Coping With Emotional Eating During the Holiday Season: 5 Essential Keys to Your Success

Are You Ready to Make This Holiday Season One Where the Richness Stays in Your Heart Instead of On Your Hips?

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For many of us whether we think we have a weight challenge or not, emotional eating plays a role in how we approach the holidays. The holidays are filled with cues that take us back to our childhoods, real or mythical, they produce situations where the “feel good” expectation is very high and they are the place where tradition rules no matter what.

All of this combines to create a time that is expected to redress the wrongs of the year, set the upbeat expectations of the new year and get the human connection that we missed during the year. Whew! Just writing about it exhausts me.

With so much feeling and expectation riding on the holiday season, we can feel powerless to change how and what we eat during the holidays. We think that the happy, wonderful, fulfilling experiences we are seeking are necessarily and absolutely tied to food. How it is prepared, what is prepared, who prepares it, where it is served and that if it has been that way in the past then it must be that way in the future.

For anyone, challenged or not with food and eating, this rigid structure of the holidays only exacerbates the uncomfortable feelings that lead to thinking we are powerless to change our experience and still get the warm, fuzzy, coziness of the holidays.

In our perceived powerlessness, we decide to hunker down and get through it as best we can. Then we try to make up for everything that happened during the holidays in the new year. What we need is to understand what creates the thinking that “we are powerless” and what can we do about it.

The belief that “I’m powerless” is at the root of most eating challenges. We feel powerful uncomfortable feelings and reach for food thinking “I have no other choice to deal with this feeling but eat.”

Feeling powerless is really a combination of feeling hopeless (no matter what I do I can’t change the situation) and helpless (maybe others can be different but I can’t). Powerlessness stems from believing you have no choice, no freedom of action or that whatever you choose will not make a difference.

We have trained ourselves (adults trained us as children and then we took over the maintenance) to connect the biological and emotional reactions we get from food to the belief that this is the best and the only way to cope with our uncomfortable feelings.

This connection becomes a given in our lives and we no longer think that other reactions, other experiences are possible. This shutting down of our thinking and awareness is what limits our choices and our ability to act.

We walk into the holidays with the plan: I will control my eating, I will control my behavior, I will avoid the naughty foods. This is not a plan for changing your habit of using food to cope with emotions. This is a plan for eating more than you said you would and feeling guilty that you did.

To create a plan for a new holiday experience you first need a foundation on which to put the plan. A foundation that will give you the capacity to change your behavior and experience your plan instead.

Here are 5 essential keys to empowering yourself and creating a new fun and healthy way to eat, drink and be merry in this holiday season.

Key #1: Awareness. It all starts here. If you don’t know what you do now, you won’t know what gotcha’s to plan for. Figure out your temptations (the food you can’t seem to live without), your triggers (sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feelings that get you reaching for the fat and sugar laden goodies), and your most vulnerable situations (alone at a party, Christmas dinner with Mom and Dad, window shopping, in overwhelm mode, in stress me to screaming mode).

Key #2: Expectations. When our expectations of an event exceed the reality of an event we get disappointed. We were looking for a pony and got a room full of manure instead. The holidays with their intense hype about happy feelings, happy families, love abounding, and hard hearts melting set the stage for outlandish expectations for how each of us individually should feel and experience the time.

Take off your high-powered feel-good expectation glasses. Your past experiences of the standard situations are a good guide to what is likely to happen this time around.

Key #3: Intentions. Just because you have put aside your “this time it really will be better” expectation doesn’t mean things can’t be different or better or even outlandishly wonderful. It is all in how you “frame” what you are intending to experience. Putting the right frame (read “the meaning I create for a situation”) can flip an experience from yuck to wonderful in an instant.

Having the intention of being curious about others and their behavior, curious about the environment and having the intention of enjoying yourself and having fun no matter what are two powerful ways to create outlandishly wonderful experiences.

Key #4: Planning. Planning is one place to create choice and choice is empowering. For example, plan how you will side-step Aunt Martha’s comments about your weight or how to meet them head-on. Know your temptations, triggers and situations (from Key #1) and think of three new ways of responding to them. It is important that the new ways help you feel joyful, relaxed and confident.

Key #5: Learning. Creating and installing new behaviors and beliefs is a process of learning. And learning is core to your being. You cannot not learn. All you have to do is practice the actions in these keys and you will find yourself learning powerful ways to be present with and healthfully cope with all of your emotions, comfortable and uncomfortable.

Bonus Tip: Awareness in the moment. As you experiment with these five keys, you will notice that the awareness of how you are behaving will get closer and closer to the exact moment of the behavior. Then it will even precede the behavior so that before you act you are aware and can create choices of different behaviors for yourself and act on those choices.

This continuum of awareness is a learning process and requires celebration for the progress you make no matter what your hopes and expectations were. The more you celebrate your movement along the continuum, the faster you will move and the faster you’ll gain the changes you desire.

To happy holidays, happy eating and happy self. It truly is possible!

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This post has been submitted to : Prevention Not Prescription.