If you are yo-yo dieting or stuck in cycles with overwhelm, overload, and overeating, it’s easy to fall back on familiar habits that keep things the same, or even make things worse. Although it may be hard to believe, small changes really do make a difference.
Here are 15 Ways to Eat Less, Stress Less, and Take Charge of Your Craving
Set a “no multitasking” policy while you eat.
When you eat mindfully you eat less and feel more satisfied. Practice fully savoring your food. Slow down the pace of your meals and focus on using all your senses.
Practice savoring.
Allow yourself to fully taste and enjoy the food you choose to eat. Slow down the pace of your meals and focus on using all your senses when you eat.
Commit to treating yourself well and fueling yourself in the best ways possible.
Move forward with the intent of nourishing your mind, your spirit, and your life in addition to your stomach, rather than focusing on depriving yourself.
Cultivate your inner wisdom.
Ask yourself what you know about why you eat when you do and why some times and situations are more difficult than others.
Identify the times of day you tend to overeat.
Create advance strategies for these specific situations and circumstances. Adjust and tweak as you learn what works well, and what doesn’t.
Fuel your body well to reduce stress eating, overeating patterns, sugar slumps and energy shifts throughout the day.
Aim for smaller, more frequent meals that include some protein.
Ask yourself what you were doing, feeling, or ignoring that may have triggered an urge to eat when hunger or strong cravings come up suddenly.
This is a clue to notice in the future.
Make sure that you are getting enough to eat during the first two thirds of your day.
Deprivation backfires and can lead to bingeing or grazing in the afternoon or evening.
Take time to plan your meals in advance.
This keeps you from being caught by surprise when life gets busy or stressful.
Save your weekly menus and grocery lists.
Build a four week collection so you can reuse them instead of recreating them again and again.
Have a Plan B for those days when life goes haywire.
Make a list of ten quick, low or no-effort, healthy, good tasting meals you can grab-and-go. Keep the list in your purse or on your phone so you can be in control of your choices.
Play with feelings of hunger and fullness.
Experiment with allowing yourself to get a little more hungry or a little less full. Notice how hungry you typically feel before eating and how full you tend to be when you stop. What would happen or what would you feel if you made different choices about when to start or stop eating?
Ask yourself how hungry you are (on a scale from one to ten) and what exactly you are hungry for before you eat.
If you don’t know the answers, it’s probably emotional eating.
Respect your hungry feelings.
Make every effort to understand what triggered them (physical hunger, an emotion, a situation) and to respond to that trigger in the highest quality way.
Visualize before entering tempting situations.
Create a clear picture in your mind of the choices you want to make and the way you want to be. Picture yourself and the way you want to feel after the event or situation has passed.
Talk soon,
