Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight by Peter Walsh

professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia. She’s a psychologist with an interest in emotional eating, and she often works with people who have both weight and mood issues. Emotions that can trigger a desire for food include:
    Stress
    Sadness
    Guilt
    Shame
    Boredom
    You may also reach for food when you’re sleepy or fatigued, which are more physical sensations than emotions.
Positive
emotions can certainly trigger emotional eating, too, such as when you’re celebrating at a party or you’re ushering in the weekend with a Friday dinner with friends.
    According to author Jenny Taitz, PsyD, author of
End Emotional Eating,
when you’re eating for emotional reasons, you don’t necessarily realize it. But the following situations generally have an emotion lurking in them:
    Snacking when you aren’t even hungry
    Feeling a sense of emotional relief while you’re eating
    Feeling a powerful urge for a particular food
    Eating during or just after a stressful event
    Using food to make your emotions feel less powerful
    If you have a tendency to eat in response to emotional triggers, you may have been developing this behavior since childhood, Dr. Goldbacher says. Perhaps you learned it from your family, your culture, or your own choices (you felt bad one day, ate a brownie and felt better, and stuck with this routine).
    Now when an event occurs that makes you feel worried, or sad, or bored—or you even
think
about these emotions—you reach for the food that you know will help you feel better. Some people are so scared of feeling strong emotions that they’re especially likely to use food to quell these feelings or provide a distraction, according to Dr. Taitz.
    If you feel ashamed or guilty after you splurge on treats to tame your emotions, you may eat even more to cope with
these
negative emotions that arise. This can turn into a very troublesome cycle.
    There’s a large overlap between
emotional
eating and
mindless
eating. Mindless eating means you’re eating food without enjoying it or even noticing what you’re doing. Do you have any experience with eating a box of candy—without even tasting it—when you’re under a work deadline? Have you ever emptied a pint of ice cream on autopilot while you were caught up in a nerve-racking TV show? That’s emotional, mindless eating.
    Not everyone who eats because of emotional triggers is overweight. All sorts of people do this, no matter their body weight, Dr. Goldbacher says. And it’s not necessarily harmful to enjoy a cookie here and there when you’re feeling down. Emotional eating only becomes a problem when it has a negative effect on your life, Dr. Taitz says.
    As you progress through the 6 weeks of the
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
program, I want you to start living your life more deliberately. I want you to bring new objects into your home only when you have a good reason to do so. I want you to only keep possessions in your home that truly belong there. And when you eat, I want you to eat for a specific purpose.
    If you’re suffering from a moment of sadness, or you’re so excited that you must celebrate, I’m not going to tell you that you must get through this moment without food. But I do want you to be deliberate about what you’re doing. I want you to be in control of how much you eat. And I want you to fully enjoy the taste and the texture of your food without feeling guilt and shame afterward.
    In the next chapter, you’ll find strategies for eating mindfully, including when you’re in the grip of strong emotions. Right now, I’d like for you to fill in the following chart, which will give you a better sense of how often you rely on food during emotional moments.
    Specific situations—like feeling stress during holidays—can act as triggers for emotional eating. So can certain feelings, like anger, boredom, or frustration. Identify three situations and