Anyone successfully stopped boredom/comfort/emotionl eating?

[Nowillpoweratall]

I cannot stop. I enjoy eating, I love food and I'm always really quite bored. Food makes me happy. I also have terrible hayfever at the moment which is making me feel dreadful but the eating was still an issue before that.
Everyday I say to myself I will sort my eating but I don't then I so cross with myself.
There must be a way to overcome this without only relying on willpower?
If I have something nice to eat I tell myself I deserve a treat but I'm going to end up with diabetes so it's an absolutely ridiculous and wrong mindset.

I’ve switched my day around so I get up at 5:30am and go to the gym. Then I’m tired in the evening and go to bed early. It works well in the week but my weekends are a disaster so my weight is just stable at the moment.

Make a massive list of non food treats: some of them free, easy instant access like, watching a favourite band sing your favourite song live on You tube or watching a favourite comedian in a sketch.

Some treats you can plan in advance like buying a magazine or some new nail polish or a face mask - pampering stuff. I sometimes trick myself mby making my 'treat' a fitness or health magazine. Just reading it makes me feel like the kind of person who doesn't overeat.

A treat can be something that's good for your body not bad for it - a 5 minute Adrienne yoga stretch. Or something that engages your mind - a Ted talk or meditation.

Or something that gives you a dopamine or oxytocin or seratonin boost like comfort food does - so cuddle a cat or watch a kitten video or go out and look at the setting sun.

The more I associate the word 'treat' with non-food experiences, the more in control I feel.

I'm the same, boredom and no hobbies. I find the only thing other than food to give me a dopamine hit is buying stuff online. Not good obviously. I used to get the same pleasure from travelling and planning holidays but obviously that's taken a hit over the last two years. I need to find a hobby I like and stick to it but I feel.like I've tried everything. And perimenopause doesn't help 😩

Yes I’m aware of this. My kids eat a great diet, I am a good cook & make everything homemade, their packed lunches are full of goodness, but I also want them to have the mantra “everything in moderation.” There’s nothing wrong with a biscuit and a glass of milk for them after football training/ swimming on a weekend, or a bag of crisps with a picnic lunch. I also get frustrated and despair at going out for days out/ to softplay with other families who bring bags and bags of crappy snacks and feed their kids nonstop, whilst my kids stand there and look on and end up getting handouts because I don’t think biscuits and crisps are necessary in a 2 hour soft play session between breakfast and lunch. 🤷‍♀️

I think as adults who can’t eat like kids can, who have to be more careful with what they eat and putting on weight, we need to accept there will be things in our house we have to have but cannot eat. Bread, wraps (which have a hell of a lot more calories in than a slice of bread!), other stuff. People can harp on about not needing willpower if you don’t have the stuff there, but with everything good/ worthwhile, you need to exercise some discipline and willpower to achieve anything.

@BookWorm45 I mainly watched Dr Jason Fung. I managed to help my dh reverse his newly diagnosed diabetes using his videos.
There's one called something like 'sugar rots you' and he uses an analogy of your body being like a sugar bowl and what happens if you keep filling it even if it's full.
It's very effective!
I still have a bit of sugar but I'm very aware now of not putting too much sugar into the 'sugar bowl'!

@ThePenIsBlue only if you use huge wraps! And even then the carbs are similar to two slices of bread (maybe 27g in the wrap & 32g in the bread).

I'm with you with the willpower - just need to find the switch to flick to make it more important not to snack than to indulge.

One of my friends sorted out her emotional eating issues when she broke up with her long term partner. He wasn’t abusive she was just bored out of her mind and had low level unhappiness. She had married young and never done very much.

She had been very overweight for 30 years, lost 5 stone over 2 years and has been around her desired weight for about 6 years now.

You need to work out why you emotionally eat. Plus what habits did your family have ? DS went to a BBQ at a friends house yesterday, the family are all overweight. He said the meat was cooked really beautifully but there was no salad, veg or coleslaw at all, not one single item. I really probed him that he had surely made a mistake.

I was not raised on a western diet, DH is English but his Mother was way ahead on healthy eating. Her Mother had lived in India and got in to yoga and was experimenting with food way back before WWII.

It will be mind over matter whatever you decide op.

Honestly hobbies! Ones that get you into a flow state. Also recognising why you’re shoving food in. For me I’m in that phase at the moment - recognising why I’m reaching for food, half the time I still eat despite noticing what I really need (a drink, mental stimulation, household mess stressing me out so I should tidy, not eat) but it takes time to rewire your brain.

Theres the binge-urge body shake too - when you want to unnecessarily eat, shake your whole body, dance etc until you feel better and then go do something else 😄

Also WOOP technique - What is my Wish/goal, Outcomes it would give me, Obstacles I may encounter, Plan - what is your if/then plan. Google it, but doing that every day in your head can be really effective for helping you focus on your goal.

Also Insight Timer has lots of good free meditations - I do overeating ones but also inner child meditations as my overeating started in childhood.

Oh my goodness please can I join!? I lost 5 stone in 2020. Felt bloody amazing (unfortunately no tricks or tips just good old calorie counting and low carb / high protein foods!) I fell pregnant with beautiful DS last year. Unfortunately gained it all back, and now dealing with sleepless nights etc just makes me binge constantly. I LOVE food. Have a few good days and then back off the wagon (wheels) again. I feel disgusting I was 16st 4lbs at my last weight in.

Had lunch out then rather disgustingly as we were so tired had a McDonald's for tea. I went to bed feeling like crap! Would love to buddy up too.

I found Susie Orbach's ' on eating' enormously helpful. I kept going back to it. What really helped was her point that you don't have to eat 'healthy foods', but just stop eating once you're not hungry anymore. Although ten years on I do eat reasonably healthily. I still have 'treat' every evening though - some chocolate or a few biscuits etc. So I don't feel I am denying myself anything. My BMI was 28 at my heaviest, is around 19 now.

I can highly recommend the Second Nature programme. It's an app & a website. It addresses: eating, cooking, stress, sleep, meditation, nutrition plus you can ask questions of your mentor about anything else.

I was an overweight kid (my parents were of the generation that made you eat whatever you were given and taught you to ignore your own satiety etc) which developed into BED, then slipped into bulimia then anorexia. I was no fun in my 20s.

I'm in my 40s now and a healthy weight, normal diet but also spend so little time thinking about food except to meal plan for the family. I sometimes remember how much my head revolved constantly around what I had eaten what I wanted to eat, what I shouldn't eat, etc. It was awful.

I did have some therapy in my 30s but by then I was on the mend. But the mend really was just taking a step back and looking at the overall impact on my life and asking: what am I getting out of this obsessing that I can't seem to stop?

And really that is where the answe was for me. Just painstaking, inch by inch uncovering what it was I was covering by staying obsessed. It wasn't really one thing, it was that eating too much then worrying about eating was the entirety of my coping mechanism around small things and big. And what I needed to learn was how to cope with the small things and big. You say you eat out of boredom, OP, but what is wrong with just staying bored until it passes? What is wrong with being sad angry, frustrated, anxious, upset, irritated, or bored? Staying with those feelings was the way out of my food trap. The therapy then was about looking at why I had found all these feelings so unacceptable etc.

It took a long time and I'm not some sort of zen master. I still do self destructive things when I'm struggling to cope (wine anyone? Splurge at the shops? Just be horrible and grumpy for a few days?). But really my life is much more my own and the conveyor belt between negative feelings and food is so far away.

So what I basically realised was that is my finding another strategy with food to fixate on, tweak, fail, renew , rinse and repeat wasn't really looking at the core of the issue. If you eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you are not hungry then your body takes care of itself. All the other stuff was me jabbering at myself so I couldn't hear or feel anything I'd decided I shouldn't feel - like boredom or whatever. The only sustainable fix for me was getting this shit looked at and sorted out. I don't have a perfect life or anything but I am no longer so distracted by food amd diets that I have no room to actually spend some time thinking about that

Eat loads of protein. It really does help reduce the cravings for sugary foods.
If you do still want to snack, eat protein rich foods and protein bars. I like a couple of baby bels and a ryvita. I can't imagine writing that six months ago!

I was given the following advice:

Ask yourself, with treat in hand "should I put this crap in my body or in the bin?"

Most of the time it goes in the bin.

Distraction techniques work too. I took up knitting again after 20 years. I can't get up in the middle of a row, especially if I'm doing something complicated and counting stitches.

Thank you, loads of really helpful advice and ideas in this thread, it's helped a lot.

The only time I am successful is when I am committed to calorie counting - but even then it doesn’t last and I binge. I can’t seem to eat like a normal person.

I wanted to lose a stone by the time I go on holiday and I’ve yo yo’d instead because I am either very “good” at sticking to calories or I binge. No in between. No sensible eating. All or nothing.

I was doing ok then got covid and I know I’ve gained some of the weight I had lost this week.

I feel like a failure. A fat mess and a failure.

Also, as well as binging, I also cannot stop eating. I rarely feel full? I could honestly nibble all day. I would of course reach a point where I felt full but I feel it takes so much longer than normal people.

When I was single, going to the gym most nights, just ate healthier. I miss it!

Newcastle, I've noticed that feeling full is just a preference. It can be weighed against other conflicting preferences; I know my body will survive and thrive on 1500 calories a day, give or take a hundred or so. No need to be pedantic. I may not feel full on some of the food combinations which could make up those 1500 calories. If I ate 1500 calories of danish pastries, probably not. 1500 calories of vegetables and protein, probably yes. The sensation of fullness is a pleasant bonus, but currently, I'm choosing my other preference which is to stay a healthy weight and stave off insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
When you've cracked the first little while, I'm almost prepared to bet that you really won't give a toss about that feeling of fullness anymore. It'll be an irrelevance.

Sorry, Newcastle, posted before finished.
Meant to say that it comes as a really big surprise, but such a relief. Knowing and reminding yourself that you're truly fine on a lower number of calories takes some sort of primal anxiety out of not getting to experience that 'full' feeling, the kind of anxiety that would likely prompt one to eat a bit more.
That association with safety and satiety can be disrupted.

I'm getting my head back around it all, I also have that worry about not feeling full. Today I've stuck to 3 meals and tried to have loads of protein. Made an amazing goats cheese, spinach and fig omelette for lunch. It was so delicious.
Roast chicken with bacon and tons of buttered leeks for tea with green beans and peas.
The test will be this evening and also having the willpower and strength to keep this up and if I do have sweet stuff (which I will) not then start stuffing myself with sugary food all the time.

See this thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/eating_disorders/4555896-what-type-of-counselling

That's really helpful thank you

I’d love to buddy up too if anyone fancies it? This is something I struggle with massively and it is really getting me down. I have no doubt that alot of it is emotional eating with me but despite knowing what I should be doing / eating etc I just cave in the evenings and binge on chocolate / rubbish. I also get panicky if I don’t have a stash of choc in the house. It would be so helpful to have a group of kindred spirits who understand the struggle.