50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food (6 page)

Have you ever visualized yourself cozying up to a pint of ice cream or vegging out with some “goodies” in front of the TV? If you do this, you are unintentionally using guided imagery as a way to increase stress eating rather than stop it. If you catch yourself unconsciously focusing on images that reinforce eating to self-soothe, don’t be too hard on yourself. Just gently acknowledge this may set you up for mindless emotional eating. If you are stuck with this image, keep the guided imagery going, but this time change the ending. Instead, create an image of yourself successfully walking away from food and doing one of the nonfood alternative activities you’ll find in this book.

~self-soothing technique~

Visualize a Soothing World Without Food

Guided imagery is a little like having a daydream. Use the power of your mind to paint a vivid picture of a safe, peaceful, and empowering atmosphere. It’s a great alternative when you’re a thousand miles away from an actual beach or you don’t have enough cash for a spa. Visualization is a realistic option that can take the place of comfort foods.

• Mindfully create a new guided image. Choose a very peaceful place. It might be somewhere you once vacationed. It can also can be as simple as your actual bedroom or an imaginary garden. The important thing to remember is that it is a place where you feel safe and relaxed. When you think about this place, bring to mind all the sensory details. If it is at the ocean, think about the smells of the sea, the colors of the sky, and the temperature. If it is your bedroom, think about the texture of the pillow and the color of the comforter on your bed. It is important to bring as many sensory details to your mind as you can. This will stimulate different areas of your brain that can help you feel as if you are really there.
  
• Need some ideas? Try these: You can visualize drifting in a canoe on a quiet river, floating in outer space, strolling through an alpine meadow, hiking up a fire trail on a mountainside, soaking in a tub of hot water, sitting on a balcony overlooking the ocean, or lying on the warm sands of an island.
  
• If you are still having difficulty coming up with your own guided imagery, try focusing on a calming photograph. It could be a photo from a past vacation or a landscape painted by a famous painter.
  
• Practice replaying this scene many times in your head.
  
• If this doesn’t work for you, there are many free audio guided imagery scenarios you can find on the Web.
  

A food coma is what I call it. I slip into it when I overeat. Eating is like an emotional anesthetic. It takes me to a place where I don’t feel anything. For example, I started eating a few days ago because I couldn’t stand being so disappointed and angry at my boyfriend. I ate and then I ate some more. I didn’t want to feel as bad as I was feeling. I also didn’t want to accept the truth that he is not a very nice guy. If I had been brave enough to face the truth, I would have broken up with him immediately. Instead, I gained three pounds and I’m even more miserable.

—Mary Ann

What is really at the core of emotional eating? Eating to get rid of uncomfortable emotions implies that there’s something unacceptable about what you’re feeling. You don’t want to feel lousy, and you think that you can’t stand feeling lousy for very long. Eating is one way to escape from your feelings by temporarily diverting your attention away from them (Heatherton and Baumeister 1991). You can’t blame yourself for turning to something that works so well at providing you with temporary relief from negative feelings or general discomfort. But what if you had a higher tolerance for feeling bad?

Instead of trying to knock out your bad feelings with food, it might be possible for you to accept feeling bad and be able to live with that feeling for a while. It’s normal to feel anger, disappointment, and stress sometimes. Learning to live with your negative emotions, instead of anesthetizing yourself from them with food, is called radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance
is, basically, a way of totally and completely focusing on what is, rather than what you want things to be. It is accepting the entire situation without trying to change it or fight against it. It’s also an ancient technique for dealing with troubling emotions.

Emotional eating is the opposite of acceptance in many ways. It involves warding off feeling bad with comfort eating because you don’t accept that this is the way you do feel. Acceptance doesn’t mean you agree with or condone the situation. For example, when you are stressed-out, you probably don’t like how you feel. Nor do you judge it to be a good thing. Nevertheless, it is the reality. When you stop fighting against how you are truly feeling, you’ll find more productive ways to manage difficult emotions. You’ll make a plan rather than stewing about how unfair it is that you feel that way. Getting to a place of radical acceptance isn’t easy. But it is well worth your time to practice getting there.

~self-soothing technique~

Emotional Eating Acceptance Statements

When you feel the urge to emotionally eat, repeat the following acceptance statements to yourself. If you like, you can also make up your own acceptance statements:

• I radically accept myself.
  
• I accept my roller-coaster emotions with all of their ups and downs.
  
• I accept that I am tempted to use food to soothe myself.
  
• I accept that I am not perfect and will sometimes slip.
  
• I accept that I can feel this pain without numbing out with food.
  
• I accept that I cannot change how I feel.
  
• I surrender to this feeling and will commit to finding comfort in healthy ways that do not harm me.
  

~self-soothing technique~

Worst-Case Scenario

Here’s a quick writing exercise to get to the bottom of those emotions that are so uncomfortable that you typically turn to food to feel better:

1. Ask yourself, what is so terrible about feeling the way that you do?
   
2. Is it likely that this amount of pain or discomfort will physically harm or kill you?
   
3. Does this feeling give you any important information? For example, overeating may be a sign that you are angrier than you realized.
   

If you want to change your emotional eating habits, you’ll need to find ways to adapt how you think about the comforting properties of food. If you think only food can make you feel better in times of stress, you’ll have a difficult time finding other ways to brighten your mood. It may take a lot of hard work to break your mental link between food and comfort, because it is such an ingrained notion. You also may benefit from putting a positive spin on your negative thoughts. Pessimistic thoughts only make you feel worse and may actually prompt your need for comfort. Your task in this chapter is to learn how to generate more soothing thoughts than the negative ones you may usually have. When you fill your mind with comforting and relaxing images and ideas, you lower the odds that you’ll turn to food to deal with stress or negativity.

I’m clueless when it comes to my emotions. Journaling helps me understand my true motives for stress eating. When I write about my struggles, I often discover that I overeat because I am anxious about something. Eating calms my nerves. As I write, I don’t judge myself. I just try to understand why I fell hook, line, and sinker for emotional eating again. I find clues for how I can be better prepared next time.

—Olivia

Writing about your troubles is an easy and clinically proven way to help you soothe yourself (Keeling and Bermudez 2006). In fact, there is an entire branch of psychology devoted to the healing power of journaling. It’s called
narrative therapy
. The theory is based on reauthoring (rewriting) and externalizing your feelings. Essentially, this means taking any feelings trapped inside you and describing them on paper so you can see them from another perspective. Unexamined feelings are like a strong undertow in the ocean. They can pull you in directions you may not want to go.

Why is journaling helpful? Well, it has several benefits. For starters, you are likely to have some aha experiences. Writing helps you be mindful of what drives you to eat for comfort. Many emotional eaters believe they eat just for the pleasure of eating, but often there is much more to it than that. Journaling helps you to confront the issue directly by examining it in depth. This contrasts with eating that numbs you and may cause you to avoid analyzing your feelings. After writing a journal entry, you may still want to eat for emotional reasons. But you will have a better understanding of why you feel that need in that moment.

The second benefit of journaling is that it can help you to think about your situation in a more positive, realistic way. Let’s say Bob is having a bad day. He might tell himself, “This is the worst emotional eating I’ve ever done.” But when he writes a journal entry, he realizes his recent bout of emotional eating was not the worst overeating he’s ever done. It wasn’t the amount of food that bothered him but the guilt and disappointment in himself. It was hard for him to see this until he put it down on paper.

Finally, journaling gives you an arena in which to plan for the next time you encounter the urge to stress eat. When you clearly spell out what your challenges were in the past, you can predict how you’ll respond in the future, and you can make plans to deal with these challenges in a more productive way the next time.

Journaling 101: Writing Tips

• To make writing into a habit, plan to do it like clockwork at the same time each day. For example, you could take twenty minutes every morning before you have breakfast. Or you could write after you put the kids to bed at night.
  
• If you aren’t into writing at length or you feel that you don’t have the time, start by jotting down one or two notes in a day planner every day.
  
• Write without editing. Try not to censor yourself or erase. Just go with the flow. In psychology, this is called
  free association
  , which means allowing your mind to take you wherever it wants to go.
  
• For each journal entry, do a past, present, and future summary. The format is this: In the past, I felt about this issue… In the moment, I feel about this issue… And in the future, what would I like to do or say about this issue is…
  
• If you spend a great deal of time in front of a computer, try out a Web journal. There are many free online journaling services.
  

~self-soothing technique~

Investigating Stress Eating

If you are not sure what to write about, that’s okay. There are some prompts below to help you get started. Each prompt is the beginning of a sentence. They are intended to stimulate your ideas. However, you don’t need specific prompts to reap the benefits of writing. If the questions listed don’t target what you’re feeling, just pick up a pen or pencil and start writing.

• The worst thing about this situation is…
  
• Three adjectives that best describe how I feel in this moment are…
  
• The reason I’m feeling this emotion is…
  
• When I eat, I feel….
  

~self-soothing technique~

Looking at the Bright Side

Looking at the bright side can help you get out of a funk. It can also interrupt stress eating. After you read the following statements, take a fresh sheet of paper or open a new computer file to write about anything that comes to your mind. Chose only one statement and then write about it in as much detail as possible.

• A positive moment in your life, like your baby’s first smile, a good report card, a job promotion, or a surprise birthday party
  
• A moment when you felt at peace or felt an intense calmness, like while you were watching a sunset on the shore of an ocean
  
• A moment when you fell in love
  
• A time you felt completely relaxed, such as on a vacation or a quiet moment after you put your children to bed
  
• A time when your sense of adventure was strong, such as a time you went somewhere you’d never gone to before or a time you tried something new, like scuba diving
  

Applying the Wisdom

When you have finished writing about any of the statements above, it’s time to apply the wisdom. Answering the following questions may give you ideas on how to recreate some

Aspects of the positive moments in your life:

• What would it take to recreate such good feelings? How can you access even a bit of this emotion in the future?
  
• More specifically, how can those good feelings help you cope with emotional eating at a later date?
  

For example, say you wrote about a time when you felt completely relaxed on a vacation at the beach. You could write about any behaviors that would help you recreate some of the sensations from that experience. For instance, you could take your shoes off, put your bare feet into the bathtub, and run warm water over them. Then close your eyes and imagine walking along the water’s edge at the beach. Perhaps you could play tropical music or call the friend who went with you to the beach to reminisce.

~self-soothing technique~

Image Journaling

No one ever said journals must be written. As the saying goes, A picture is worth a thousand words. Draw visual images of how you’re feeling or take photographs of yourself in different moods. Keep a notebook of these drawings and photos. Date each picture and explain how it relates to food and emotional eating.

A good laugh is sometimes the best tranquilizer. The other day, I was down and depressed about my weight. I wanted to gorge myself on whatever I could find in the kitchen. Instead, I tried to relax on the couch. When I flipped on the TV, I saw an ancient episode of I Love Lucy. It was so silly that I rolled on the floor laughing. By the end of the episode, I had completely forgotten about food. My irritation had evaporated and I was able to get moving again.

—Terri

Terri, a forty-two-year-old accountant, was once in a near-fatal airplane accident. While on her way to Europe, the plane had depressurized thousands of miles above the ocean. When the air masks were released, she was shaking so badly that she was unable to put on the mask. A nearby passenger came to her rescue. The plane made a safe emergency landing, but it was the most traumatic and terrifying situation in Terri’s entire life. In therapy ten days after the safe landing, she was still trembling. She became tearful when she recounted the details. Since the event, she had lost control of her eating.

Two years later, Terri tells the same story in a very different way. She laughs as she demonstrates how her hands trembled when she tried to put the air mask over her face. Getting in touch with her laughter took some time. Initially, laughter was a physical release that was better than crying. Then when she retold how the event had happened, she noticed that laughing helped her and others to be less traumatized by the details. Friends were able to give her support instead of becoming overwhelmed by the story. The experience also demonstrated to Terri how comical it can be to stress about trivial matters when much worse things can happen.

This incident is, of course, an extreme example. Most stressful events that prompt overeating aren’t so terrifying. It’s interesting that an experience can be so terrible in the moment, but later on you can see the humor in the situation. Humor is an extremely powerful therapeutic tool. It is a recognized way of coping with some hurts, and it can be amazingly healing (Thorson et al. 1997; Tugade, Fredrickson, and Barrett 2004). Laughter boosts the immune system and decreases stress hormones. It’s also linked to lowering blood pressure, which can be a key factor in stress management. The chemical changes produced by laughter are very much like the mood-elevating benefits of exercise.

If you experience debilitating guilt or shame for mindless emotional eating, laughter is a great way to redirect your focus away from feeling bad, and it can brighten your mood, as well.

~self-soothing technique~

Laughing Yoga

Laughing yoga is a modern new form of yoga. It was created by a family physician in Mumbai, India, and the practice has spread worldwide since its invention. The idea behind laughing yoga (
hasya yoga
) or any kind of humor therapy is that laughter is another way to change the sensations in the body. When you start laughing, the physical movements create a cascade of reactions in your body. Your brain sends signals to your body to relax, while at the same time, particular neurotransmitters are released that help you feel pleasure. Laughing exercises relieve tension and distract you from negative feelings. They also provide a workout for your abs, diaphragm, and shoulders while you are making the natural movements associated with laughter.

Jump right in and give it a try. Repeat these laughter sounds out loud in a jolly Santa Claus manner: Ho ho. Ha ha ha. Repeat them several times for a few minutes. It’s likely that your simulated laughter will turn into real laughter. Playacting your way from fake laughter is a great way to help you arrive at true laughter. Think of it as being like the canned laughter on TV sitcoms. Did you ever notice that just hearing the canned laughter sometimes made you join in? You can also check out videos on the Web for examples of how to do laughing yoga.

~self-soothing technique~

Medicinal Laughter

• Find the natural humor in whatever problem you’re struggling with. To help, look to the future. What about this situation might cause you to laugh five years from today? Is there anything giggle worthy in it? For example, is there a Three Stooges moment? Try to imagine how your favorite comedian would take this situation and turn it into a humorous sketch.
  
• Do something funny. Leave a funny phone message for a friend. Make up a fictional name and use it all day. Wear a T-shirt or a hat that makes people laugh.
  
• Learn a one-line joke and tell it to everyone you meet in your day.
  
• Put a funny picture of yourself or an amusing picture from a magazine on your refrigerator door. You can even tape the picture onto a box of cookies in your cupboard so that when you start searching for food to snack on, you’ll see it.
  

Some situations are just not funny and humor is not appropriate. If your problem really doesn’t have any comic elements, try to find humor elsewhere. Take your mind off your problem by going to funny websites or renting a funny movie. No matter what prompts your laughter, it will do good things for your body and mind.

I messed up again! Chocolate chip cookies sent all my good efforts to eat well back to square one. Why can’t I get anything right? I feel I’m a complete failure. How hard is it to control myself? I allow myself a little pity party before remembering that I’m working on looking at the bright side. I must remember that this isn’t a make-or-break situation, even thought it feels like one. The good news is that there are no more cookies in the house. At least that temptation is gone and I can start again—right now. As my mother used to say, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”

—Kathy

Therapists are experts at helping people feel better. When you consider that they have only words to comfort their clients, it’s amazing. No hugs. No gifts. No food. This is intriguing. They must use very powerful words and string them together very skillfully to get the results they do. So what is their secret? Partly, it’s that they give people support and encouragement. But what exactly do they say that helps people feel better even in their worst moments?

Much of what therapists do is to
reframe
the situation. The therapist explains how the client feels from another perspective than the one the client has. Instead of focusing on the problem a particular issue creates for you, reframing looks at the benefits or opportunities presented by that difficult issue.

Let me describe a common situation that many stress eaters face. Emotional eaters focus a lot on their failures. They have laundry lists of everything they’ve done wrong and condemn themselves for falling back into old habits. Here is one way to reframe this particular situation: those overeating moments aren’t really failures. Instead, they’re
missteps
. These missteps provide you with useful information to study and use to guide you. They are teaching moments that help you identify what you need to work on. The good news is that you can do such reframing yourself. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to get a new perspective on your situation. You just have to look at it differently. As the saying goes, When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When you reframe a situation, you take charge of how you think about the issue.