Please share your thoughts in the comments.
EMOTIONAL EATING
Let me first say there is nothing wrong with emotional eating. There is a primitive connection between food and comfort. A baby’s first source of nourishment is being held and fed. Many children grow up being offered a sweet when hurt or sad. When you become an adult, the connection between eating and emotions doesn’t magically disappear.
Eating is comforting. Reducing your emotional eating frequency will require dropping the judgment you attached to this behavior.
it’s OK to emotionally eat sometimes. But if we do it a lot, it may interfere with our other goals.
Here are the steps to reducing emotional eating:
1. Identify the emotion. Studies show that those who cannot identify their emotion are also less effective at coping with them.
2. Examine your thoughts. Ask yourself if that negative thought is true. Ask yourself if there are other possibilities. Ask yourself if you’re talking to yourself like you would talk to a friend with the same struggle.
3. Change your actions. To make this happen, you need to find a new habit to replace the eating. Maybe journaling or taking a 15 second time out. You may need to try several things before you find something that works. (I will share something surprising that is working for me in a comment)
Discomfort is inevitable as you learn to allow and except your thoughts and feelings without acting on them. As you are working on this, try to separate yourself from your thoughts and feelings. Step outside of them. See if you can observe them from more of a distance.
Example:
Initial thought: “Why can’t I just NOT eat when I’m not hungry? It should be easy.”
Follow up thought: “I am noticing that I am being quite critical of myself. It makes sense that unlearning this behavior will take practice and I don’t have to be perfect to feel good about my efforts.”
Feeling and learning to sit with discomfort is a skill. It will be most difficult at the beginning, like any new skill. You were going to mess this up, but it gets easier the more you practice.
Optional exercise
Choose a reoccurring emotional, eating situation you would like to practice working through
Identify the circumstance, thought, feeling, action, and result (CTFAR) that is happening currently.
Example:
C: a friend cancels our plans
T: she doesn’t value me
F: hurt + rejection
A: emotional eating
R: feeling overfull, guilty, and still hurt
Next identify the CTFAR that you would like to happen more often
C: a friend cancels our plans
T: she needs some time alone
F: disappointment + empathy
A: move one with evening
R: eat until comfortably (but not overly) full
It’s helpful to journal on this and of course, sharing in the comments here as welcome
OK. I said I would tell you what I’m doing right now to disrupt my mindless eating habit.  And I just did this two minutes ago, so I’m going to share a very recent example with you. I was just thinking about what I wanted to post in this group tomorrow and I started pacing around my house. I watched through my kitchen without even thinking about it, picked a banana up out of a bowl on my counter. A few months ago I would’ve just eating a banana without really even thinking about it. I might’ve not even realize I was eating it until halfway through as I continue to think about what I wanted to post tomorrow. But because  i’ve been practicing this, I did pause with a banana in my hand, checked in to see how I was feeling and realized I was not hungry. So I put the banana back.  But here’s the next step. This is the step that is allowed me to make more progress on this skill than I think I would’ve without the step. It’s an idea I got from the atomic habits book we read together last month. Every time I successfully interrupt this habit, I walk over to my window seal, and I move a blue rock from one vase to another. That’s it. Then I go back to doing what I was doing before I reached for the snack. I can’t explain it other than to say that there’s something satisfying about it. I don’t think it would work for everyone, but there is something that would work for all of us. I encourage you to keep trying different systems until you find something that works for you.