Diet Fails Due To Emotional Eating, Here's Expert Advice To Prevent It From Happening

Illustration of expert suggestions preventing emotional eating (Freepik/studioredcup)

YOGYAKARTA Eat emotionally or known as emotional eating is driven by stress and is a challenge for those of you who are undergoing a healthy diet. Many research is exploring this issue and identifying more about emotional eating.

Kristen Carter, MS., author of The End of Try Again: Overcome Your Weight Loss and Exercise Struggles for Good, wrote that many studies were only carried out in a short time so they could not clearly show the cause of emotional eating. The main problem is that it is very difficult to track and measure emotions. Because emotions in the context of emotional eating are related to age, gender, hunger status, previous experience with food, culture, genetics, and food flavor intensity. So reported Psychology Today, Sunday, November 26, articles in the Journal of Food Science revealed the philosophy behind emotional response to food.

In the article above, the food eaten is selected by the emotional impact rather than the pleasure felt afterward. Someone who experiences it, may choose foods related to positive memories.

The center of smell and taste is closely related to the channels in the brain. The center of both monitors hunger, saturation, emotions, and memory. Thus, it is easy to see why a number of life experiences, habits, memories, and physiological responses lead to automatic responses to food in certain situations.

Eating emotionally that a person experiences tends not to pay attention to the experience of eating. Eating anything, may actually not be fun for them. Therefore, it is very difficult to identify what emotions encourage it. But the main factor of emotional eating is stress. This may come from work, relationships, life situations in general, or even lack of sleep. Apart from dieting or suppressing portions and types of food also cause stress. Emotional eating can also be driven by nutritional status.

Another article, discusses the awareness of how certain emotional aspects encourage emotional eating. Internally and externally, of course, a lot of things are encouraging. But Carter suggests, instead of extending the debate 'why' emotional eating is experienced but is more aware of what actually happened. By questioning what causes emotional feeding, we can formulate solutions and empower them.

A very useful solution to overcome emotional eating is to make small changes to one destination slowly or within a certain period of time. This not only eliminates stress due to diet, but also gives a person the opportunity to focus on one habit/behavior at a time. Small changes, for example, by taking action one by one. This is a way to minimize frustration and confusion and be more motivating as small wins increase.