- Do you eat when you are stressed?
- Do you grab chocoalte when you need to calm down?
- Do you continually tell yourself “I will start again tomorrow”?
Comfort eating … the greatest way to sabotage weight loss success!
We all comfort eat from time to time. Often when we feel stressed, bored or lonely. Or we just want to cheer ourselves up.
Most of us do it without even being aware of it. It is that extra cookie with a cup of coffee; a candy bar at the supermarket checkout; or the temptation to have that extra helping because we’ve enjoyed the first one so much.
Most of the time we comfort eat when we’re not really hungry at all.
How it all starts …
Comfort eating is something that is instilled in us from birth.
When we were babies we cried and our mothers comforted us with milk. As we grew older we were given treats for comfort or when we hurt ourselves. We were rewarded with sweets or the occasional ice cream when we were good.
We were learning the lessons that food could make us feel better. The early lessons in life always stay with us. But, unfortunately for many of us, these comfort eating lessons often come back later in life and cause weight loss havoc!
When we feel under pressure or when we get upset or worried we look to comfort food. In a matter of minutes, your weight-loss efforts can be destroyed.
When we are eating for comfort, food becomes a way of making ourselves feel better. It might just be caused by a stressful day or by something that is worrying us.
The important thing to realize is that comfort eating is not about being greedy and not being able to cope – it is a learned behavior. A way of trying to make ourselves feel better with food.
If you’ve seen the Bridget Jones movies you’ll have seen a wonderful example of modern day comfort eating. When she’s upset Bridget eats. When she’s angry she eats. When she’s lonely she eats. It’s hilarious because there is so much truth in it. So many people identify with it.
These foods pile on the pounds!
There are degrees of comfort eating. From the occasional chocolate bar to an all out binge. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to lose weight comfort eating is a real pain in the you-know-what.
The downside to Comfort Eating is the effect it has on our bodies – we gain weight. And in many cases, we gain the weight quickly. Comfort Eating foods are high in fat-producing ingredients, such as sugar and simple carbohydrates and most of them are manufactured foods. When they are high in sugar it keeps you hooked on eating them.
The result is that the new overweight you is unhappy with the way that you look and feel and the cycle starts all over again.
Just because you comfort eat does not mean that you binge. Far from it. You may be very self-disciplined and have great will power. But you can still find yourself tempted to snack or give yourself a treat.
When logically you know you don’t need to eat, your feelings often tell you something different …
You know how it goes. “Just one piece of chocolate won’t hurt”. And before you know it the whole bar has gone. (And you may even be searching for another!)
You’ve been good all week so you’ll treat yourself at the weekend … “Never mind”, you tell yourself, “I can start again on Monday”.
The big difference between so-called ‘naturally thin’ people and those who aren’t, is that the ‘naturally thin’ use food soley as a source of often enjoyable nutrition.
The rest of us, however, can use it for:
- comfort
- to de-stress
- as a reward
- to stave off boredom
- to cheer us up
- to change how we are feeling
Food becomes less of a way to provide us with nutrition and more of a way to make us feel better and take away all our worries and stresses.
Are you feeding a need or needing a feed…?
If you’re overweight and at times you eat when you are not truly hungry, it’s a virtual certainty that you’re comfort eating.
And you may not even be aware of it. It’s just something you do. Just part of the daily routine. That packet of chips. Those mid-morning cookies. Those snacks in front of the television.
As with anything, if you do it regularly enough it becomes a habit. The problem comes when you try to stop. Because you associate the foods with a good feeling part of you doesn’t want to stop!
The more you try to discipline yourself and follow a diet the bigger the battle becomes to break your comfort eating habit.
It makes losing weight such a struggle.
Unfortunately comfort eating never achieves the desired effect. Except in the very short term – while you are eating. Afterwards we are likely to feel miserable, and annoyed about the effect such eating will have on our weight. In fact you probably end up feeling worse after comfort eating than you did before you ate the comfort foods.
Whether you want to lose 2 lbs or 20 lbs, stopping comfort eating is going to help. Whether it reduces your calorie intake by just 200 calories a day or whether it stops you bingeing. If you don’t do something about it, comfort eating can stay with you for life, always undermining and sabotaging your efforts to lose weight.