From the moment you are born, being fed is strongly associated with comfort and love. For infants, food and hugs go together, and that emotional imprinting stays with you for life. Cooking for someone is a way to show love. A box of chocolates is a traditional gift of love …
There are many reasons that people continue eating after they are no longer hungry. Here’s the short list: You don’t recognize satiation cues. You don’t recognize that you’re no longer hungry until you are past full. It bothers you to leave food on your plate. The reasons for this can …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
