What is Emotional Health and Wellbeing?

Are you wondering what is emotional health got to do with your food cravings? A lot. In fact, everything.

This might be a new idea to you, but, when it comes to mind and emotions, the invisible creates the visible.

The extra pounds of body fat are merely a side effect of trying to fulfill normal emotional needs - love, comfort, protection, or simply relieve unwanted feelings like worry, frustration, stress, boredom - with food.

Contrary to the popular belief that being emotionally healthy means feeling positive all the time, emotional health is, in fact, a consciously developed skill of recognizing and expressing our emotions appropriately.
When we acknowledge and respect our emotions by not stuffing them down, we are in control over our feelings balancing the mind and body, the heart and spirit.

Achieving emotional health allows you not only to stop emotional eating, but get the most out of life as well.

What is Emotional Health - Food Cravings Connection?

Psychologists discovered that food cravings are mere reflections of unmet emotional needs, as eating specific foods gives you a temporary relief to a corresponding feeling.

In fact, you merely "medicate" your...

• stress, worry, loneliness, anxiety with soft sweets
• frustration and restlessness with crispies like nuts and chips
• boredom, dullness with spicy foods & fizzle drinks
• resentment, guilt, anger with fatty, salty foods
• mental/emotional energy drain with dense sweets like chocolate
• low self-esteem, feeling rejected or unloved with gorging on food

But let’s face it; food can’t heal poor emotional health; food can’t dissolve negative feelings. Merely numbed, they lurk just beneath your consciousness resurfacing almost immediately and keeping you from taking care of your body, eating healthy meals, getting enough sleep, exercising and managing stress.

You have to understand this.

If you try to get rid of emotional eating without finding new, better ways to get what you were trying to get from food, you will not lose weight or keep it off.
Over time, unresolved negative feelings lead not only to weight gain; they take you on a path to depression, hopelessness and isolation, ultimately stopping you from enjoying life to the fullest.

But it doesn’t have to be like this - when you learn to cultivate your emotional health.

What is Emotional Health in the Context of Weight Loss?

As you know, unlike other external solutions to emotional soothing (smoking, drinking, overworking, overanalyzing, overspending, people pleasing, rescuing others), overeating and giving in to unending food cravings translate in pounds over pounds of body fat.

In contrast, a state of emotional health and wellbeing in the context of losing weight is achieved through mindfulness - that state of "being in the moment" that is more and more elusive these days - especially when food cravings hit - seemingly out of nowhere.

However, a non-judgmental awareness of your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and underlying motives behind your actions, mindfulness means consciously making the right eating decisions rather than habitually choosing the default mode.

This way, food cravings disappear, appetite fades.

When you are mindful, you start eating foods that nourish our body rather then "medicate" your unmet emotional needs.

In a nutshell, the answer to the question, "what is emotional health?" in the context of weight loss is this: instead of acting on reflex to satisfy your emotional needs or distract yourself from feeling unpleasant emotions with food, use mindfulness activities instead.

Also, you can achieve emotional healing faster by using self-hypnotherapy.

^TOP^ What is Emotional Health in the Context of Weight Loss?

<< Return to Mind-Body Connection

Brainy Weight Loss Home

Website Powered by  SBI!

Developed by  Brainy Websites

Privacy Policy