Emotional Eating and How to Stop It

There is also a Want-O-meter where you can put in your daily preferences for food. Mindful eating isn’t about perfection — it’s about awareness, reflection, and making better choices. UnDiet Your Mind is a fantastic nutrition app to try if you’ve struggled with constant dieting and find that nothing has ever worked for you. Unfortunately, you need a premium subscription in order to use most of the app. You can tap the plus sign in the bottom right corner to add a new routine, check in with yourself, or enter a meal.

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If you’re feeling stressed, anxious, bored, lonely, sad, or tired, food won’t fix those feelings. If you feel like you are trapped in a cycle of restrictive dieting and binging, mindful eating is something you should try to rebuild a positive relationship with food. In this guide, I have ranked and reviewed the 5 Best Mindful Eating Apps, so you can pick one, that suits your preferences.

Pay attention to your body

It’s a practice that encourages you to focus on the sensory experience of eating—notice the colors, smells, textures, and flavors of your food. Shapa is not just an app, it’s a scale that is linked to one. But it is a scale with a different mind-set, which is apparent at first glance because it has no number display at all.

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It’s a frustrating and exhausting cycle, and one that many of us are all too familiar with. The app will then open up into three Pathways – Body Feels, Emotional Eats, and Mindful Shifts. Each Pathway serves a specific purpose, with Body Feels designed to help you actively listen to your body. Emotional Eats flips the connotation of emotional eating to help you have harmony with your emotions and accept them (emotional eating is not “bad” or something you need to “fight”).

Indulge without overeating by savoring your food

• With no pressure to make drastic changes, Bea offers a gentle introduction to evidence-based techniques that promote change in eating habits.
• For these reasons, we assessed whether the mindful eating apps offered any kind of guided mindful eating example.
• It also asks you to predict your feelings and goals after the meal.
• After a recent vacation where I felt sluggish and irritable, I tracked intensively for two weeks and discovered that my increased dairy consumption was likely the culprit.
• Mental health and wellness tips, our latest guides, resources, and more.
• Addressing even one of these layers—like regular meals or better stress management—can meaningfully reduce episodes without extreme rules.

“It’s like eating according to your own internal system, versus external,” Haisley says. There’s also a physical journal to help repair your relationship with food when you are not using the app. Mindful eating can be as detailed as paying attention to the entire meal setting itself including the dining room, the placement of cutlery, sarasotamagazine and the movement of one’s hands [8]. Integrating these types of examples in an app would be insightful. Only 1 app mentioned paying attention to cutlery and the meal setting very briefly [48].

The Processed Food Problem

Writing down what you feel before, during and after eating helps build awareness and accountability. Emotional eating involves consuming food not out of physical hunger but to soothe emotional distress. This behavior often includes cravings for high-calorie, sugary or fatty foods that provide temporary relief. Emotional eating and stress eating are common responses to life’s challenges. Many individuals turn to food for comfort during times of stress, sadness or boredom. Its strength is making you aware of patterns without judgment.

Combine Apps if Needed

When you’re physically strong, relaxed, and well rested, you’re better able to handle the curveballs that life inevitably throws your way. But when you’re already exhausted and overwhelmed, any little hiccup has the potential to send you off the rails and straight toward the refrigerator. Exercise, sleep, and other healthy lifestyle habits will help you get through difficult times without emotional eating. When you’re physically hungry, almost anything sounds good—including healthy stuff like vegetables.

Eating Disorder Support

Then look for patterns and work to redirect your behavior or reaction to the trigger. An emotional and physical emptiness is being “filled” with food when you eat. For emotional eaters, the food provides a temporary wholeness, but it doesn’t last long. By understanding your personal food-mood relationship, you can make targeted changes that improve both your nutrition and your emotional wellbeing.

The goal is to allow you to make a conscious decision about when, what, and how you eat. There will be times when it makes sense for food to be part of dealing with big emotions. If you have anxiety or stress around what to eat or not to eat, try this Tapping script for releasing stress around food. If the number is still higher than you’d like, continue tapping through the points, using your own words to express what you’re feeling.

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And there is an interesting section which is called the “stress test” that evaluates your mental health condition and therefore helps you to figure out the ties between eating and psychology. Next, there are sections in the app, where you can put in all information about the meal that you eat, you can also set up a meal reminder and set up a meal calendar. After a while, the app will compile statistics about your meal schedule and the overall quality of your eating habits.

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Therapists, dietitians, or physicians trained in disordered eating can help https://www.helpguide.org/wellness/weight-loss/emotional-eating you work through root causes safely and build personalized strategies. Emotional eating often fills a gap where support or connection might go. Talking with trusted people about stress, joining a community, or working with a coach or therapist can reduce loneliness and help you feel less alone with your feelings. Social support is a powerful buffer against stress-driven eating. Think of handling emotional eating as skill-building, like learning a language or instrument. Instead of, “I failed, I can’t do this,” try, “That was a rep of my old pattern; what’s one small thing I can try differently next time?