Normal Eating Support Group

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Are You an Emotional Eater? Take the Test!

Are you an emotional eater? If so, what are the reasons you eat? Are you mainly soothing negative emotions, or do you eat primary to distract yourself from the real problems in your life? How does being fat affect your view of yourself, and perhaps even serve you?
Take the test and find out! After [...]

5 Reasons Emotional Eaters Shun Mindfulness

There’s been a lot of discussion in the forum lately about mindful eating – generally how much people don’t want to do it. It’s ironic that emotional eaters who claim to love eating find it so hard to just eat – to focus only on eating when they’re eating. It seems the only time that [...]

5 Main Triggers for Emotional Eating

When you’re in the moment of craving – wanting to eat, though you’re not hungry – it doesn’t help to have abstract knowledge of why you eat. If you know that you eat when you’re angry, for example, that doesn’t help much in the moment that you’re angry. You’re still angry and you still want [...]

How to Stop Emotional Eating in the Evening

Do you eat in the evening – and eat and eat? If so, you are not alone! Here is a sampling of the many posts about this in the forum:
“Night eating has been my number one curse. When I initiated that terrible habit then the pounds really started a rampant escalation. I have found that [...]

2 Main Reasons that People Are Overweight

What makes people fat are the two main factors that interfere with body wisdom:

Emotional Eating and Compulsive Overeating – Eating when you’re not hungry, to meet emotional needs and cravings.
Processed Food – Processed foods are engineered to pervert body wisdom so people eat more.

Body wisdom is an inborn attraction to the foods that our body [...]

Emotional Eating in Men and Boys

Since I started the original Normal Eating Support Group in 2002, only a tiny fraction of members have been men – well under 1%. And those few men who joined have never stuck around. In contrast, many of our female members have been active participants for years. (I’m very grateful to those who have found [...]

Eating Out of Loneliness (or Is It?)

The Normal Eating® approach is to figure out the reasons behind emotional eating, and then take steps towards fixing the real problem. So if you’re eating out of loneliness, you’d take steps towards enriching your social life.
The tricky part is figuring out the real problem. It’s not always obvious. For example, consider this question from [...]

A Simple Tip to Stop Compulsive Overeating

Not all emotional eating comes from the expectation of future deprivation, but some of it does. How many people, for example, decide to start a diet on June 1, and then spend May 22 to May 31 overeating — getting while the getting is good? A lot!
Even if you’ve sworn off dieting, a sense of [...]

A Lightbulb Moment to Stop Emotional Eating?

Are you waiting for a “lightbulb moment” to catapult you out of emotional eating once and for all? This came up recently in the Normal Eating Support Group. It’s a very common attitude, but not one that gets you where you want to go. This is the same thinking that brings you, “I’ll start my [...]

9 Truths of Normal Eating

I went into a Barnes & Noble recently and asked for their section on emotional eating. They didn’t have one! Books on emotional eating are scattered across at least three sections: Nutrition, Diet, Eating Disorders, and Self Improvement. What a vivid reflection of how eating and weight problems are misunderstood.
Emotional eating is the single most [...]