Identify and treat limiting beliefs that block success

Ask – What is your theory, why you are over weight.

The group felt they had more of a handle on their addiction and agreed to keep notes during the next month when we would meet again to look at The Future.

The reason you reach for food when you are not even hungry, or eat more than your body can possibly use, often stems from wanting to avoid unpleasant emotions that you’re not consciously aware you have. You are able to avoid certain feelings when you overeat.

In other words, more often than not you overeat to numb painful feelings so that they won’t come to the surface. This way you don’t have to experience them. Unpleasant feelings are likely to be the number one cause of your overeating.

Also overeating at the slightest provocation can become a habit. This means that the habit itself needs to be altered. Something that EFT will empower you to do.

As you may have noticed so called “comfort foods” such as sweets, other types of carbohydrates and wheat products (bread being a big troublemaker ) and some dairy products

Can be so soothing when we eat them that they seem to make anxiety and other emotions disappear - or at least become great lessened – for the moment.

Why do we find carbohydrate foods in particular to be especially soothing? This may well be the blood sugar rush we get from eating them. It makes us feel very safe and comforted. Unfortunately this feeling doesn’t last long as the blood sugar rush subsides and we run out of steam abruptly as a rebound reaction occurs in which our blood sugar drops even lower than before. This starts a new cycle of cravings, the familiar the more I eat the more I want syndrome.

Some of the situations that can trigger emotional overeating.

When you worry about something that is in the future, such as an upcoming medical procedure, a job interview, or a family problem, you may find yourself automatically reaching for food to stop worrying. You may have found in the past that eating your favourite food, or maybe just any fattening food, distracts and comforts you. If you eat enough of this food you may even forget about your worry for a while, provided that you keep eating.

For many people food is a major tranquilizer. This is one of the reasons that so many people develop an addiction to certain foods – these foods act just like medicine. The only problem is that there are certain serious side effects, one of them being excessive weight gain.

This can be anger at your spouse, your boss, your neighbors, members of the family, yourself, the way that your life is going can cause you to overeat, compulsively to hide that anger from yourself and to avoid acting on it.

Doughnuts, muffins, biscuits, chocolate, candy bars the list goes on. Piling these in can dim your anger so effectively that you may not even realize that you were angry in the first place. Just sink your teeth into another pile of potatoes crisps. Bite down hard and = crunch, crunch, crunch. It’s so effective to stifle your anger that you may not even realize you are stuffing these foods into your mouth.

When this happens, overeating seems totally natural because your anger and your difficulty in dealing with it is temporarily drowned as you concentrate on the food and its calming effect.

Food can immediately comfort you when you feel blue, especially sweet foods such as desserts, chocolate, or starchy ones like breads, rolls, French fries.

These foods soothe and make you forget you’re sad – until later. But when the sadness returns you need to eat more and more to continue your emotional numbing process.

Why if we don’t need any more food as fuel, so we continue to eat? Answer: You often do this so that you don’t have to feel your fear, guilt, anger, self-blame or any other unpleasant emotion.

Feelings avoided by overeating

Here are a few of the feelings that our group found may try to avoid by overeating:

Abandonment deprivation loss loneliness

Anxiety (in general) fear (of a specific thing) anger

Self-rejection guilt shame and many others

An unfortunate side effect of may diets is the fact that restricting calories signals the body to store fat and slow down the metabolism. The body seems to ‘think’ that the dieting person is facing famine and so will not readily let go of the stored fat.