I am asked quite regularly if my Combat Your Cravings Ebook is available in hard copy.  Unfortunately it isn’t (besides being located on lulu.com but I am not entirely sure about quality on there) BUT over the past several months I have been updating and working hard on it in order to publish it early February hopefully. 

The Cravings Ebook as it stands is a great resource but in the new version that will be released there will be much more detail.  I am sectioning so that there is a step-by-step plan for emotional eating and physical eating.   The emotional eating step-by-step consists of 7 steps to emotional freedom from food to make it easier for anyone to really overcome emotional eating. The physical cravings aspect as 4 easy steps to combat physical cravings that are due to addiction/withdrawal as oppose to emotional eating.

The book is made of pretty much everything that has helped me gain control of my own eating habits.  I have added everything that is in the ebook but MUCH MUCH more, specifically going into more detail about emotional eating than in the ebook.

So as a result of this, I am now offering the Combat Your Cravings Ebook for only $7!  You can buy this by going to the Books & Products tab at the top of the page.  It is, in my opinion, a great introduction to the issues surrounding cravings. 

For more information please go here: http://www.eating-naturally.com/books-products/ or alternative you can buy the book by clicking on this button:

                 $7

I will be updating in a few weeks how the new book is getting along and whether I have a specific date for release.  But for now just enjoy the Ebook!

Being free from emotional eating takes time – it can take a LOT of time. For some people their emotional attachment to food is less severe and they can be done with the issue in months. For others, like myself, it can take years.

I never realized how much emotional eating was a part of my life and never thought I was an emotional eater. Only until very recently, in the past few years, has it become so abundantly clear that emotional eating is something I take part in on a regular basis or try not to! Unfortunately, although I was getting somewhere with my battles against it, it can take another emotional blow to send you back into an emotional panic again and delve for the food.

A year and a half ago my mother died. It was just after the birth of my son, so the blow couldn’t have come at a more devastating time. I was excited about my new bundle of joy, but I had been more excited about spending time with my mother and her helping me bring up her grandson. Unfortunately, this wasn’t meant to be and although I thought I could handle her death, it has been an ongoing battle since then. When people say it gets better, I really haven’t seen the evidence of this yet.

So what’s this got to do with emotional eating? Well, my emotional eating habits got a lot worse once this event occurred and have been a lot harder for me to deal with. They come in waves. Every so often a powerful wave of emotion hits me that I try to avoid feeling through comfort eating. It’s almost as though it creeps up on me and takes over me before I even notice. I then tend to act as though I haven’t really got a clue why I am suddenly obsessing with food again – but really, if I took a good look at myself the answer is there, I just want to avoid it. Avoidance of my issues seems to be on a subconscious level though, so I am not intentionally avoiding the issues but I am (if that makes sense!).

I did have my emotional eating under control before this occurrence but since, it is almost as though I have had to rewire my thinking again and get back on track – like I have fallen off the wagon. It hasn’t been as simple as addressing the underlying issues either – my grief. I can’t force it out all in one go. It comes in waves and I don’t know how long these waves will go on. All I know is that without the support of my boyfriend, I would have found it almost impossible to stop myself falling into the trap of emotional eating again and this is why I made this post.

If you are an emotional eater, you need to get support. You need to find someone you can go to when it gets too tough. It is so very easy to cave and eat the food. The instant gratification is so very tempting that we need someone to help us overcome it. When life gets tough, others’ support is needed to stop us indulging in the behaviors that cause us pain and repression. If you can’t find someone to support you in person, there are many forums online that can give you support too and I have used a few myself and found them to be useful in times when I felt misunderstood. So do a search for an emotional eating forum or use a forum you already frequent for support if necessary.

Sometimes, all we need is to discuss our emotional eating habits with someone who has been there or is there and once we have spoke about it, we feel instantly less emotional and more powerful.

So when you start to acknowledge your emotional eating and your maladaptive comfort eating, make sure you have a friend who can help you through the times when you feel like you can’t overcome overeating on your own. Sometimes its all you need.

And remember.

It is possible to overcome emotional eating,

You are able to overcome emotional eating.

And you deserve to overcome emotional eating.

Don’t suffer in silence: get support.

Food is addictive especially when we use it for comfort and numbing ourselves emotionally. We can instantly turn to food during emotional upsets and get the instant gratification, the feeling of fullness we need in order to numb out old feelings resurfacing or stress we have just been experiencing. The problem is, we often feel extremely guilty afterwards and vow never to cave to food again.

Promising ourselves in the midst of guilt about our overeating and bingeing never works. You can’t just decide to stop and then never will again, especially when your decision is made during guilt.

Bingeing serves an important purpose to you and that is to make you feel better. When you are on the brink of the next binge, your promise to yourself never to binge again would have been forgotten and if it is still in the back of your mind, you will be doing everything to talk yourself into eating. We can rationalize anything when we want to.

This is why the all or nothing attitude to bingeing fails to work. It is too much to ask of ourselves to let go abruptly something we have been using as an emotional crutch for such a long time. It also lends its hand to making us feeling even more guilty when we can’t stay committed.

If you take the approach of more self awareness and observation, making note of when you binge and how you feel before and after you can gain a better understanding of your eating patterns and also can embrace and reflect on them properly.

It is too much to ask of yourself to change overnight. Bingeing and overeating has become a part and parcel of how you work and how you cope with the daily stresses and strains, so it is important to become aware of exactly what you do and to allow yourself time to overcome it. If you slip up and binge – learn from it and accept it as an experience. It’s not the end of the world, overcoming emotional issues especially surrounding food takes time.

Make sure you also acknowledge the small successes with your eating habits. These are just as important as the final destination, the final you you want to be, because without them you cannot reach that end.

Ending your binges and overcoming overeating isn’t easy. By learning to love yourself and having self awareness, you can overcome it. You won’t overcome it by continuously promising yourself not to do it again in the midst of guilt (but I am sure you already know this!).

Take it one step at a time. Learn from the binges that do occur through self awareness and embrace progress not perfection.

For Help To Overcome Binge Eating & Cravings: CLICK HERE

Previous Post: Stop Food Cravings: What To Do In The Midst Of A Craving

I can’t seem to lose the weight despite continuous efforts to do so; I just keep craving and bingeing…

Food cravings are one of the subtle, cultured forms of addiction and compulsive behavior that are very difficult to discern.  It is acceptable to have an addiction when it comes to food, or so it seems.  We all have them and we all treat people with this particular addiction (addiction to food) entirely different to someone who is addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

Where as someone who craves alcohol would be encouraged to seek help, those of us who crave sugary snacks are often – if not all the time – encouraged to indulge in our addictions.  And if we don’t indulge we will often hear the retort:

“Why are you depriving yourself?”

“A little isn’t going to hurt!”

Can you honestly say that the foods you crave are not addictions?

Most foods that are craved have no nutritional benefit to you and can cause and contribute to a number of different health conditions including excess fat, diabetes, heart disease etc.

Why would you want to eat these foods other than for comfort and pleasure?  You wouldn’t.  It is your addiction to them that makes you eat them.

Food has the power to control you in this way.  Sugar, salt and foods laced with fat are emotionally and physically addictive.  In order to rid yourself of these substances from your life, the first step is to admit there is a problem.  This is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you think you are eating that sandwich out of hunger.

But cravings are a bent form of hunger and it is quite possible that you may have never felt what true hunger feels like.  You are probably used to the unger that gets your stomach growling, that makes you feel agitated and that resultings in your needing food right then and there.

This is not hunger – it is addiction.

Addiction is anything that has become stronger than your willpower to change.

Bread, sweets, coffee, meat and salt among a million other foods, provide you with false needs and behavior patterns that are destructive to your well being and can have a greater authority in behavior than the natural desire to eat and drinnk.  The salt, fat and crunch of junk food offer emotionsl of fulfillment that are lacking because of a spritiual vacuum – a feeling deep down inside that something is missing.

Emotional emptiness is the source of addiction in most cases – dependency on pleasure to temporarily numb our feelings of hopelessness is usually the root issue.

The sensations of hunger and thirst are homeostatic mechanisms which help the body maintain optimum levels of energy, nutrients and water.  When addictive foods are eaten repeatedly, the body adjusts homeostasis to be balanced with the food in the system.  Over time the body will become dependent on that substance for homeostatic balance and its removal will cause withdrawal.  The body cries out for the missing substance as just intense hunger cries for food.

Control has been established on the inside of you.  Even if there is an intense desire to lose weight there is often failure and discouragement.

But how did it all come about?

The potential and most likely start of food addiction is from the moment you were born.  Living in a society that deems food as a social function and emotional poise it can be hard not to associate food with emotion/feelings (whether they are good or bad).

This would seem to suggest that we are all addicted to food and I would say we are to some extent. However, not everyone has a problem with food.

Some people overuse this method of consuming food at an emotional/social event, pushing it into every aspect of their lives. It may have started with an upset in childhood, where your mother gave you some cookies or cake to make you feel better, and as you grew you began to use this comfort as a way of easing your pain whenever pain arose. You went through your teens with the usual social awkwardness and pubescent pains and food was your way to make it easier. You then went onto college and a stressful job and the only comfort you had was food. Your days revolved around you coming home from work and comforting yourself with a takeaway or something else. It was your little treat.

Unfortunately this is an all too common scenario for people and a lot of people do not recognize they have an issue and if they do have some awareness, they do not take it seriously because the world doesn’t take it seriously. The world does not recognize it as an addiction.

Overeating is a powerful way to change the state of your mind. Eating is a way to silence the mind.

The compulsion to eat sets up a very painful process. It makes one feel weak and out of control. It prevents many from successfully losing weight and eating a healthy diet, because the endless slip ups and indulgences into junk food for comfort can leave one in a very low insecure place.

Emotional eaters have a dependency on food to get through life – to survive challenges. Many of us are emotional eaters. We avoid emotion, we avoid allowing emotion to flow through us and instead we void it by numbing it. This doesn’t work though, because that pain is still there, we have just put it off.

Emotional eating is instant gratification and short lived, but it is a very hard thing to break free from. However, to be able to control our eating, to lose weight and to live a fulfilling satisfying life, it is crucial that emotional eating is addressed.

Emotions aren’t something one should fear, we should embrace every one that we feel and experience and that’s just it: we should allow ourselves to feel and experience them. The more we do so, the better we are able to manage them and more able e are to cope in stressful situations in the world. The world will also be a much more interesting place and wonderful place.

We need to make peace with our food and we need to allow ourselves to be happy. You can beat your addictions, you can break your reliance on food and the first step to do so is to be aware of your reliance.

Some questions to think about concerning your own emotional eating:

(Being aware of the following questions throughout the course of a day can help you better answer them)

1. Emotional eating is one aspect of food addiction. What other aspects of food addiction are present in your life? For example, being overweight is a sign of food addiction just like emotional eating. Can you pinpoint any others?
2. Have you been on diets before and if so what has made you break them? How did you feel before and after breaking your diet? Did breaking your diet give you relief? Was it stressful to be on a diet that prevented you from using food as a comfort?

For more information on how to overcome cravings click here

The Social & Emotional Aspects of Eating Video

Part One: Introduction to Emotional Eating

Part Two: What Fuels Emotional Eating

This is a video of a talk by Professor Rozalind Gruben/Graham on the social and emotional aspects of eating.  It is a great introduction to the social and emotional aspects and I wholeheartedly recommend you watch it (along with the other parts to it). 

Here is part one:

Positive Affirmations: A Great Way to Start Your Day

The fuel to emotional eating is emotional hunger. Unfortunately, no matter what you do, you will always have emotional hunger. It is what makes us human but this doesn’t mean we have no hope of dealing with it. The emotional hunger isn’t the problem; it is how you deal with it that really counts.

At the moment, the only way you may know how to deal with emotions is to eat or you may be the type who uses food on certain occasions to deal with an emotion. You may even be someone who doesn’t think they use food for comfort but doesn’t really know if they do or not.

For me, I was really unaware of the way I used food for comfort. When I started stripping my diet down and eating low fat foods, I really started to see that I did use food for emotional comfort and a LOT of the time too. I still have moments now where I struggle to keep awareness of my feelings. I am lucky though to have some great support through it.

When you eat for emotional reasons, you can become so attached to dealing with the ups and downs of life with food that any suggestion that you can actually stop this makes you nervous. In Part One: An Introduction to Emotional Eating I mentioned people going into a blind panic and bingeing, this is what I am talking about here. You are dependent on food for comfort. It is like security to you, no wonder it makes you nervous if that was to be taken away! Many people simply cannot imagine being able to handle a bad day without food there for comfort.

When you are an emotional eater, you really do feel truly hungry and when the craving grips you, you can’t tell its not really hunger. People who are not emotional eaters usually eat less when they are troubled by emotion hunger. Their emotional hunger doesn’t feel like physical hunger.

Emotional hunger and the feeling that you are truly hungry, has so much power over you that it drives you to go to almost any lengths to satisfy it. Have you driven to the store late at night just to get some junk food?

There is such power in emotional hunger that if you do not deal with the underlying issues to it, you will always be at its mercy. It will control you.

Some signs of emotional hunger:

• It results from something emotionally upsetting.

• It has a quick onset. It comes on rapidly.

• It demands food immediately.

• It doesn’t notice how why or what is being eaten.

• It can even demand more food even after a person is stuffed.

• It demands particular foods to be fulfilled (like cake and chocolate).

If you are compelled to eat in this way and cannot be patient, then you know it is most likely an emotional issue you are dealing with.

Are you an emotional eater? Do you feel compelled to eat in stressful situations?

Below I have put together some questions you may want to take the time to answer if you feel that you could be an emotional eater. These will help you get a better understanding of yourself and your eating.

• Is it hard for you to see emotional eating in your life?How hard do you find it to see it?Describe the instances where you think you emotionally eating.Do you think that this is an obstacle to your weight loss?

• Do you think you can tell the difference when you are experiencing emotional hunger versus physical hunger?

• Have you ever mistake emotional hunger for physical hunger? Do you eat out of boredom for example? Has it become such a habit that only on reflection you can see what you are doing, as opposed to in the moment it happens?

• Why do you think you use food rather than address the emotion directly? Do you always use food to deal with emotions?

Activity: During your day be more aware of your eating habits and notice when you eat out of true hunger versus emotional hunger. Note down whether your feelings on this. Were you surprised at how much you used it to numb yourself?

For A Complete Guide on Cravings Click Here

Part One: Introduction to Emotional Eating

Part Three: Food Addiction & Its Origin

For many people, simply following a balanced diet and exercising is not enough to lose weight. Many find it impossible to stick to a diet and to control what they are eating, despite their best efforts. Maybe you are one of these people?

You already know how to lose weight – you know you must eat more nutritionally but you seem to slip up at every turn. So what is getting in your way?

The answer is most likely a mix of physical addiction to food and emotional eating. Emotional eating is the hardest part to overcome and is what I will discuss below (physical addiction will be discussed in a later blog post).

The thing I have found is that a lot of the information available out there (including diet programs) is that they do not addresss this issue and if they do, they just touch on it.

However this issue is a big one and can stand in the way of someone achieving the healthy lifestyle changes they want. Especially if you are following a diet that restricts you in anyway. For some this can lead to a blind panic and before you know it you will have just engulfed a large chocolate cheesecake and will still be wanting more.

Food is a security blanket for many and to be restricted can make us feel vulnerable and exposed, even if we aren’t completely aware of it (which we usually aren’t because by the time we have become rational again, after a good old binge, we are too numb to feel anything).

What is emotional eating?

Emotional eating means to eat to satisfy emotional hunger. You eat food for comfort or a way to help you cope in life. You eat for reasons other than nutritional.

We all do this. Emotional eating is part of our culture. We use food to celebrate, to deal with upset, to deal with a hard day at work and even boredom (ever sit in front of the TV eating mindlessly?) It is a part of our culture. The problem with this is, it isn’t really seen as a problem in society, but it is one.

We spend so much time numbing ourselves, that when we do not have an opportunity to do so, we don’t know how best to deal with the emotions that arise in us. Food also has physically addictive properties within it that can affect our mood as well (I will discuss this later in a blog post) so everything can be very overwhelming. When we don’t live in the present moment and allow emotions to flow through us, but instead numb ourselves, we carry a lot of baggage around unknowingly. Sometimes this can surface in a bout of aggression or other form. The thing is, if we don’t face it, don’t learn to deal with our emotions then we just continue to live a life of numbing, of bingeing or craving. You miss out on the potential of life, of embracing emotions.

People suffering with this way of eating are driven to eat so they don’t have to face what is bothering them internally. They become addicted to the way they handle life. This is why dieting and calorie restriction doesn’t work. And since most diets do not teach you about emotional eating, we never become fully aware of it and think it is something wrong with us.

If others can do it, why can’t I?

Unless you learn to stop emotional eating and deal with your emotions in the present moment, you will find it impossible to lose weight and keep it off. Not to mention you will find it pretty hard to enjoy life fully if you are constantly battling with this issue with your weight loss.

If this resonates with you, then you are not alone and you can overcome it.

I will be writing about emotional eating this week and next, so stay tuned.

For A Complete Guide on Cravings Click Here

Part Two: What Fuels Emotional Eating

Part Three: Food Addiction & Its Origin