Xyngular 90-Day Body Transformation Challenge Commitment #7: I will divorce mood from food

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What happens on a stressful, exhausting, or boring day? When we get home all we want is a whole bag of chips or a pint of rocky road ice cream. Sometimes eating isn't about hunger at all. Eating by mood can be one of the most overwhelming issues for someone who has fought their weight all their lives.
In the heat of an emotional mood, it's hard to separate the physical need for food triggered by hunger from the emotional need triggered by an emotion. Sometimes it's boredom, anger, loneliness, sorrow, fear, frustration, or fatigue that control our responses to food.
We have to become aware of our personal mood/food connection by keeping a journal before we can resolve it. 

Kathy Smith has led many groups through weight loss programs and systems, and the most successful people are almost always those who faithfully journal how they feel before and after they eat. It's important to write our feelings down whenever we're driven by emotion to head to the kitchen for a binge. When we can record our trigger emotion and recognize it for what it is, we can identify the specific food or taste sensation we're after. We can become aware if it's because we're truly hungry or just trying to deal with a particular emotion.

For those of us who recognize that we are emotional eaters, it's important to write about how life is affecting how we eat and binge. We need notes about the days we go off track and respond to our emotional state with certain foods.

Your Xyngular team can be a great support for sharing frustrations and victories once you've identified them.
The goal is to get to the point that you no longer respond to negative feelings with a binge. Then you find some kind of substitution. For example, if you typically start getting cranky around 4:30 most afternoons and that triggers a binge on something you regret later, you may want to schedule a 20-minute walk or some other stress-releasing activity every day at that time and have a light snack ready afterwards. 

Many ideas for this and the other articles in this series were gathered from suggestions by Kathy Smith, a well-known fitness icon who has led the charge for exercising, losing weight, and eating healthy for over 30 years.

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