Overcoming Overeating: 5 Compassionate Strategies

Overeating affects many people across Australia, often becoming a coping mechanism for dealing with stress, anxiety, or even unresolved grief.  Understanding overeating is the first step towards overcoming it, and in this blog post, we will explore five compassionate strategies to break free from its hold.

Understanding Overeating

Overeating means we eat food in response to our feelings instead of our physical hunger.  It often comes from a place where food becomes the biggest source of comfort and that helps us numb the pain of what we think we’re going to feel if we were to allow ourselves to feel our feelings.

1.  Identify Your Triggers

The first step to overcoming overeating is to identify your triggers.  What situations or feelings lead you to seek solace in food?  It could be a stressful day at work, a fight with a loved one, or feelings of sadness.  Keeping a feelings diary can be a helpful tool.  After your overeating session, write down what you think you might have been feeling, and you’ll probably be right.  This can be the beginning of a great deal of further insight into your own patterns and this might be enough to bring about a sense of relief in your capacity to understanding what’s actually going on.

2.  Cultivate Emotional Awareness

Developing awareness of our feelings is essential.  Often, we ignore or suppress our emotions, leading us to overeat.  Make a habit of checking in with yourself throughout the day.  Ask, “How am I feeling right now?”  Like building any skill, emotional awareness takes practice, but remember: it is a courageous act to be able to take a few seconds and attempt to acknowledge your feelings, instead of ignoring them and as we often do, as we end up running to food to numb the emotional pain we are in, in that moment.

3.  Find a Supportive Strategy instead of Food

Instead of reaching for food when you feel overwhelmed, have a plan of at least one thing you can do in the moment instead of eating: What worked for me in my binge eating and bulimia years was that I would slam the fridge door shut after I decided I didn’t want to binge, and I would do a sharp 180 degree turn away from the fridge and walk with purpose up and down the hallway or I’d do a few laps of the inside of my house until the intensity of my feelings passed, this would only take about 10 minutes at the most - and turned out to be a very empowering coping strategy.

4.  Practising Kindness Towards the Self

It’s essential to practice giving out tiny doses of self-kindness throughout our healing journeys.  Understand that overeating isn’t a sign of weakness, but rather an attempt at coping with our feelings that we don’t understand, and it is always at attempt at self-soothing.  Speaking to ourselves kindly is like working on speaking a new language, it will sound foreign and you won’t want to do it, but if we could speak to ourselves the way we would speak to a close friend, we’re well on our way to be living in a calmer, happier space.

5.  Asking for Help

Asking for help takes courage - a lot of courage, but allow yourself to feel how freeing genuine support could be.  Many people who overeat or struggle with binge eating have always been seen as ‘Good Copers’ in their lives and have prided themselves on doing everything themselves, without asking for help.  Sometimes we all need just a tiny little bit of help to make a world of difference in how we feel about ourselves.

Conclusion

Overcoming overeating requires developing a new language and new daily habits (aiming for a 1% improvement on the day before) and of believing that we are worthy of top quality Self-care.  When we can take that first step and reach out to a professional, our inner world can feel a whole lot calmer.  I wish you the courage to treat yourself with great kindness, just like you would treat a good friend.