User post: Are You Guilty of Emotional Eating?

You have two options in regard to emotional eating: you can try to eliminate it altogether or you can try to make better use of it by making emotional eating more conscious. The latter would be consistent with the goals of harm reduction, a humanistic form of psychotherapy that offers a pragmatic risk-reduction approach to managing problematic behaviors.

Three Principles of Mindful Emotional Eating

If becoming a mindful emotional eater is the goal you'd like to pursue, the following three principles will help you transition from mindlessly-reactive emotional eating to mindfully-conscious emotional eating in moderation:

1) when eating to cope with emotions, accept emotional eating as a legitimate coping choice, not a coping failure;

2) when eating to cope with emotions, follow a predictable eating ritual, with clear start and end points;

3) when eating to cope with emotions, remember that emotional eating does not have to mean emotional overeating.

Following guidelines for your emotional eating will help you approach it with a sense of control.

Ritualize Emotional Eating

Habits, routines and rituals offer a soothing, stabilizing sense of predictability and help us feel in control of the moment. Emotional eating episodes are often haphazard and unstructured. To help you rely less on food and more on the activity of eating during your emotional eating episode, I encourage you to ritualize and structure your emotional eating "protocol."......

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By Pavel Somov Ph.D. for Intent.com

Pavel Somov, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008) www.eatingthemoment.com

(Cupcake image by bookgrl via Flickr)