Somebody also gave me good advice about the way you snack:
If you’re eating chips or something that comes out of a bag, put a serving of chips into a bowl while you’re in the kitchen and take it into the living room or wherever you’re having your snack with you. You’ll be less likely to eat the whole bag mindlessly if you have to get up and get more.
Don’t deprive yourself if you really want something. If you want seconds, fine - you can have a second helping or a second brownie or a second fun size Snickers bar in fifteen minutes if you still want it. If you do, though, you do get to have it - you can’t cheat yourself. But odds are you’ll forget about it because you don’t really want it that much.
All these are great suggestions. I also recommend a hobby that is incompatible with eating, which, unfortunately, reading, movies and game playing are not. Mine is knitting. It’s hard to knit and snack without getting brownie crumbs all over your work.
I am a bit of a numbers person and an emotional eater. I also have two kids, a mortgage and a house that needs renovations.
So, I’m kinda broke for the moment.
What is helping me is first of all not having anything in the house that I can go nuts on (chips being my biggest downfall).
The second is to write down what I WOULD have had plus the approximate price. Adding it up and just this week, I have saved 40 dollars (what can I say? I have expensive tastes).
That’s forty bucks that I can put towards my renovation, my retirement, my savings! And I am getting healthier!
I can see that having young kids would stress you out. I know it would stress me out! And there are definitely coping strategies for stress, but they take time, and having a 4yo wouldn’t give you much time.
The two best ways I know of are meditation and exercise. You’ll have to figure out which one works better for you. I do have a meditation that only takes about 2 minutes, twice a day. Do you spend more time than that snacking? I can PM the exercise to you if you’d like.
In the meantime there is something that you can do right now to ease the stress. Don’t just eat mindfully, do everything mindfully – and slowly. When you’re doing the dishes, just do the dishes. Don’t think about everything else that you have to do. And when you’re done, pause for 30 seconds before moving on to the next thing.
Personally, I do this when shaving and showering. I find it very centering.
I’ve heard perfectparanoia’s suggestion to write down how much $$ you saved by not doing {X} is also helpful for smokers. If that can help them kick such a difficult habit, it might help you as well.
Can you do something with your 4-year-old? Toss a ball back and forth, or jump rope together?
I am a recovering emotional eater. Stress, sadness, anger, and I was driven to eat. I wasn’t picky about what I ate, either. If there were brownies or chips, great. If not, I ate toast or cheese or a sandwich. It is such a hard thing to overcome.
While it is nice to have healthy, low-cal snacks around for when you are hungry, I do not suggest turning to those when you are stressed. You aren’t solving the problem which is emotional comfort = food.
I have had success with yoga and meditation. I used to do yoga with my son when he was your daughter’s age. It was fun and silly to be doing simple basic poses with a little kid. Totally takes your mind off food and makes you laugh, which is good for reducing stress.
I totally agree with cher3’s suggestion to find something to do with your hands while watching TV that is in compatible with eating. I also knit, crochet and do other handcrafts. If you don’t already, I think crochet is easier to learn and you can get a crochet hook and ball of yarn for under $5 at Michael’s or some place like that.
The no carb diet is the ultimate in unsustainable. You should cut out sugar though. It is addictive.
Find a way to make exercise enjoyable. Get into podcasts, music, books on CD, heck watch TV.
2a. Start slow. I’m not sure how big you are but maybe just walk slowly for a long time. Get used to just going for walks. Do it daily though or 5 days a week. The key is to make it a habit.
2b. Maybe after a month of walking slowly 5 days a week. Take it up a notch. Just a little.
2c. Your brain MUST be engaged though.
Sooner or later you will start craving that alone time to focus on that book, podcast or music. You will also start getting your body used to motion and exercise. Listen to self help stuff. Listen to Buddhist lectures. Enjoy eating healthy food.
I don’t mean for this advice to sound unsupportive, because it’s a great goal. Think of this advice as *assuming *you are successful and the advice is don’t let yourself go overboard. I made tons of changes to the way I eat, most of them extremely ‘self sustaining’. I love vegetables and hated fast food and hot pockets anyway.
But even though I ate healthy almost all the time I’d get these cravings for sweets and spent months trying to figure out why. I settled on emotional eating and started questioning why I got so much emotional satisfaction out of eating a piece of cake of a cookie. Finally it dawned on me that food is *supposed *to be emotional and it’s *supposed *to be satisfying.
So don’t let yourself get too extreme, because that’s not sustainable. Make sure you keep up variety in your meals and that you really enjoy them. You don’t have to really love everything you eat but you should get satisfaction regularly from eating. It’s an important part of being human. And you can have an extremely emotionally satisfying meal that’s really healthy.
Of the choices listed in your OP, I’d go with playing a video game or giving yourself a pedicure. Do something that engages you so that your mind is off food, and something that keeps your hands busy. Don’t watch a movie. I’m not even an emotional/rewards eater, and when I’m watching a movie at home, I eat more often than not just because I figure when I’m doing nothing but sitting still would be a good time to have dinner.
Also, yes, ditch the bad food. I don’t have any in my apt. At all. I have a serious self-control problem when it comes to salty snacks (Doritos = legal crack), and I know if I open the bag, well, the whole thing is gone. Why do they even make chip clips? So instead of tempting fate, I have no fake food in my apt of any sort.
It worked well for us when my partner and I gave up smoking - but not writing it down, actually putting the money in a jar which we kept where we would see it every day. Within a disgustingly short time, we had a jar under the coffee table with £400 waiting to be spent on something amazing!
I’ll be reading these tips with interest since I’ve gained a little weight lately and I think it’s stress eating with me at the moment too. I don’t know whether writing down how much I didn’t spend on snacks will help, but I’ll give it a go, starting in the morning.
Another great idea. And I’m lucky enough that I could probably just spend that money on frivolous fun stuff for me, which will deliver exactly the kind of emotional bump I’m looking for.
I agree, I would rather cut the “feel bad, eat” connection altogether. I should try yoga with the kidlet - it won’t be a serene meditative exercise, but it would be fun!
No worries. They can have my carbs when they pry them from my cold dead hands. I refuse to even cut out sugar. I didn’t get fat from putting 2 tsp of brown sugar in my oatmeal in the morning, or 1 tsp of sugar in my afternoon tea. Now, I am trying to keep it sane, and also to nudge my carbs into the whole grain category, but no Atkins for me!
Here, I’m ahead of the game. I’ve been going to the gym 3-5 days a week for a few years. It is indeed my time off from momming, when I can just be by myself. Several times I’ve tried to push more and get more sustained cardio, and my varied musculo-skeletal issues have interfered, but I keep trying, and at least I always go walk and stretch and do my physical therapy exercises.
This is a very good point. And I don’t plan to cut out everything enjoyable. I will still eat cake at a party, or a rich meal for a celebratory dinner. What I want to cut out is the behavior that I kind of think of as bulimia without throwing up - skulking off by myself to stuff the most unhealthy food down my gullet in unreasonable amounts, because of the emotional hit I get off it. Does that make sense?
So what you’re saying is that the $50 + $15/mo I would pay to play The Secret World (which I foolishly became addicted to in its free beta weekend), isn’t an outrageous, unjustifiable expense, but rather a judicious investment in my health. I see! No, shh, don’t say anything further. I completely understand this directive you’ve given me.
Seriously, you guys are awesome, and I really, really appreciate all the support and ideas!
I’m not sure if this is also a problem for you. But I often mistake (well not mistake, bear with me for a moment), fatigue for hunger.
That is, “Oh, I’m so tired, but I have to do XYZx1000, I need coffee and a brownie”!!! It’s difficult but instead, I try to go “no, HELL no, XYZx1000 can wait, I’m going to take a nap”. Usually I feel more energized and can actually do a better job at XYZx1000 when I get up, than trying to do it still tired, and now jittery from caffeine and sugar.
I’m trying to finally lose the “break up” weight from 7 years ago. Well, I didn’t actually start gaining much of it until 2 or 3 years after the break up, but I digress. I’m also an emotional eater (obviously). One of the things that helped me the most, back when I was a gym rat, was a gym forum I belonged to. It helped to have people that I was accountable to. You’d be surprised how much less appealing the brownie is when you want to go post, but inside you’re feeling as if "I can’t! I ate that brownie, so I either have to fess up, or sit there and post guiltily…VERY guiltily.
AH! I thought of one. TV watching can be a rather bad trigger to want chips or candy. So I watch my favorite forensics shows. “Bones” in particular is DISguzzzting! I have no desire for anything during or after that show (sometimes before, if I’m anticipating something gross :D). The original CSI often has really gross stuff too. CSI NY usually goes all high tech and the autopsy isn’t too bad.
THE worst is when they have to “de-glove” to get fingerprints. GAG!
Unauthorised Cinnamon, I don’t know how useful it is to consider yourself an ‘emotional eater’ using food to ‘soothe [yourself]’. I understand that people find this acceptable terminology, but I think it offers an inbuilt reason to not be too hard on ourselves with its implication that something terrible has happened, and we need to be immediately consoled and comforted.
Being an ‘overeater’ using food to ‘punish’ yourself sounds much harsher, and may be more realistic; and reality is a necessary ingredient in following through on your ‘Fit by Forty’ plan. (Which is a great thing to do.)
Each time you think you want to eat some wondrous crapola, remind yourself that you’re just overeating (rather than you’re tired, or upset, or angry etc), to break the circuit. Thoughts of ‘Eating this makes me feel better’ need reinterpretation. (‘Eating this moves me further away from who I am at 40’ - or whatever works for you.)
Almost automatically, the junk food thought is gone and you’re continuing the process of your day before it was interrupted by what now amounts to, a passing thought. The ‘treating yourself’ will be the complete satisfaction of having entire days not thrown into chaos by that one nagging, unproductive idea that makes you get in the car, or stop what you’re doing, or take a detour through the drive-thru or whatever it is that you had to do to get that thing that has you ultimately feel bad.
Don’t replace what you were doing - be moving past it.
6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast, interesting thoughts. I’m not sure if I agree or disagree. But I want to expand on an earlier thought that I had, and see how it meshes with yours.
Unauthorized Cinnamon, think about this. What you’re asking for is a distraction from eating. And you’ve gotten some great suggestions! Try them all.
But is a distraction what you really need? The problem is overeating. But that’s not really the problem either. That’s a distraction from stress. What is stress? It’s either fretting over the past or worrying about the future. Stress, in itself, is a distraction from the present.
So what you want is a distraction from a distraction from a distraction. How much more disconnected from yourself do you need to get? When you mentioned mindfulness above, that may be exactly what you need to return to.
I like the idea of dancing. It connects you to your body immediately. And you don’t need to go out to a club to do it. You don’t even need to put on music. Just wiggle your hips for a few seconds. It’s really theraputic!
