Find support not just for emotional eating, but all aspects of your well-being.
Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, will look a little different for everyone. But if you notice youâre more irritable, your sleeping or eating patterns have changed, or youâre more anxious or depressed, you might be experiencing SAD.
Weâre sharing four things that can help you find a mood boost in the darkest, coldest days of winter. We recommend creating a list you can easily reference, either in a notebook or on your phoneâs notes app, of things that make you feel good. Either take inspiration from the ideas below or brainstorm your own! Personalizing an approach to support yourself through the next few months is a great way to show yourself some love.
Support
This can come in many forms, like a regular coffee date with a friend, scheduled therapy sessions, or speaking to your doctor about medication. Consider who in your life makes you feel supported and tap into that! If you feel intimidated going to the doctor, read this blog post for a little confidence boost.
Hygiene
When...
Going to the doctor can feel like more than just a chore. It might make your anxiety sky rocket as you face explaining your symptoms and feelings to someone you only see a handful of times a year. Â
If you exist in a body that doesnât âfitâ into narrow definitions, like BMI, there might be added anxiety that you wonât be heard by those treating you because they canât see past your body shape or weight. This is called weight bias in medicine. It is when a practitioner believes they know everything they need to know about you because you are classified as âoverweightâ or âobeseâ by their standards. They will often highlight or even pressure you to lose weight as a miracle cure-all to any and all issues.
That is simply not true.
Many people with higher body fat percentages live healthy lives with clean bills of health from blood work to digestion. And you deserve the same treatment from a practitioner that everyone else getsâto be seen, to be heard, to be understood.
Knowing all this...
It can be so easy to get obsessed with the numbers on your bathroom scale and hop on/hop off every day or sometimes multiple times a day. You might be telling yourself that itâs âjust to check inâ but letâs look at your motivation a bit more closely:
If the number on the scale is higher than yesterday, do you have a bad day? End up picking yourself apart and vow to restrict what you eat?
Are you stepping on the scale more than once a day? Do you have set ârulesâ for when you weigh yourself (for example, must be after using the washroom, must be without clothing, etc.)?
If you find yourself letting the number on the scale dictate your mood and actions, here are four reminders you need to hear. Feel free to print these out to read them when you need to, or even tape them on your bathroom mirror!
The summer âuniformâ is made up of shorts, tank tops, and sweating! All can make you feel uncomfortable if you struggle with body image. But perhaps the most dreaded of all is the bathing suit. At some point we go from children who love being in the water and playing in the sand without a second thought, to worry-charged and self-conscious adults who will actively avoid situations that require suiting up.
If this sounds like you, youâll want to bookmark this post to come back to when youâre faced with a bathing suit event. Here are 4 tips to make you feel more comfortable (dare we even say confident!):
Have you ever noticed that when you wipe down the kitchen you immediately feel a sense of calm? Or maybe you love to light a candle during the cold, dark winter months. These are great examples of how small alterations to your environment can boost your mood in seconds. And we recommend finding more ways to add these things to your every day! It is a great way to tailor your environment, stack the deck if you will, to bring more joy and relaxation into your daily life.
You might think: âI donât have the budget to upgrade my house!â While of course weâd all love to decorate or renovate our homes to fit our ideal dreams, you donât have to go all out (and drop a lot of money) to see mental health benefits. You can try:
You may have seen yourself in our last blog post about body checking. It is the practice of monitoring and critiquing your appearance based on diet industry standards. Our tip there was to catch the negative thoughts in action and try and counter them.
In todayâs post weâre going to take it to the next level: once youâve caught that negative thought, how you can support yourself into creating a positive experience when looking in a mirror (either literally or in the form of comparison with other peopleâs bodies).
It might feel normal to pass by a store window and check out your reflection. But if youâre noticing more than simply adjusting your scarf or hat, you might be falling into body checking.
Body checking is any way you monitor your bodyâs appearance. This might look like:
You might even notice that these habits become even more frequent when you are stressed, feeling sad, or even just about to go on vacation! The issue with body checking is that youâll never feel like you are measuring up to whatever youâre hoping for because it is a way of constantly critiquing your body. The diet industry doesnât help us at all! Even if it changes i...
For many of you who have been on the diet rollercoaster for years, you probably have collected two wardrobes: one youâre trying to feel good in now and the other is the clothes you hope to fit back into one day. You might even find yourself putting off buying clothes you feel your best in because youâre waiting to lose weight and donât want to âwasteâ the money.
Here at the Centre for Emotional Eating we hear this from clients often! Not only is there a wish to one day be the smaller size you were previously, a lot of the time you also have emotional ties to those clothes because of who you were when you wore them. For example, one client loved her blouses and pencil skirts because it reminded her of a time when she was happy in her career.
But getting rid of these clothes will not only free up real space in your closet it will also free up mental space. Hereâs what we hear from clients once theyâve taken the plunge and cleaned out their closets of clothes that no longer fit them or ...
There is a big movement, especially on social media, to be body positive. It is the idea that you feel positive about your bodyâembracing how it looks, how you feel in itâmost of the time. It is meant to lead to more self-confidence, self-love, and total acceptance of your weight, which all sounds great!
⌠But what if youâve spent years absorbing diet culture messaging? Or you eat emotionally and that leads to feelings of shame and guilt around your body? It can seem impossible to get to a place where you unconditionally love your body and actively feel positive about it.
This is where the idea of body neutrality comes in.
Being âneutralâ about something means you donât have any positive or negative feelings about a topic, it simply is. This is something you can apply to how you feel about your body. If you constantly beat yourself up after going clothes shopping or suck in your stomach every time you look in a mirror, you might find ALL your ideas around your body are negative. The...
When TV shows and media show us what an emotional eater looks like, it is usually someone who would be categorized as obese by the BMI chart. Their rolls and double chin are highlighted to create a character that seems lazy or is the punchline in a few jokes. Not only is this incredibly harmful messaging to those in bigger bodies, it also isnât indicative of the experience of all emotional eaters.
But there is no one body type for emotional eaters, it can affect anyone.
They could identify as male or female.
They could be a preteen or a person in their 50s.
They could be from any cultural background.
They could reach for savoury or sweet foods when an emotion comes up.
What they do all have in common is that is that they eat to sooth themselves. When a feeling comes up that they canât manage or donât want to feel, they reach for food as a distraction, to numb out, even to bring some control or joy to the moment.
While from a caloric perspective, it is true that eating more than ...
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