Do you eat for emotional reasons? Of course you do—everybody does! Soon after birth we develop powerful emotional connections to feeding, eating, and food.

We celebrate happy occasions with food. We eat to express love, have fun, soothe a hurt, and reward ourselves for a job well done. These days, with food readily accessible and inexpensive, eating is an easy way to add pleasure to our lives. Emotional eating only becomes a problem when it’s used to cope with or avoid difficult and uncomfortable feelings.

If you feel your emotional connection to food is causing problems for you, these suggestions may help.

• Avoid labeling yourself.  Labels become self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead, label the behaviour. Behaviours can be explored and changed. For example. Eating when I feel stressed. Using food for comfort. Eating as a form of entertainment.
• Get back to the basics. To identify emotional triggers, ask “Am I hungry?” whenever you feel like eating. And then grade it out of 10. In fact, most of us no longer really know what hunger feels like. For me, my eyes feel tight, nothing to do with the belly at all! If there are no physical signs of hunger, it’s likely that the urge to eat was triggered by environmental or emotional cues. Much of our eating (and more besides) is triggered by external signals and our response is automatic. For example, driving on the way home, expecting your tea, starts you thinking about food. Seeing a picture of a dinner makes you think about food.
  
• Leave judgment at the door. Guilt and shame can trigger bingeing and then feeling bad.
  
• Be a caring friend for yourself. When you eat for emotional reasons, you are simply trying to feel better. What could you do instead?
• Cravings are time-limited. They soon pass. Distract yourself and you will be surprised to find that you have forgotten all about the craving. Treat them like an annoying child. The more you give in, the more they will whinge.
• Respond instead of react.  Eating is a choice. When you identify the triggers, you can then choose how you'll respond to your triggers instead of reacting automatically.
• Read the need. Your desire to eat when you aren't hungry is a clue that you have unmet needs and uncomfortable feelings. Recognising that they are gives you the chance to deal with them.
  
• Avoid labeling emotions as good or bad, or positive or negative. All emotions are information that you can use to better understand your interpretation of an experience and help you recognise your true needs.