find out why you eat when you aren't hungry

Find our why you eat when you aren't hungry. Address the reasons directly. Food can only satisfy stomach hunger. It cannot make other hungers go away. It can only postpone them or temporarily cover them up. If you are lonely and you eat, you will have given yourself a reason why you are lonely - 'I'm too fat and therefore I am alone.' You won't have addressed your loneliness; rather you will have taken yourself a step away from solving it.

You will also - without meaning to - have given yourself an extra problem: a food problem.

If you eat when you need to cry, your tears will always be there waiting to be shed.

If you eat when you are angry, you are swallowing a feeling that needs to come out.

If you eat when you are feeling lost, you may feel more lost.

Allow yourself the idea that you might not be hungry for food at all.Your hunger might be emotional. Food cannot satisfy other kinds of hungers. It can quiet them momentarily but, when you are finished eating, they are still there. The food you eat to temporarily quell your emotions can't actually do that. It is you - not the food - who is quieting the uneasy emotion. You can't always respond to your emotional hungers. You won't always know what is troubling you. You may not have the words to explain the feelings. You may be ashamed of certain feelings. But that doesn't mean that covering them up with food is a solution.

If you are eating when you aren't hungry, stop and ask yourself what you are hungry for. If you can't come up with an answer, and don't know what exactly you need at that time, don't despair. This is not a reason to eat. It is a reason to be pleased with yourself for not eating and not adding to your original problem. If you can't work out what you are feeling and what would be satisfying, try feeling regret about not knowing the answer. Recognizing you don't know what will calm and soothe you more successfully than eating when you are not physically hungry for food.

hints

If you can't fathom your emotional hungers, or are too afraid of them, don't worry. Here are some things you can do to give yourself the space to find out:

write some sentences asking yourself what you are hungry for

take a bath

cuddle up in a blanket and read a book

take a walk

phone a friend

draw/ paint a picture

go to the cinema

There may be something that is troubling you that you can't quite put your finger on. Even though you don't know what it is, you've stopped yourself falling into the food and adding to your problems. Perhaps you have uncomfortable feelings that make no sense to you. You feel unhappy or angry. You don't know or understand why. You with the feelings would go away. You push them away but they come back. If you can acknowledge these uncomfortable feelings, they won't have to plague you. Perhaps you are feeling excited or delighted. Perhaps you are feeling calm. Each person has feelings they are used to coping with, even pleasurable ones. We expect positive feelings to be easy, but they too can be troublesome. Feelings are very similar to food. If you pay attention to the feeling, if you allow yourself to experience it, it will fill you up. Sometimes you will be filled up with sadness, sometimes with anger, sometimes with joy. When your personal feelings fill you up, you will feel better even if the feelings are sad ones.

Being able to put names to the emotions that lie behind your wish to eat when you aren't physically hungry is the most nourishing food you can give yourself. Notice the emotions you are most comfortable with.Write them down. Notice the emotions that make you uneasy. Write those down too. For example, if you feel nervous or reluctant to acknowledge your anger, think about why. Did you come from an angry or violent home? Or were you never allowed to express anger when you were growing up? Think about the personal reasons why you regard anger in the way that you do. Remember anger is just a feeling like any other. You may not be easy with it but you can learn to accept it. You don't always have to show it just because you feel it. And what about the feelings close to anger? Can you accept feelings of helplessness? Can you allow yourself to feel sad? Can you recognize rage in yourself? Is disappointment a feeling you know? Is it difficult to admit to feeling depressed? These emotions can be hard to accept. But you don't have to do anything with them, just experience them privately, for yourself.

Even if you are uneasy with feelings of this sort, naming them and experiencing them lets you know what they are like. Instead of keeping them at a safe distance, where they can threaten you, feeling them lessens their menace. They may be uncomfortable or disconcerting, they may make you feel sad or in pain, but as you get to know them your confidence in handling them will make you less afraid of yourself. Knowing them in this way will help you with your eating.

when you want to eat but you know you aren't really hungry, you can ask yourself:

am i angry?

am i sad?

am i feeling helpless?

am i in a rage?

am i disappointed?

am i depressed?

am i excited?

Often there will be nothing you need to do about your private feelings. They don't have to be acted on. They don't have to be run away from. They don't have to be turned into something else. They don't have to be taken out on somebody else. They are just part of what makes you human in your own unique way. You might not be able to work out the emotional reasons why you might want to eat when you aren't physically hungry. That's OK. You are looking for clues to help you find the feelings and activities that will satisfy your real emotional hungers. That way you can keep food and eating for when you are physically hungry.