53: How To Escape Reactive & Automatic Eating Habits

Why is changing reactive and automatic eating habits important if you want to get to goal weight and keep it off? 

Reactive and automatic eating are two adpative habits that respresent habitual overeating. If we always look to food to resist, react to, or escape from how we feel OR we use eating as a form of escapism then you are chronically overeating; which is in the way of weight loss. 

I offer three approaches to work with decreasing reactive and automatic eating; working ahead of the build up of negative emotions, directly processing how you feel and cultivating a relationship with your emotional/thinking patterns, and practicing acceptance to what is and tell the truth about what is happening in your life. Finally, you can increase your awareness of how your thinking and feelings affect your nervous system and whether you are in a stressed state or not. 

Questions to ask regarding reactive and automatic eating: 

1. If you are not hungry for the food then what am I thinking eating is going to give me?  
2. My need in this situation is for _____________________________. 
3. How else could I meet this need more directly? List as many as possible.
4. What is this situation trying to tell me is needed and or needs to be accepted? 
5. How can I give time and space to process my day and the emotions I am feeling before I eat?

Homework: 

Challenge yourself to practice a different response (other than eating) when you want to reactive eat or automatic eat up to FIFTY times. At the end of fifty times responding differently, you will start to fundamentally change your habit of reactive and/or automatic eating.