All posts by : Deborah King

Do you find yourself mindlessly inhaling potato chips? Do you nervously devour the entire bread basket at restaurants before your first course even comes to the table? Does your diet consist mostly of comfort foods like pasta and potatoes? Do you find yourself wandering toward the fridge after an upsetting phone call or email? Does a stressful day at work make you want to break out the nachos?

You may very well be an emotional eater, but fear not, you are not alone! The good news is you can curb your emotional eating – you have the power to overcome your struggles with food and weight.

The first step is understanding why and when you turn to stress eating. Everyone does it from time to time, but if you are someone who handles all your difficult emotions by eating – whether you are bored, angry, sad, jealous, or nervous – then you are clearly stuck in a destructive cycle that is not healthy for your mind or your body. Emotional and stress eating is a form of self-medication. While some people turn to alcohol and drugs, others turn to food, especially comfort foods like carbs which trick our bodies into feeling warm and fuzzy and safe. You may be eating to suppress whatever emotions you are feeling, but notice that once you’ve devoured that entire bowl of macaroni and cheese or that big bowl of buttery popcorn, your emotions are still there waiting for you. You usually end up feeling even worse than before you took your first bite. And now your body is going to wear the extra weight from that binge. It’s a lose-lose situation and the resulting shame and feelings of loss of self-control put you in an even worse emotional place than before.

So let’s rewind and think about what you can do before you take that first bite! Make it a habit to grab your journal every time you want to reach for food and answer these questions: Am I really hungry? Am I depressed or anxious? Why do I want this food right now? And really answer yourself honestly? What just happened prior to your craving this food? Are you mad or frustrated or stressed out or exhausted? Is there something else you can do to resolve these emotions rather than numb them with junk food? Perhaps you would feel better if you went for a walk outside or took a warm bath or called a friend. Maybe chewing on something healthy and crunchy like celery would help you keep your mouth busy and help you release those emotions.

One of the causes of your stress eating may also be a result of childhood habits. How was food treated in your household growing up? Were you rewarded with food for good behavior? Was food taken away from you as punishment if you did something bad? Was your family struggling to put food on the table and you now see lots of food as a sign of success? Did your family encourage you to “clean your plate” no matter how full you were? All of these habits are emotional eating habits formed very early in our childhood, but that does not mean they are habits we cannot break. If you are aware of why you eat and when you eat, it will be a lot easier for you to make a point to eat when you actually need to eat and you will be able to control your mindless emotional eating.

You may also have unresolved suppressed emotions from a traumatic or stressful experience that you are protecting yourself with through the comfort of food and emotional eating. Physical or sexual abuse, a difficult relationship or lack of one, divorce, the death of a loved one, or as is becoming more and more common in today’s struggling economy, the loss of a home or job, are all situations that you may be battling and trying to eat your way past.

If you know you are going through a rough patch and your emotions are strong, try not to store them in your body as they will do more harm than good if they are bottled up inside you. Let your truth out and give yourself permission to release these emotions. One of the best ways to do so is to write in a journal everyday. Take a few minutes every evening at the end of your day and write down what is bothering you, what is on your mind, what happened that day…be 100% honest with yourself and don’t sugar-coat or try to be eloquent in your writing. Don’t be harsh on yourself for what you are writing – these are your feelings and they are 100% legit. If you can let yourself be honest with your emotions on paper, you will make fewer trips to the fridge!

If weight has long been a stubborn issue for you, come to one of my in-person workshops and let’s get to the bottom of it together! To sign up for an upcoming workshop near you, please visit my Events page at: /events-workshops//

It’s that time of year again for Women’s Health Week and it’s about time! This year’s theme, “It’s Your Time,” could not be more appropriately titled. Now, more than ever before, it is vital to acknowledge Women’s Health Week and work to empower women today to take charge of their health and take great care of themselves. In the past several months alone, women and their health choices have been under attack and used by politicians as part of a political game more than ever before. There is a war on women going on, and women’s wellness and health issues are at stake. It is high time women take back their power, and both men and women unite together to promote women’s wellness. Let’s make women’s health a top priority in our everyday life! Not just this week, but every week and every year!

Defining Women’s Wellness

Women’s wellness embodies everything in women’s health – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Women tend to put themselves last as many of them try to balance work and family and do it all. Oftentimes, their physical, spiritual and emotional health needs are put last in the long list of daily to-do’s. Women are so focused on taking care of everyone and everything else that they forget to even think about who is taking care of them. It is perplexing to me that so many women aren’t on their own list of priorities, as I believe it is imperative that in order to take care of anyone else’s needs, they really need to be able to handle their own selves first.

So to jumpstart your plan of action, here are some starter tips on ways you can celebrate Women’s Health Week and take better care of yourself and the women in your life today:

Physical Wellness: Taking Care of our Bodies!

• Visit your healthcare professional/encourage the women in your life to visit their healthcare professional for regular checkups and preventative screenings.
• Adopt an active lifestyle – make it a point to take walks, exercise, try yoga or Pilates or other mind-body workouts that will not only make you feel better physically, but will also ground you and improve your emotional health.
• Eat healthy! Proper nutrition and drinking lots of water will go a long way in taking good care of your body.
• Avoid unhealthy and risky behaviors and habits such as smoking, drinking excessively, and not wearing seatbelts or bike helmets.

Emotional Health: Taking Care of our Minds!

• Make daily meditations a part of your everyday routine! Twice a day for twenty minutes will go a long way in helping you calm your mind and find your inner peace and sense of self. If you don’t know how to meditate or would like to learn an amazing meditation technique that will take your meditation to a higher level of consciousness, please check out my meditation download available online at: https://deborahking.b.smartzsites.com/learn-to-meditate/
• Get plenty of Zzz’s! Sleep is important to keeping your stress down and taking care of women’s wellness. You may notice if you fall asleep often during your daily meditations that you may be lacking in the sleep department. Make sure you give your body and mind time to rest and recuperate before you start conquering the next day’s list of to-do’s!
• Manage your stress better by learning to say ‘no’, making boundaries for yourself and keep them! No one can look out for you better than yourself, so be sure to set some limits so you aren’t overworked and overstressed!
• Find something that brings you joy in your life – whether it’s an activity or hobby you love to do, or people you love to see who make you feel happy – and make a point to find the time to do it/see them.

Spiritual Calm: Taking Care of our Higher Self and Connecting to Source!

• Reconnect with your higher self by reconnecting with Mother Nature – take walks through parks, on hiking trails, by the ocean. Appreciate all that our beautiful nature has to offer and feel closer to Source. Or try what I do, sleep outside to get a big dose of nature every night!
• Journal your thoughts and emotions daily. Writing in a journal daily is one of the most powerful and uplifting tools both women and men can use to find our inner truths. If we can be 100% honest with ourselves, we can be honest with the world and we can connect closer to Source and each other.
• Empower your Chakras! Daily meditations, taking a bath with sea salt and baking soda, hugging a tree, loving our pets, and tapping into our creativity are just some of the ways we can improve our chakra balance and thus, connect closer to Source. For tips on buffing up your chakras, you can read more in my blog on the Secret Seven at: https://deborahking.b.smartzsites.com/blog/2012/03/25/the-secret-seven-7-tips-to-buff-up-your-chakra-system/

These tips are a springboard towards better health for both men and women, but I urge all of you this week especially to please make a point to help the women in your lives as well as yourself to better nurture their spiritual, physical and emotional health. Too often, we move at such a fast pace in our society that women’s most basic needs get forgotten or left behind. Instead of pushing women’s wellness to the backburner this year, let us make a point of promoting and living it!