This Is How She Stopped Emotional Eating At Night

How do you stop compulsively eating snacks in the late evening when you’re not even hungry?

I just talked to the woman who is in a pattern of snacking at night. She says this is her biggest struggle.

She comes home after work, after a long day at work, and she’s now able to stop snacking immediately after getting home. She’s now able to help her kid out with homework and even a good meal.

However, she then still finds herself snacking after dinner even though she’s not hungry.

I just had a great conversation with her and really feel inspired and I want to share with you her next steps as well as what’s really working for her.

The big picture is that several mind body tools need to come together in a holistic way.

1. Comfortable Acceptance Even With Negative Emotions – She’s really understanding that she has to feel her uncomfortable emotions and there’s no way around that.
   
2. Understanding Uncomfortable Emotions Like Stress – Then now she’s realizing that if she feels her uncomfortable emotions then she can process them via journaling. Or, what she’ll do is basically talk to herself but she’s really realizing that she has to process her emotions.
   
3. Practicing Emotional Self-Care, And Also, Practicing Eating Enough Food Regularly – Her next major step is where she’s had a fundamental eating enlightenment that food is self care. This is been one of the biggest transformations because eating nutrient dense food is becoming a high priority because she sees that eating regularly is key. She has successfully incorporated next day meal planning into her daily life and it feels good.
   
4. Learn To Stop When You Are Comfortably Full (And Realize You Can Have More If You Want) – Lastly she’s in tune with hunger more now and is stopping to feed herself. Just the other day when she was running errands, she realized that 5 hours had gone by and she was ravenous. She actually stopped at a Starbucks and got a protein box because it was going to be a few hours before she got home. This sustained her and prevented a binge.

How To Stop Cravings At Night, Other Musings:

So this is where she is at, and she’s made a lot of lot of progress decreasing her binge eating.

I also want to explore what her next steps are to stop emotional eating or the snacking at night.

Our conversation which was so inspiring, really focused on the pleasure and pain principles of emotional eating.

That’s what the focus of this video is about.

To build on the 4 basic skills and also to understand pleasure and pain principles.

I’m going to share with you how I incorporated these principles to transform my weed addiction.

I also was doing other self care trainings too. So don’t think that you can skip points one through four and just rely on pleasure or pain principles.

The overall lesson is to link pain with emotional eating, versus pleasure with self care and healthy eating.

How do you do this?

First, to link pain to emotional eating or weed, you have to drop the judgment. Realize that you have conditioned your brain to numb, or avoid an uncomfortable feeling by eating or smoking weed.

So you have to realize that this pattern is going to repeat itself …

But if you realize this pattern is going to repeat itself, you can drop the judgment. If you drop the judgment …

Then you can actually stop disconnecting while you emotionally eat or smoke.

I would smoke because my heart would hurt, so I would run away from the pain and into marijuana.

Realizing this habit in me was deeply conditioned surprised me, but I did not judge myself…

I would actually just mindfully observe myself smoking weed.

Yet I would refuse to disconnect and fantasize and run away from the pain.

Even though I was doing something to numb the pain, I would refuse to disconnect in my usual ways.

This is how to stop cravings at night. You feel the pain without guilt and try to not feel pain.

I would try to really see if the pain went away. Then I discovered that often times the drug was simply away from my mind to disconnect.

Even while I was high, if I stayed present, if I had an intention to be present …

Only then I could still feel that the pain my heart was still there and that the weed wasn’t helping nearly as much as I thought it was.

So this helped me start to associate pain with weed, and the second principle is pleasure.

Basically we have to have self care give us pleasure. And for me with weed, this looked something like where I would ask myself what do I need right now?

I would try to meet my emotional needs instead of smoking. And then I would pay very close attention to how I felt afterwards.

By taking care of my emotional needs and by refusing to numb out totally with weed, the momentum started changing. I just didn’t want weed as much.

Then there would be days when I just wouldn’t even smoke at all I would have no desire to smoke.

This became incredibly hopeful, this gave me real conviction.

The process on learning how to stop cravings at night just continued to where I am at peace with weed today.

And that’s the principles that she’s now starting to work on too so I hope this makes sense and let me know any questions you might have.