{"id":29,"date":"2010-10-15T16:36:38","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T23:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eatingreport.com\/blog\/?p=29"},"modified":"2010-10-15T16:36:38","modified_gmt":"2010-10-15T23:36:38","slug":"people-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/people-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Most People Fail At Ending Their Emotional Eating?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emotional eating<\/a> is a problem that keeps many people from enjoying vibrant health and causes anguish and feelings of helplessness for many. As a result, therapists, coaches, and self-help authors have tried to
\nhelp emotional eaters stop overeating in response to emotions. And
\nunfortunately all of them have failed you.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Because they didn\u2019t fully understand the true cause of most
\nemotional eating.<\/p>\n

After 25 years and about 13,000 clients, I finally figured out what causes
\nemotional eating. Although beliefs are, in fact, responsible for most of the
\nproblems that plague us\u2014such as anxiety, the fear of rejection, worrying
\nwhat others think of us, anger, lack of confidence, and most relationship
\nissues\u2014they are not the primary cause of emotional eating.<\/p>\n

Over the years I tried to help some people with emotional eating by
\nhelping them eliminate the beliefs that seemed to cause the problem.
\nUnfortunately, the results weren\u2019t great. We worked on belief after belief
\nand many aspects of their lives improved significantly. But one thing didn\u2019t
\nchange\u2014their eating habits.<\/p>\n

But because I knew from years of experience that change can be easy
\nand lasting, when presented with a behavior I couldn\u2019t change by eliminating
\nbeliefs (like eating), I didn\u2019t conclude it couldn\u2019t be done. Instead, I decided
\nthere must be a way to help people like you, and I just hadn\u2019t figured it out
\nyet.<\/p>\n

The Turning Point<\/p>\n

I started figuring out a solution to emotional eating in August 2009, when
\na close friend of mine asked me to help him with his emotional eating
\nproblem.<\/p>\n

Because I had realized that beliefs have little to do with emotional
\neating in most cases, I looked elsewhere. Here\u2019s what I discovered in the
\nprocess of working with my friend and other emotional eating clients since
\nthen.<\/p>\n

Emotional eating has just one primary cause: a unique type of
\nconditioning that appears to only apply to eating. In addition to this
\nconditioning, some emotional eating can also be traced to a few beliefs.<\/p>\n

Conditioning of eating happens in one of two ways. The first and most
\ncommon is when you have some negative feeling or experience and then just
\nhappen to eat and experience a \u201cpleasurable distraction.\u201d In other words,
\nwhen you eat you experience a pleasurable feeling instead of a negative
\nfeeling and you also have a distraction from the negative feeling.<\/p>\n

After (unconsciously) noticing many times that eating provides a
\npleasurable distraction in that situation, you get conditioned to eat
\nwhenever that situation occurs in the future.<\/p>\n

The second way conditioning happens is when you want a \u201creward,\u201d such
\nas wanting to feel good or comfortable, or to celebrate. You eat and then
\ndiscover that you are experiencing the reward you want; after numerous
\nconnections between eating and the \u201creward,\u201d eating gets conditioned to
\noccur whenever you desire one of the rewards.<\/p>\n

In a blog post I wrote about eating in October 2009, I pointed out:
\n\u2026if your parents continually rewarded you for special things you
\ndid as a child by giving you a special meal with the food you really
\nliked, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you wanted to feel
\nacknowledged for something you did.<\/p>\n

I call this process \u201cconditioning\u201d because the behavior (eating) is
\nexperienced as compulsive, as driven. Eating happens automatically and
\nrequires considerable will power to stop.<\/p>\n

This conditioning is the emotional equivalent of a belief: You have the
\nemotional sense that the behavior in question is the best way to get what you
\nwant. In the case of emotional eating, it feels as if eating is the best way to
\ngive yourself pleasure, to reward yourself, to provide a pleasurable
\ndistraction from something negative, etc. It\u2019s like an emotional, rather than
\na cognitive, conclusion.<\/p>\n

At that point I realized that one way to describe emotional eating is
\nthat, for the most part, it\u2019s \u201cset off\u201d both by \u201ctriggers\u201d and \u201crewards.\u201d
\nEating to achieve a reward is when you eat when you want to get a
\npositive feeling or to celebrate. Triggered eating is eating that provides a
\npleasurable distraction from negative feelings or events. So the eating is
\n\u201ctriggered\u201d by these negative experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emotional eating is a problem that keeps many people from enjoying vibrant health and causes anguish and feelings of helplessness for many. As a result, therapists, coaches, and self-help authors have tried to help emotional eaters stop overeating in response to emotions. And unfortunately all of them have failed you. Why? Because they didn\u2019t fully … Continue reading “Why Do Most People Fail At Ending Their Emotional Eating?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}