Keep in mind that awareness is the first step to breaking your mindless/emotional eating habit.
1. Use Sticky Notes
Place sticky notes, where you store your food.
For example, you might place a post-it on your refrigerator and your pantry door.
You’ll see the post-it when you go to open the refrigerator and ideally, you’ll stop to think about
why you’re eating,
what you’re feeling,
and if you’re really hungry.
It will take deliberate mindfulness on your part to stop before you open the refrigerator.
So let’s explore your motivation.
Why do you want to stop mindless/emotional eating?
Wanting to stop and knowing WHY you want to stop are two different things.
Your WHY - your reason for wanting to stop emotional eating - is where you’ll find your true motivation.
It’s important to understand your motivation because changing your habits is hard.
You’ll start off great for a few days, or maybe a few weeks, but at some point, you’re going to start falling back into old habits.
This is when you’ll need to be able to tap into your motivation, to remember why you want to stop comfort eating and to continue to work toward your goal.
So why do you want to stop emotional eating?
There are so many potential reasons; what’s yours?
Do you want to lose weight?
Have more control over yourself and your health?
Eat more healthy?
Feel empowered?
Food freedom?
Reduce your risk of chronic disease?
Reverse type II diabetes?
The list could go on and on, so spend some time thinking about why you want to stop emotional eating.
Let’s explore more ways you can create awareness around your eating habits.
2. Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness Meditation teaches you to be present in your body and in the moment.
It helps you learn to focus, to be more aware of yourself and the world around you.
It calms your mind.
Here’s the secret to meditation... Five minutes is enough.
Start meditating throughout your day with something that is easily doable for you.
If you can only meditate for two minutes at a time, then do it for two minutes.
As you develop that habit, add a minute, and make it three minutes.
Continue until you have a manageable meditation practice that you can handle on a daily basis.
3. Reminders
There are other things that you can do to remind yourself to check-in and be more aware of your eating habits.
For example, you can put a rubber band on your wrist and every time you eat something, you switch the rubber band to the other wrist.
It just helps you to start thinking about your eating habits rather than eating unconsciously.
When it comes to changing habits it’s not usually effective with a restrictive approach.
Meaning that if you simply try to cut something out or your life, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to stick to it.
However, if you substitute one habit for another, then things start to flow and work together.
Here’s an example
Let’s say you want to stop drinking diet soda every day.
Quitting it all together will not help.
Within a few days, your cravings will come back strong and you will more than likely drink a soda.
Instead, decide to back up and gradually stop drinking soda but this time replace it with sparkling water. I love to call it “soda water”
For the first week, substitute one can of soda a day with one can of sparkling water.
The second week, substituted two cans of sparkling water a day and so on until you have completely eliminated diet soda.
