I sometimes cringe at using the term self-care with clients as I find the concept to be a bit fluffy. My clients are high achievers, they’re busy juggling life and they’re struggling with #emotionaleating & #bingeeating. Telling them we’ll work on self-care strategies may sound like I’m suggesting they should make more time for bubble baths and face masks. Advice that I believe would trivialize the problem of Emotional Eating.

Boredom is one of the most common reasons for emotional eating, especially at night. You’re sitting in front of the tv and have the urge to reach for a snack. You know you’re not hungry, you’re just bored!

This can be one of two things:

Do you ever find yourself having an argument with your spouse, and before you know it, you’re standing in front of the kitchen cupboard crunching through a bag of Doritos? You had been doing so well all day with your diet and you weren’t actually hungry, so why did you blow it now when you were just about to go to bed?

I used to have a long list of foods I couldn’t keep at home. A jar of nutella? Absolutely no way, I would eat my way through the jar with a spoon. A packet of biscuits? Definitely not, I wouldn’t sleep knowing they were in the cupboard and I could never stop at one or two. Having these foods around would trigger an all out binge. Just knowing they were there would haunt my mind until eventually I would give in and eat them. Once I started, I wouldn’t stop and it would end with me kicking myself for eating so much and feeling the need to restrict to make up for it.

‘I had a binge this weekend’, ‘I’ve been binging all day’. We hear it all the time right? The word binge gets thrown around a bit, but was it really binge eating? Or did you just eat a lot of food? Or… did you just eat more than your current diet plan tells you to?

You wake up thinking about food, you go to bed thinking about food, you walk up and down supermarket aisles looking at food, maybe every time you pass a bakery or a pizza place you now find yourself fantasizing about food. Thoughts of food and cravings are taking up far more space in your brain than you want them to but you just can’t seem to make it stop. Does any of this sound familiar?