Vegetarian Weight LossHow to Stop Emotional Eating for Vegetarians
Vegetarians can also fall prey to emotional eating too. Hence, if you realize you gain weight due to a nasty binge habit, then you must learn to stop emotional eating before it gets out of hand.
You tend to binge whenever you get bored, stressed, angry or depressed. Even happy times can make you binge, though not as severe comparing to negative emotional attack.
It gets worse especially when you live in a country where plenty of cheap processed vegetarian foods are within your reach.
All it takes is a trigger event. Forget about other methods of de-stressing - listening to music, do yoga, or go for a walk, they just take too much effort and time.
Eating makes it easier and faster to fill empty spaces. Eating just makes you feel better, when faced with each difficult or painful situation. You can just hide behind food and let everything melt away till you feel safe to come out from hiding.
A perfect solution, as it seems.
Unfortunately, you tend to gorge on unhealthy processed vegetarian foods full of saturated fat, sugar, sodium, preservatives and artificial flavorings like ice cream, chips, chocolates, candy bars, popcorn and cakes. You'll ingest calories so much more than you think.
Such indulgence happening once in a blue moon probably won't cause much harm to your health and shape. But you won't be reading this article if you're such a disciplined and rational vegetarian.
So, if your uncontrollable bingeing happens often enough, it definitely contributes greatly to your overweight.
Hey, I'm not judging you since emotional eating can influence you in a subtle way. Sometimes too subtle that most of the time you don't even realize it's taking its toll on your weight.
Your logical sense tells you not to do it, but somehow you already eaten a ton of junk food without stopping. The craving becomes just too strong to subdue.
People assume vegetarians naturally lose or maintain weight because they don't take meat. I disagree.
When you eat to satisfy your emotional needs rather than hunger, it actually accounts for your overweight problem. You, a vegetarian, can become an emotional eater if you can't deal with your emotions in a healthy way. The only difference is that you'll make meatless food choices instead.
But that doesn't mean you'll choose healthy vegetarian foods.
Consequently, it destroys your entire weight loss plan, albeit a vegetarian one, making you lose sight of your weight loss goals before you realize what's happening.
Therefore, when you misuse food frequently to seek relief, you strengthen the relationship between food and your emotion. If you discover that you're shopping for bigger-size clothes each time, take heed of this warning sign. It means... you're expanding sideway.
What Cause(s) Emotional Eating?
Ask yourself these questions:
Do you feel lousy about yourself, especially the size and shape of your body?
Do you constantly consider yourself as fat, dumpy, ugly and unattractive?
When painful or stressful event strikes, do you immediately turn to food for comfort?
Do you feel it's your fault when someone criticizes your looks and abilities?
Just one nod from your head to any of the above suffices to show that you're constantly engaging in internal struggles to overcome the wretched feeling that you're not good enough.
To escape from the misery, you turn to high-fat, high-calorie food that pumps in more fats into your body. Worse, you wolf down a ton of such food for your own good.
Yes, those foods relieve you... but temporarily.
Then, guilt for overeating kicks in, making you feel disgusted and frustrated with yourself for losing control. But when faced with another sneering comment or stressful event, you start to binge again.
As your weight climbs, it makes you feel even more miserable and helpless. The more miserable you get, the more you turn to food. And the vicious cycle of emotional eating repeats.
Vicious cycle of emotional eating
If you find yourself in such situation, you have a big problem with emotional eating as it always leads to overeating that slowly eats away your confidence, bit by bit, inch by inch. When you lack confidence, you simply don't feel like following through your weight loss plan as you become too preoccupied with your negative thoughts.
Under the influence of your emotions, you tend to choose certain types of food to ease your emotions; you know exactly what food or even a particular brand of food you want.
For example, when you experience tension-related emotions like stress, irritation or frustration, you want a quick way to let go of the steam.
So you go with chewy, crunchy or textured foods such as nuts, candy bars, pizzas or chocolate to pass off as those issues or people that upset you. Then you stuff them into your mouth and start crushing them with all your might. Such way of emotional eating can soothe your anger temporarily and calm you down.
How about those times when:
You feel hollow inside or not getting the attention, appreciation or acknowledgement you want?
You get an undeserved and harsh dressing-down from your boss?
Nobody asks you out after work?
You miss home after staying away for too long?
Gnaw at by feelings of emptiness, loneliness, sadness or self-pity, you desire for foods that bring back happy memories. Sometimes, fatigue and illness can also ignite those feelings.
Unlike tension-related emotions, they often creep in quietly without your awareness. Subconsciously, you know eating can make you feel better, so reaching for food as comfort comes naturally.
What food would you choose then?
Observe yourself if you'll pick soft, sweet, smooth and creamy foods like ice cream, cakes, popcorn, etc. Sometimes, you may even miss your mom's cooking or foods you took during childhood. When you eat those foods, they give you a sense of being hugged and loved. Most importantly, you feel good after eating.
Imagine eating a lot whenever you feel down or stressed every day, what will happen to you? Remember, emotional eating results in overeating. And overeating results in a bigger size, in general.
To conclude, you don't choose vegetarian food wisely when emotional eating strikes you. Ultimately your weight shoots up and your health suffers, so you gotta learn to snap out of it!
Proven Ways to Stop Emotional Eating Without Drugs
People with low self-esteem tend to feel bad about themselves easily. They easily get guilt-stricken even though they've only committed a very minor mistake. So, they'll go to the extent to punish themselves to atone for the mistake they make — eat till they become sick.
Here's a typical confession of an emotional eater from a veggie forum, "I love to work out. When I feel bad about myself, I don't work out because I feel like I don't deserve it. Instead I eat until I feel sick and all the joy is gone from eating as a form of self punishment."
If you continue to let those negativities run in your mind, you can easily sink into deep depression. When that happens, it's no longer emotional eating you must deal with. You might attempt suicide and lead to irreversible consequences.
Hence, you must start to break the vicious cycle of emotional eating as early as now, by disconnecting your negative thoughts totally. Here are some effective methods for you:
1. Get External Help
As you're filled with negative emotions, seeking help from your friend can help keep your emotions in check and power up your mind with positive forces. This is by far the most effective method.
But you must find the right person to confide in - someone with strong positive thoughts and energy (if he or she gets negatively affected easily as you, you'll become even worse), and more importantly, a person whom you trust will not tell anyone about your problems (if you want to keep it a secret), and will give you the utmost honest opinions rather than saying all the good things about you just to make you happy.
Is there such person in your family, social circle, or even in your workplace / office?
If yes, pour out your heart to them. Tell them how, what and why you feel the way about yourself, and then listen coolly to what they have to say about you — your good and bad side. This type of people usually will give you great power to face the harsh reality.
Once you acquire enough positive power, you'll then garner the drive to make great changes to your lifestyle — eating more healthily and getting into exercises which will further boost your positive energy.
Over time, you'll shed off excess fat and get into better shape, which in turn, will rebuild your self-esteem and raise your self-worthiness. You don't feel bad about yourself anymore.
Remember the overweight vegetarian (moments ago) saying that he loves to exercise but he stops working out when he doesn't feel good about himself and eats until he falls sick? He probably didn't have someone to share his feeling, so he let himself sink into such misery as a punishment for himself.
Speaking of that, what if you don't have such a positive figure in your family or in your social circle, or they're not free to hear you out when you're experiencing an extremely low mood on a particular day? You can apply the next method below.
2. Self-Help
I know that beginning with controlling your mindset and trying to stay positive alone can be pretty difficult, especially when you're already mentally loaded with negativities.
But you must start somewhere. And you have to begin with your mind since you're working alone.
Unlike the conventional way of telling yourself "Come on, I can do this!", "They can't hurt me with those comments.", "I won't get beaten down like this. Get up and try again!" kind of self-hypnosis, or push yourself to go out for a walk or start working out even though you very much don't feel like moving an inch, we'll give your mind a lighter job to start with.
Get your mind to turn to food for comfort. This is easier since whenever you feel emotionally struck, food is your only companion if you can't find a trusted person to open your heart to.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not asking you to turn to junk food yet again, but healthier food choices this time. Standby some mood-lifting instant snacks such as banana, cherries, pineapple, pumpkin and tomatoes.
These foods enhance the release of serotonin, a chemical in the brain that beneficially stabilizes your mood, emotion, behavior and thought.
I know. Some of these foods contain unrefined simple carbohydrate, which may raise your blood glucose level. But they're nevertheless much better than those junk foods (refined carbs) you're eating because they contain minerals, vitamins and fiber too.
Another healthier option for you is get some wholegrain breads or wholegrain crackers ready at all times since they can calm your mood too, yet carry natural fiber and complex-carbohydrate that provide you with steady flow of energy over long hours, so that you get enough energy to launch your exercise and rebuild your self-esteem.
Bear in mind that you're using these foods to stabilize your mood, so make sure you don't eat too much of them which can become too heavy for you to work out later.
That's what I do when sometimes my positively-powered friends are not around for me when I need them.
3. Mood-Boosting Exercise
Most emotional-eaters need to use either aforementioned technique 1 or 2 to get their body and mind ready for exercise to enhance their mood and stop their emotional eating. But if you feel you have very strong will-power and once attacked by negative emotions, you can still quickly force yourself to work out, that's even better.
So, what kind of exercise should you do?
High-intensity interval training (HIIT) has gain sound popularity over the past few years in producing amazingly fast fat loss results in lesser time. Thousands and thousands of overweight people are using it now. But if you still prefer low-intensity cardio exercise, go ahead with it.
You can also go with yoga. Me? I use both yoga and interval training to keep my mood high and maintain my shape.
Interval training is good for your mood because even hours post exercise, your body remains metabolically active. Meaning, your fat-burning engine is still at work and hence, you're still flowing with energy post training.
Cardio exercise will have its fat-burning effect subsides soon after its training bout. Hence, you may fall back to your mood swing.
That explains why interval training burns more fat and at a faster rate than cardio. And more importantly in this context, keeps your spirit high over longer duration.
Despite the benefits of interval training, if you do it 2 - 3 hours before your bedtime, it might disrupt your sleep. So, I suggest that you do it in the morning which works better since it'll keep you metabolically active and mentally positive throughout the day.
Last But Not Least...
All in all, make it a habit to connect your emotions with eating wholesome, natural food, instead of junk food, and you'll always get enough positive energy to kick-start your exercise regimen and overcome your negative emotions completely.
Eventually, you'll rebuild your self-esteem and stop your emotional eating. And when you body slims down over time, you'll feel even more confident and your low self-esteem will go away by itself.
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