YMCA Healthy Living Magazine, powered by n4 food and health Summer 2017 | Page 14

CLARE WOLSKI, APD
Clare is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian (APD) who is passionate about
empowering people with good nutrition information so they can make the best
decisions for their long term health. To find out more about Clare visit
www.healthyeatinghub.com.au or www.n4foodandhealth.com

HOW TO MANAGE
EMOTIONAL EATING
Nutrition expert Clare Wolski provides this guide to helping you
manage emotional eating.
ost people experience emotional •
eating at some point. Often it’s
during those times when you feel
really low or stressed and you just want to
make yourself feel better. You may think to
yourself ‘what’s the point?’ and so you buy
yourself a bag of potato chips or chocolate
biscuits and annihilate them, only to feel
sick afterwards. This can leave you feeling
like you’ve failed and that you will never
reach your goal. So, you do it all over
again, creating a vicious cycle that’s hard •
to escape.

M

Emotional eating habits are learned
behaviours. We pick them up from the
habits of others, from our own past
experiences and our beliefs about food
and our body. The good news is that we
can unlearn these habits and relearn
others; it’s not an easy thing to do, but it
is doable.
To effectively change your emotional
eating habits, you have to understand
what drives them, because you can’t
expect to change a behaviour without
changing the factors that cause it to
happen – that would be like expecting to
have a holiday in Fiji without buying a
plane ticket!

A food journal. Unintentionally
restricting your food intake during the
day can cause you to become overly
hungry (or ‘hangry’). This can make
stressful situations seem worse and
make it difficult to say “no” to a box of
doughnuts on the way home. Keeping a
food journal can help you to see your
daily intake more clearly, and then
make changes to get more filling food
throughout the day.
A thought journal. You may be
unaware of your own thoughts because
when it comes to habits we often tend
to operate on auto pilot. You can also
speak to yourself in negative ways
without even realising. Writing down
your thoughts can help to
identify if the way you are
thinking is logical, helpful
or even true. Once you
have written down your
thoughts, ask yourself,
“What would I say to a
friend if he/she said
this?”

By keeping an
Emotional
Eating
Journal
(see
You need to ask yourself:
opposite)
• “What emotions trigger my emotional
you will be
eating?”
able to better
• “What is the thought process that
identify and
makes me eat when I feel that way?”
reflect on the
• “What are the beliefs I have about food, drivers behind
my body and my emotions?”
your emotional
• “Is my diet setting me up to fail at
eating. From there, a
controlling emotional eating?”
qualified health
These are difficult questions to answer off professional can help
you to build new,
the cuff, so for effective self-reflection it
can be helpful to use the following tools: healthy habits.
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YMCA HEALTHY LIVING MAGAZINE SUMMER 2017