Are you worried about overeating making you obese and affecting your health? Learn about its causes and adopt proven solutions to finally put an end to it.

We’ve all been in that situation: it’s your friend’s birthday and the cake is so delicious that you end up eating more than you intended to in the first place. Or, you’re stressed about something and you constantly find yourself turning to your fridge to help you cope with it.

Even though you might be conscious that it is not good for your health, there’s a lot more to overeating than you might have imagined. In the long term, overeating can cause serious health issues including type 2 diabetes and obesity which can significantly reduce the quality of your life.

To tackle it successfully, you need to first understand why it happens in the first place. What makes you eat more than you should? What triggers lead you down the path of overeating, leaving you with a cloud of shame and guilt hanging above your head later on?

What are the triggers and causes of overeating?

Binge Eating Disorder

Binge Eating Disorder, or BED, is an eating disorder that most people encounter during late adolescence or early adulthood. In this disorder, you will find yourself overeating on a regular basis and feeling completely out of control while you’re at it.

After some time, you may be hit by a wave of intense guilt and anger at yourself for having eaten so much. This will make you start a restrictive diet or abstain from eating for a long period of time. However, this often turns into a sticky cycle - excessive abstinence and hunger then plunge you back into binge eating to satisfy your empty and growling stomach.

Stress

There is no way to escape from the anxiety induced by stress, especially if you regularly overwork yourself. Overeating ‘comfort foods’ is a common way in which many people cope with this stress - it gives them a temporary injection of happiness and energy.

Negative emotions

People overeat to deal with negative emotions like sadness and depression just like they overeat to cope with stress. You might have heard about the term ‘emotional eating’, like when someone undergoes an unhappy event (like a break-up) and consumes tubs of ice cream to push back the onslaught of sadness and depression.

Boredom

Have you ever found yourself scanning the insides of your kitchen cupboards and fridge to find something to kill your boredom with? When we don’t plan our days properly and don’t have good ‘productive’ habits, we resort to overeating to fill our days and pass our time.

5 strategies to stop overeating

When you have a strong understanding of what fuels your overeating habit, you can take steps to start cutting down on it. Here are some solutions that will help you stop overeating and start building a healthy lifestyle.

Revamp your environment

If you see a tub of ice cream every time you open your fridge for something, it’s highly likely that at some point you will give in to the temptation and whisk the tub out to treat yourself to some tasty ice cream. Similarly, if your cupboards are loaded with your favorite snacks, you will find it an uphill battle to stop yourself from reaching out and grabbing a bunch every now and then.

The key is to remove the temptations from your environment. You should not have your favorite snacks lying in easily-accessible places. In fact, if you decide to not buy any snacks or never bring leftover ice cream back to your home, you will find yourself overeating a lot less on a daily basis.

Learn better stress management

The only way you can stop yourself from ‘stress-eating’ is to find better ways to deal with your stress. Luckily, there are a number of things you can do to reduce chronic stress:

• Develop a habit of exercising regularly, even if it’s just a short walk around the neighborhood
• Practice activities like yoga and meditation to relax your mind
• Meet up with friends and have fun conversations
• Maintain a to-do list and try to complete your tasks on time

By implementing these activities in your daily life, you will find yourself less anxious and stressed throughout the day. You will feel less tempted to resort to comfort foods to make yourself feel better.

Ask yourself if you are hungry

It is quite useful to remember why we eat in the first place - it is a means of sustenance. Eating food gives us the energy we need to perform our daily tasks, work, and pursue our interests. Therefore, if you are not feeling hungry, you do not need to eat anything.

However, this is easier said than done. People who overeat often do so mindlessly - they do not stop to consider whether they are hungry at all. So whenever you get a sudden craving and find yourself reaching out for food, pause for a minute, and ask yourself: am I hungry right now?

If the answer is no, then you should muster the will to turn away from the food and come back later when you actually need to.

Maintain a fixed eating schedule

When you do not have a fixed eating schedule, it becomes a lot easier to eat sporadically throughout the day whenever you ‘feel like it’. As a result, you often end up eating a lot more calories than you should.

A helpful strategy is to eat three full meals at fixed times in the traditional way: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can slot in a couple of snack times if you want to, but following this schedule will greatly help you limit the amount of food you eat on a daily basis.

Avoid excessive dieting

Many people decide to tackle their weight issues head-on and embark on prolonged bouts of dieting. This can include reducing portion sizes by a huge amount or even skipping meals altogether.

While there are good intentions behind these actions, they can be quite counterproductive. Your body will torment you with hunger if you keep it starving for long enough, and at some point, you will succumb to your natural desires and binge on food to fill your empty stomach.

So it’s better to avoid these schemes altogether - you don’t have to starve yourself to lose weight. You can do so by getting some exercise into your routine or just dialing down your portion size by a small proportion.

It’s okay to fail

Trying to fix a bad habit like overeating is not an easy task. It will take a lot of planning, effort, support, and failed attempts. You will have days in which everything goes according to plan, but you will also have days in which you end up overeating.

It is important that you don’t beat yourself down for slipping up once in a while. It happens to everyone, and it’s a part of the process. Whenever that happens, just remind yourself that you are going to learn from this failure, put it behind you, and try again the next day.