Why do 95% of all over eaters gain weight back after they've lost it? Answer: emotional eating. Everyday I read articles or books featuring a means of overcoming emotional eating. At first I was excited about what new tips I'd learn and was quickly disappointed. Three of the top books on amazon.com for dealing with or overcoming emotional eating are: Shrink Yourself (Break free of emotional eating) by Roger Gould MD, Taming of the Chew by Denise Lamothe, Phy.D, H.H.D., and Breaking Free from Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth. It's amazing that not one of these books dealing with emotional eating has even one chapter on how to handle emotions. Nothing about the cause of emotions? Embracing emotions or the importance of experiencing them is totally ignored. Just go to google and set up alerts for emotional eating and you'll get article everyday re emotional eating. Unfortunately it's all old recycled advice from the fad diet era. None of the books or articles recognize that emotional eaters don't eat because of particular emotions, but because of the stress the emotions place upon the over eater. Yes, emotions are themselves stressful and the old stress management advice, i.e. do yoga, go for a walk, talk to a friend, count to ten, take a deep breadth, and so on just are not effective for 95% of over eaters. It may be good advice but for the most part impractical. And none of this advice deals directly with the stress of the emotions. For instance, do you like to feel malaise? bored? frustrated? confused? uncertain? anger? upset? down? How about happiness? joy? excitement? love? Most say "yes" to the second group of emotions and cal them positive and "No" to the first group of emotions and call them positive. But do you know what you've just done? You've just voted. You determined that there are some emotions you like and some that you dislike. The reality is that emotions are different energy levels and it's our beliefs about them that make them bad or good. Yes it's what we believe about them that makes them stressful. Yes this is the stress that makes us emotional over eaters and contributes to eating excessively. Even happiness for instance can be stressful. "Don't be too happy, you'll set yourself up for a big let down." It's beliefs of this nature--and we have them for every emotion--that stand in the way of us truly feeling happy and the result is that we dilute the emotion with food. A real approach to losing weight involves asking questions "What is missing here? Why are people not getting the results from the books and experts they consult? It is clearly ridiculous to keep using the same techniques when the results are so poor. It's more important to learn to feel emotions and gain a grasp on breaking free from emotional eating than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person. If you're a mother, you'll be a better mother--an accountant, a better accountant. Conquering emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life and is how you really lose weight or make weight loss easy. Resource box: Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified, an expert in the field of hypnosis with his top selling stress management and hypnosis cds at http://www.DStressDoc.com and http://www.PanicBusters.com His aimis to make it possible for anyone to conquer emotional binge eating. For more information please visit http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm
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