Eliminate Emotional Eating Part 2: Now that you've caught it...

Eliminate Emotional eating part two: now that you've caught it, what are you going to do with it?

Thursday, January 08, 2015 

There's this old cartoon of Marmaduke, the great Dane. In it, you see a driver who has rolled down the window of his compact car, saying to the big dog, "OK, now that you've caught it, what are you going to DO with it?" 

You've done step one: you have identified an emotion that you are feeling. You know it's making you want to eat. What can you DO about the emotion OTHER than eat?

Beck's item 1 on her anti-craving strategies still applies: label it. Give it a name. Talk to it (OK, maybe that's just me). I like to think of the old Simon & Garfunkel tune, The Sounds of Silence, "Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with you again..." 

I will go through this inner dialog, "I know you! You're anxiety. I'm feeling you because I'm under deadline pressure and I just found another bug in my code." "You're irritation... the kids just spilled dirt on the carpet AGAIN!" "You're sadness... I saw a dog just like the one I lost last year." Whatever it is... if you can put a name on it... it gives you a starting point.

Also, once you know what it is, and that it's not hunger... you have alternatives about what to do with it.

Beck's #2 is to stand firm. Tell yourself you're not giving in to the craving, the desire to eat. The decision is made. My equivalent for the emotion is similar: I'm not going to eat over it... but I might choose to just sit with it and experience it. 

The thing about feelings is that you didn't ask for them. Having them doesn't make you a bad person, even if it's a feeling you think you shouldn't feel: you are a caretaker and you got irritated at your patient. That's something you think you should be too caring and compassionate to feel. It has set up a cognitive dissonance in your thinking... you THINK you shouldn't feel this... and yet it's there. Add "guilt" and possibly "shame" to your feeling because you think the feeling is inappropriate. Now you have triple the emotional triggers to eat. 

If you just sit with a feeling for a while and acknowledge its existence, you may notice it losing its intensity. Release any sense of guilt or shame. Don't try to NOT feel the feeling. It will kind of go away on its own. Breathing exercises help me in this situation, too, in getting through feeling the feeling.

Beck's point 3 is to NOT give yourself a choice. I am not convinced of this, when it comes to strong emotion, when eating is what we've always done to respond. I believe I have to give myself responsibility to make a decision, determine whether this is something I need to make an exception for. By giving myself the choice, giving myself "permission to fail" if you will, I also free myself to succeed. I know it sounds very anti-Beck, but it works for me, more often than not.

In the process of giving myself that choice, to eat or not to eat, I make use of her points 4 and 5... imagining the outcome of both sides of the choice: if I give in and eat to mask/suppress the emotion, or if I stand firm and let the feeling fade. I think choice is very important in my life. I like being "in charge"... my inner rebel even more so! 

Once I've made the decision to NOT cave to eating the emotion... I can move on to the behavioral techniques in the anti-craving section.

But this is getting a little ahead of the game... this is all assuming you identified the emotion BEFORE you got to the bottom of the ice cream carton. If you did NOT identify the emotion until AFTER eating over it, or in the middle of the eating... you still have a choice. The choice to STOP, and turn it around.

DO NOT beat yourself up. Go to the Beck strategies related to getting back on track. You can return to your program at ANY point. Before eating, in the middle of a bite, or after you've overindulged, even days later. But the sooner the better. The important thing is if you find yourself eating... take a deep breath and figure it out. Find that emotion. At first, this may be the ONLY way to find that emotion. As you get more and more practiced at this, you'll be identifying the emotions BEFORE you dive into the Ben & Jerry's. 

And whenever you do identify and respond... there is a further step to all of this... solving the underlying problem that led to the emotion. And again, I'll save that for another installment. Because that's actually Beck's Day 34 exercise: problem solving. 

But before I do that one, I think I have one more blog about emotional eating before I get to the problem solving. That will be reviewing the behavioral techniques in stopping / avoiding starting an emotion triggered binge. Today I choose: to FEEL my feelings. 

For the coach, since I've left off the check list the past couple of days: 

• I have been reading my response cards at least twice a day. 
• I have been eating sitting down and noticing each bite. 
• I have been planning ahead, although for today, not until I got up this morning. 
• I have been monitoring and recording in writing what I ate. 
• I have been getting in my spontaneous and planned exercise. 
• And I'm in the process of writing about my experiences with emotions!