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Mindful Emotional Eating: Food For Thought

Pavel Somov, PhD has a powerful idea about emotional eating: “You have two options in regard to emotional eating: you can try to eliminate it altogether or you can try to make better use of it by making emotional eating more conscious.”

Somov, a psychologist and the author of Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time, recently blogged about his approach, which he calls Mindful Emotional Eating, for the Huffington Post. Mindful emotional eating, which may at first seem counter-intuitive, overlaps with many of the concepts and ideas that I blog about at Peace With Cake. I find Somov’s ideas and his three principles of mindful emotional eating intriguing and potentially very helpful. Somov also suggests that emotional eating doesn’t have to be a negative act and that if it is something that we engage in consciously and deliberately–if we are in control of the choice and the act–it can actually be something that meets our needs. I’m looking forward to reading his book and will share my thoughts about it here.

In the meantime, check out his post and then leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

Take good care,

Melissa

One Response to “Mindful Emotional Eating: Food For Thought”

1. Pam Watson says:

   April 29, 2009 at 4:56 pm

   Regarding the emotional eating – I don’t think I need to read his book to understand emotional eating. This is only my opinion of course, but if you are not hungry and you are eating – then you are trying to fill a need with food. I have been overcoming emotional eating for years – I keep an emotional eating journal and when ever I eat other than mealtime I log in my food journal. I am not hungry why do I want to eat.
   Anyone who has lost weight or is in the process of loosing weight has to overcome this battle with the mind and food.
   If we were in control of our choice to eat then we would not be overweight.