If you struggle with emotional eating, you aren’t alone. Far too many of us make our bad eating choices because of emotions, instead of eating based on our health needs.

When people make poor food choices, often emotion is behind this mistake. In this article, I will present some tips for how to recognize and manage emotional eating, and hopefully help you to avoid this pitfall.

First, be aware of what may trigger emotional eating. Any changes or new circumstances in your life can sometimes set off a bout of emotional eating. Watch for changes in employment, moving, differences in relationships or other habits, health problems, and so on.

To combat emotional eating, it is critical to be able to recognize the difference between emotion-based desire for food and actual hunger. Many of us don’t know the difference. You need to know how to gauge if your experienced hunger is actually coming from your body.

Every time you get the urge to eat, ask yourself if you are really hungry or if you are trying to deal with emotions via food.

If you think that you are hungry but aren’t sure, reach for a healthy food. Stay away from your comfort foods. These comfort foods tend to be higher in calories, and also tend to be more commonly chosen for emotional eating.

Are you hungry even though you have recently eaten? Try distracting yourself. Chances are you aren’t really hungry and if you ignore the impulse for a while it will pass. Exercise is a great way to do this, it will help you to get your mind off of eating and it burns calories besides.

Try for a while to control your own emotional eating, and remember that these habits won’t be broken overnight. Real, lasting change may take some time. However, if you work for a good while on changing your unhealthy eating habits but can’t manage it, you may need the help of a professional. Emotional eating is a compulsion that can have many harmful effects and it is important to stop this behavior.

Food is good for us, when used correctly as fuel. In this way, food is like a drug. It is healthy when used properly, but can become very damaging when abused.

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