The Beck Diet Solution Day 33 - Eliminate Emotional Eating

The Beck Diet Solution Day 33 - Eliminate Emotional Eating 

Wednesday, January 07, 2015 

I fully expect to blog on this day for several days, as I'm kind of short on time this morning, and this is one of my hot button topics. I've long believed that most commercial and self-help groups dance around emotional eating. Beck, with cognitive behavior therapy in her tool bag might have one of the better chances of dealing with it effectively.

As a life-long emotional eater it always disappointed me when I would go to a diet group and discover they gave it only lip service. In 1989 I took a quiz at weight watchers which was supposed to determine which emotions triggered one to overeat. Did you eat over anger or stress? Sadness and sorrow? Were you a celebratory eater, eating when happy? Did you eat over boredom? 

They had six questions... I ate for ALL the reasons. They offered SOME of the same things Beck does, I remember them as mainly distraction, which works best for boredom. They may have offered more, but they did not spend much time talking about it... focusing far more on the mechanics of losing weight.

And that's my biggest complaint with "dieting"... it doesn't solve "life"... and the uncomfortable truth is that many of us want it to. Eating to calm yourself down? Culturally embedded from childhood: what's the first thing you do when a baby cries? Feed it and cuddle it. We continue with our toddlers... feel bad? Here's a cookie. The commercials push those memories at us... hot chocolate as love. 

My goal in working on overcoming the compulsive/emotional eating is to NOT remove the joy from eating (food is a blessing)... but to detach using eating as a means to procrastinate (avoidance), to sooth or to punish myself or to transfer feelings about other elements of life onto my eating behavior. 

That can be deep, heavy, emotional work. In following blogs, I'll go into Beck's toolbox again (a reprise of Day 13 anti-craving techniques) and how I use each of them. Since I was rather distracted when I originally blogged Day 13, this will be a more thorough treatment... but right now, I have to get out the door for work. 

Today, I choose: BALANCE, i.e. let's make a living while living a life!