Stress Eating and The Holidays

Food and the Holidays go hand in hand right? Throw in stress and now we can add Emotionally
Eating to the party.

How often have you been super stressed about getting your Christmas cards out on time and
found yourself eating an entire plate of cookies? or get mad that the school wants you to buy
white corduroy leggings for the Holiday pageant, which DO NOT exist and suddenly the fudge
you bought for your in-laws is gone? This sort of thing happens all the time during the Holidays,
do not worry, I am here to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

After an Emotional Eating episode, I was always filled with tons of shame and regret, I couldn’t
think straight and my stomach hurt and I wanted to cover up all evidence just in case CSI came
overlooking for candy wrappers.

Brené Brown says about shame, “Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives:
secrecy, silence, and judgment.”

What if we started talking about Emotional Eating? What if we had an emergency list of coping
mechanisms for when we are freaking out about the Christmas cards or the lack of white
corduroy leggings anywhere on the planet? Odds are the junk food wouldn’t have a chance
versus come honestly to solutions or at least someone interested in hearing us out.

We have all emotionally eaten. If you have ever had a piece of cake at a party or stuffing on
Thanksgiving, or candy corn on Halloween, you have eaten to celebrate an occasion, which is
contradictory to consuming food to fuel your body. So, let’s just destigmatize emotional eating
right off the start. We have all done it to some degree and there are many reasons why we eat in
addition to hunger. It could be because everyone else at the table is eating chips at the Mexican
restaurant.

The only problem food ever solves is Hunger, so to use food to solve any other type of problem
is a mistake because:
a) The original problem or issue isn’t addressed.
b) Now you have the food to metabolize and 99% of the time we do not reach for broccoli
when we are bored, restless, sad, or obsessing over something that happened at work. So
now we have the emotions we haven’t addressed, and the crappy food (which is almost
always some sort of toxin) we are throwing at our body to try to handle it.

Tomorrow: Coping Mechanisms that do not come in a wrapper.