The Original Health Coaching Program
Learn more about IIN’s rigorous curriculum that integrates 90+ of the world’s leading experts in health and wellness, blending the scientific and the spiritual to create an immersive, holistic health education.
Staying Healthy and Happy While at Home
Working from home is not new to some. Many people conduct business remotely as technology continues to advance and productivity is no longer limited to an office desk.
However, with the COVID-19 outbreak spreading quickly and widely, more and more companies have pushed for their employees not to come into the office, even before government officials encouraged and, in some cases, mandated it.
To prevent the spread of COVID-19, the protocol has been to practice social distancing. That means not only working from home, but learning and exercising from home as well. Those whose lives were built around a 9–5 schedule suddenly find themselves in their homes all day, every day.
While this initially might feel like a pleasant change – no more long commutes or having to put on a suit and tie – the shift has caused many people to reevaluate how they structure their days and stay healthy, especially without access to gyms or their favorite organic food spots.
A big part of staying healthy while being stuck at home is diet. However, it’s not just about what we eat, but also when, how much, and why. Although physical hunger plays a big role in dictating our eating habits, many of us eat due to emotional hunger. It’s normal to engage in emotional eating during a pandemic as our emotions are especially heightened.
Defining Emotional Eating
Simply put, emotional eating is the practice of eating in response to our feelings or emotions rather than physical hunger or the need for dietary nourishment. Emotional eating can also take the form of overeating, eating more frequently than usual, or craving specific comfort or junk foods. Emotional eating is normal and something we ALL do from time to time. Some common feelings that trigger emotional eating are stress, anxiety, depression, and boredom. However, emotional eating can also be a way to distract ourselves from other repressed emotions we don’t want to feel. Emotional eating, like any regular activity, can easily become a habit. So even when we realize we’re doing it, it’s quite common to continue doing it on autopilot.
Identifying emotional eating can be tricky. The urge to eat, snack, or reach for comfort foods can strike so quickly, we might easily mistake it for physical hunger. How do you know if what you’re experiencing is emotional eating? There are a few ways to tell:
When we slow down and check in with ourselves before heading to the fridge, we can usually identify what’s driving our desire to snack.
Because emotional eating is triggered and fueled by our feelings (not biology), it’s easy to get stuck in an emotional eating cycle. For example, boredom can lead to more frequent and larger food intakes, which can then create feelings of guilt. To suppress or soothe those feelings of guilt, we might reach for sweet foods that temporarily soothe us. Both the food itself and the act of emotionally eating only feed the cycle more. When we are under chronic stress, it becomes that much more difficult to mindfully change our behavior as the triggers are ongoing rather than spaced-out, isolated events.
When we are stressed, cortisol levels rise. Cortisol interferes with ghrelin and leptin, our hunger and fullness hormones, causing us to feel hungrier and making us less able to feel full. This inhibits our ability to satiate physical hunger in a healthy way.
Eight Tips for Tackling Emotional Eating
This is why stress management is an integral part of ongoing self-care. Training our bodies to cope with stress in a healthy way rather than letting overeating become our stress response is an important process. Fortunately, there are simple yet effective strategies we can use to tackle emotional eating and break free of the cycle.
How Health Coaches Can Help
We all need support while working to break out of emotional eating habits. It can be instrumental to work with a Health Coach who is there to support and guide you through the process. A Health Coach is a trained wellness professional who specializes in helping their clients set realistic health-related goals, providing accountability, and holding a safe space for their clients to explore the deeper issues at the root of feeling stuck. Health Coaches make a huge difference in helping their clients successfully change unwanted behaviors and patterns and reach their wellness goals by exploring the client’s life holistically through both primary and secondary food (the food on your plate).
Learn more about IIN’s rigorous curriculum that integrates 90+ of the world’s leading experts in health and wellness, blending the scientific and the spiritual to create an immersive, holistic health education.