If you are an emotional eater, you'll understand how horrible it feels to realise you have eaten large amounts of calories, fat, sugar and salt in an attempt to comfort you or help you celebrate.
Emotional eating - the habit of using food as a buffer for experiencing emotions both good and bad - can become an increasingly difficult cycle to break.
If you are ready to get your life back, though, the first step has to be admitting that you are an emotional eater.
There should be no shame in doing this. I believe that we are all emotional eaters; some of us just control the eating while others allow the eating to control them.
When admitting that you are an emotional eater, you should do this without adding emotion to the admission. If you feel any guilt or anger, disappointment or fear, the admission itself can become a trigger to turn to food!
Instead, remain as detached as possible from the admission.
Say out loud "I am an emotional eater" with the same emotion you would say, "I have blue eyes".
And realise that the great thing about this admission is that it can be changed, at any time, by you.
This realisation is a huge step for many emotional eaters as they finally understand that they, and they alone, hold the power to free themselves from the cycle of emotional eating.
This may be a little scary at first, but it's also very liberating.
It is easy to become trapped in the cycle of reaching for crisps or chocolate whenever you feel down. It happens before you have even realised what you are doing. You feel powerless to stop it.
This admission shifts the balance and forces you to realise that you are, actually, in control.
And once you know you are in control, you can do the remaining steps to overcome emotional eating.
