Appetite Awareness Workbook by Linda W. Craighead

Author:Linda W. Craighead
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608822966
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

What About Your Underlying Emotional Issues?

Many approaches to emotional eating are designed to help you resolve your underlying emotional issues so you won’t feel the need to eat so intensely. In contrast, AAT starts by taking decisions about eating out of the emotional realm. How much you “want” is no longer the basis for your eating decisions. Instead, you choose to use hunger and fullness to decide when to start and stop eating. Rather than simply giving in to emotionally-driven urges to eat, you instruct yourself in the following way:

It doesn’t matter if I feel anxious, upset, or bored, or I am celebrating and enjoying food. I have made a commitment to stop as soon as I feel stomach distention. At that point, food has done all the good it can do for me. Continuing to eat will detract from whatever good the food can do for me and will create more negative feelings. In the moment, it may be hard for me to remember that I will feel worse later. That is why I use my stomach as a stop sign instead of allowing my mind to make excuses to eat more. Of course I don’t want to stop eating. Right now, I think more food will make me feel better. But I know that is magical thinking. I wish more food would make me feel better, but it won’t. Getting stuffed always makes me feel worse.

You may find that you do have emotional issues and that you must address these before you are able to make further progress with AAT. You may be able to address these yourself, or you may need the help of a peer counselor, personal coach, or professional counselor. You can probably stop gaining weight without resolving other emotional issues. However, you are likely to find that you have to address those issues if you want to reduce emotional eating enough to lose a substantial amount of weight. You must first learn to manage your emotions without bingeing or overeating before you try to lose weight. Otherwise, emotional eating is going to sabotage your efforts. Once you can do that, chapter 10 describes how to use AAT as a foundation for weight loss.

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