so many things you can do to fill up your day no matter where you live. You can go out to the city, visit an art gallery, learn a new language, read a book, visit family or friends to help prevent boredom. It is important to prevent boredom because when your mind is preoccupied with something, your mind will not focus on eating unless necessary.
Support
We all need some support to get through stressful times, calling a friend or family member for support is a great option to help overcome stress eating. In fact, some other options such as joining a support group or signing up for therapy will help you even more!
Speaking to a professional, you will identify your stressors and food triggers, and you will create a plan that works best for you. Joining a support group is great because you will be surrounded by other people who are trying to overcome the same thing as you and you will have a team of supportive people on the same mission as you which will feel inspiring and uplifting.