Using Biofeedback To Stop Emotional Eating

You come home after a long day at work, you just had a disagreement with a loved one, you just paid your bills and you're feeling the squeeze on your finances, or you're just plain feeling lonely. What's the first thing you do to drown your sorrows and bring you comfort? You open up that container of ice cream, eating straight from it. You open that bag of cookies, consuming it down to the last crumb. You grab a bag of chips, and as we all know, nobody can eat just one. What drives you to eat junk food in that situation until you're stuffed to the gills? Stress!

Experts say that about 75% of overeating is caused by emotional eating. which is eating for a reason other than just being hungry. Eating is strongly connected to our emotions, whether they be overloaded, depressed, anxious, lonely, or even happy. One of the reasons that a diet may fail is that it does not address the most important aspect of weight management, regulating your emotions. A balance between heart, mind, and emotions has to be included in your diet commitment and intentions. A lot of stress and stress eating can be eliminated as you learn to have compassion for yourself, increase self-acceptance, and learn how to say no to drama.

When we allow stressful emotions to dominate our day, or try to cover up our feelings, it becomes difficult to impossible to change our eating habits. It can cause mindless eating and comfort eating. YO-YO dieting is also a sign of emotional eating. Emotional eating becomes an addiction and becomes hard wired. You need to re-program yourself, the way you think, and your eating habits. Will power is not enough to change eating habits.

One of the ways to rid yourself of the stress that can cause emotional eating is through the use of biofeedback.

Biofeedback involves using a non-invasive machine that allows you to determine and control your physical responses to stressful situations such as increased heart rate, blood pressure and tension. By controlling your response to stress, you can reduce the need to overeat as a method for coping. When you can identify what triggers your eating, you can use biofeedback to manage your emotional issues and take food and weight gain out of the equation.

As you use the biofeedback device, you focus in on your breathing and your heart, while you visualize those things in life that bring you happiness. As you do that, the pattern of your heart rhythm becomes more ordered. As your heart rhythm is measured by the biofeedback device, it provides feedback which indicates whether or not your actions of controlling your breath and focusing in on your thoughts are leading you in the proper direction to reduce your stress level. As your stressful thoughts dissipate and are replaced with thoughts of appreciation and happiness, the biofeedback machine will flash colored lights and emit certain tones which will let you know that you are nearing a state of being emotionally positive. Once you have eliminated your negative thoughts and replaced them with feelings of joy and happiness, your body will relax and you will soon realize that it was your stressful thoughts and not your physiological need for food that prompted you to reach for that container of cookies or gallon of ice cream. Though biofeedback machines used to be very expensive and only available to medical professionals, advances in electronics have made them more widely available such that individuals can now purchase personal units.

So next time that stressful moment causes you to reach for your favorite comfort food, grab your biofeedback machine instead of the bag of cookies and rid yourself of the negative thoughts that can lead you to emotional over eating.

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