It is very common for people to eat in a desperate need to fill an emotional void. Unfortunately that void cannot be filled regardless how much food you pour in it. All you manage to do is get fatter and fatter. Your emotions play an important role in driving your eating behavior towards healthy or not so healthy food.
Finding other ways of coping with your emotion instead of running to the fridge is a must if you want to achieve long-term weight loss and health. If you don’t get rid of your emotional demons or funnel them in a more productive way, you can’t expect to win against them using just your willpower. For a time you will be able to follow your weight loss plan but eventually you will crack under the pressure.
A new weight loss study funded by NIH and done by the researchers at Temple’s Center for Obesity Research is trying to figure out the best way to help people to cope with their emotions and emotional eating.
Edie Goldbacher, one of the researchers said "The problem that we’re trying to address is that the success rates for long-term weight loss are not as good as we would like them to be. Emotional eating may be one reason why people don’t do as well in behavioral weight loss groups, because these groups don’t address emotional eating or any of its contributing factors. " So it seems you have to put an end to your emotional eating if you want to be able to lose weight forever.
The participant from the first wave of the study succeed to lose weight in a relative short period of time. What is more interesting is that the participants that continued to use the techniques that help prevent emotional eating suffered the least weight fluctuations. Some just kept their new weight without a problem. The future of this study sounds promising already.
You should also check out:
- How to Stop Emotional Eating: breaking free from emotional eating
- Emotional eating: the relation between your mood and eating
May 5, 2010
Weight Loss News