Stress eating can lead you to depend heavily on comfort foods; foods that are laden with calories, sugar and salt. Stress eating therefore leads to sudden weight gains and health problems. Also, stress eating is addictive and once a person is used to munching their way through stress, they find it difficult to stop.

Here are some effective tips to cope with stress eating:

Understand your problem: This is the first tip. Stress eating is often mistaken for needful eating because stress saps you of energy, makes you feel listless and empty. Therefore, victims have to develop a super sensitive antenna to detect stress eating and recognize it for what it is.

Relax: People turn to comfort foods during stress so they can help the body unwind and get some comfort. It is more productive to look for healthy ways of de-stressing. Deep breathing, yoga, music or exercises can help you relax.

Postpone: Postpone the act of eating for 10-20 minutes. Actual hunger tolerates delay. By postponing the act of eating, you can control the urge to eat junk food. Besides, postponing the urge may get rid of the food craving altogether. This is one of the most effective tips to fight stress eating.

Exercise: Daily exercise is a natural stress fighter. More importantly, it can help you overcome the bad effects of stress eating. Exercise need not be rigorous. Even light exercise will do. But commit to 15-20 minutes of exercise every day.

Portion control: If you are used to stress eating, there may be times when you cannot deny yourself the pleasure of food. In such cases, simply indulge yourself. But, instead of gobbling the entire cake, eat a thin sliver. Enjoy the taste and savor the flavor.

Try, try, try again: Don't give up on yourself. It is not as hard as it seems. Small steps will lead you to success ultimately. Slowly but surely, you will succeed in breaking the unholy nexus between mood and food!



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Davenport

All of us overeat once in a while. When we eat something that throws us into paroxysms of gastronomical delight, we just cannot resist another bite, and another. This is why we have stomachs that have the capacity to hold a lot more than what we need, much like balloons that can expand to a certain extent. Eating more than what you want is alright if it happens once in a while.

But, when overeating becomes a habit, overcoming it could very well become a matter of survival. Continuous overeating leads to serious weight gain, which in turn causes a number of dangerous health problems. Equally important is the fact that victims of overeating are controlled by their food habits. Their happiness, independence and feelings of self control are sabotaged by the all out desire to eat. This is the reason why you must overcome your addiction to overeat.

Here are some ways to overcome overeating:

- Set achievable goals (not that I will never binge again, but that I will binge only twice in the day or for half an hour)
- Measure your success by how much you have achieved not by how much there is yet to achieve
- Journal your food patterns and the quantity of food you eat so you can realistically assess how much you are eating
- Forgive yourself for episodes of bingeing
- Identify triggers that set you off
- Keep excess food out of the house
- Eat in company

It is not an easy task to overcome overeating. In fact, with so much emphasis on healthy eating and thin bodies, eating is one of the forbidden pleasures. Also, eating more than what we want is being wired into our brains every hour of the day as we are bombarded by attractive food ads, great discounts and bigger portions in restaurants.

Even so, if you are a victim of overeating, you must make it a top priority to overcome compulsive overeating as soon as you can. Remember, the longer a habit stays with you, the more deeply ingrained it becomes.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Davenport

The modern generation is plagued by many eating disorders. Anorexia tops this list by being a mental condition that prompts a person to refrain from eating. Acute loss in the body weight is the result. The condition is commonly seen on teenagers. Why is this termed as a mental condition? It is because, even if the person is reduced to bones, they have the feeling that they are obese. The condition is prevalent among girls and can evolve itself into dangerous situations, if left untreated. In the following passages, we will be discussing some finer aspects of anorexia.

There is no specific cause for anorexia. In fact, a series of factors is known to act in tandem and bring forth this medical condition. The patient might be psychologically affected and will be obsessed with the fact that they are obese. The lifestyle of the patient plays an important role in shaping this illness. In certain cases, it was found that the household members contributed to augmenting anorexia in the patient. Constant reminding of being overweight will prompt such thoughts in the mind. The genetic makeup of the person also plays an important role in designing the condition.

Since the condition is purely related to the mental temperament, care and caution must be exercised while devising prevention paradigms. Confidence must be instilled on the mind of the patient that they are not obese. If you doubt yourself, spend some time everyday looking at the mirror. Instead of harboring contempt for the body, it is better to start loving and caring for it. Food is essential to keep one hale and hearty. Absence of food will lead to unlikely consequences. Important vitamins and minerals must be consumed on regular basis to refrain from various other diseases. All these must be instilled on the mind of the patient.

Loss in the appetite is the preliminary symptom of the condition. If you doubt that a family member is undergoing the effects of anorexia, many self-screening tests can be found online and in labs that will aid in diagnosing the condition. These days' blood tests have been developed to sniff out anorexia. Doctors will get wind of the situation when conversing with the patient. Detecting the condition is quite easy because the patients will be displaying negative approach to food and healthy lifestyle.

Various treatment options are available with the help of which anorexia can be treated successfully. Counseling sessions play an important role and instilling self-confidence in the patient must be the ultimate motive. Along with psychological treatment sessions, it is advisable to subject the patient to a balanced and healthy diet. The lost vigor can be gained by proceeding in this manner.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Praveen_K_K

The binge eating disorder is probably more common than you might think. Out of all the people around you who are quite overweight, what percentage of them do you think are eating out of an addiction or mental need for food, rather than mere gluttony? Even if you aren't like that, you can try to relate to how they feel. Think about what it's like when you haven't eaten for most of the day and you have those big hunger pangs that are telling you: "You'd better go eat!" How easy is it for you to ignore those hunger pangs?

Would you be able to stop from thinking about eating if you were starving? If you would honestly find it hard to ignore the need to eat, particularly when your body is begging you to eat something, then you can possibly understand what a binge eater feels like.

The binge eating disorder is sometimes subcategorized into a deprivation-sensitive type and an addictive type. The deprivation-sensitive type will force themselves not to eat or exercise excessively in an attempt to lose weight, and then overcompensate in the other direction by binging. An addictive type might never try to lose any weight, but simply start to use food as a means of self-medicating or feeling better, much like a drug addict or alcoholic uses substances to give themselves a high.

A binge eating disorder is a serious condition that is difficult to control once the "ritual" begins. Many binge eaters reportedly have inner dialogues where they try to convince themselves not to do it, but the need to overeat wins out and they go through with it anyway. The compulsion is often too strong for most people, and it's not surprising that it can happen. After all, you hear all kinds of stories about women who are depressed on a Friday night because they don't have a date, and so they console themselves with a romantic movie and a gallon of ice cream. Imagine that the depression was more permanent and the ice cream was just a lot of food in general, and you might get a better picture of how some addictive binge eaters will use food to feel better.

As a matter of fact, the need for food boils down to biology. If you overeat for a week on vacation, and then you come home and realize you used to eat less, you'll probably feel hungry on the food you had before for a while. This is because your body has adjusted to the new amount that you started eating, and you have to readjust back downward. Well, what would happen if, instead of adjusting downward, you continued to eat more and more as you started to get hungry? Your body clears out the blood sugar that you consume because you would die with that kind of blood sugar, but then you find yourself starving because your body overcorrected.

Once you are on a blood sugar roller coaster, it is no different than addiction to substances. You need it to just feel normal, and you usually overcorrect and feel really good for a while, then crash later. Now that you know more about a binge eating disorder, you will be more prepared to recognize it if it shows up in yourself or others.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Emile_Jarreau