Ok, so here’s the deal. If you’re a yo-yo dieter, an overeater, a binge eater, a bulimic, or a compulsive eater the chances are that you’ll be feeling pretty crap. Why? Well there are a lot of complex reasons why you’re feeling down or even depressed and one of them is that your serotonin levels might be low.

What causes low serotonin?

There are a number of things that can cause low serotonin levels:

Eating too little protein – people with eating and weight problems are rarely eating enough protein and this means that you’re short of the amino acid required to make sufficient neurotransmitters (serotonin is a neurotransmitter). Four of the main neurotransmitters are made from just one amino acid (phenylalanine) and proteins are the only food source of this nutrient.

Seasons and time of the year – darkness signals the pineal gland to convert serotonin to melatonin whilst bright light tells it to stop. If you don’t get enough bright light/sunlight you may get overloaded with melatonin and deficient in serotonin.

Lack of exercise – in the short term, exercise can stimulate serotonin production. Exercise also increases the intake of oxygen which is critical for making serotonin from amino acids.

Why are so many people deficient in serotonin?

Our way of living is a major culprit in low levels of serotonin. A poor diet and eating habits mean that we don’t provide our bodies with the raw materials needed to produce neurotransmitters like serotonin.

To deal with emotional stress we use faulty coping mechanisms such as overeating, drugs, alcohol, tobacco and inactivity. These all force our body to constantly adjust its chemical balance to deal with stress which means that it’s using up nutrients and raw materials. These factors together mean that the brain just can’t make enough serotonin to meet the body’s demands.

Why Does Low Serotonin Make You Feel Crap & Trigger Bingeing?

In the brain, serotonin influences mood, pain transmission, sexual behaviour and sleep. But one of its most important functions is to control appetite through the ‘satiety mechanism’. In effect, serotonin puts the brake on food intake by signalling to the brain when the body has eaten sufficient food.

As serotonin levels fall, complications such as depression, obesity, insomnia, migraine headache, chronic fatigue, PMS and SAD may arise. Unfortunately, food cravings, particularly for carbohydrates, are a significant feature in many of these conditions.

Researchers have found that when animals and humans are fed diets lacking in tryptophan, their appetite increases significantly as serotonin levels fall. Dieting also lowers blood levels of tryptophan and serotonin which means that low levels can trigger bouts of binge eating. During a binge, people usually crave foods high in simple carbs such as sugars and starches – bread, cakes, sweets, biscuits, cookies, ice cream … You can read more about the problems of serotonin deficiency and the results of research here.

This is thought to be a part of a self-medication mechanism. Carbohydrates provide a quick source of energy to keep the body going and high carbohydrate intake also increases the amount of tryptophan that can pass across the blood-brain barrier to make serotonin. With more serotonin in circulation, the appetite control centre receives stronger signals that appetite has been satisfied and switches off the food cravings for a while.

However, because there has been no actual change in behaviour or lifestyle, in some cases, carbohydrate cravings may develop into a kind of ‘addiction’. The body gets caught up in a vicious cycle: low serotonin triggers overwhelming hunger urges leading to increased intake of usually refined carbohydrates; these carbohydrates raise serotonin levels quickly but temporarily; when the levels fall, the cycle starts again.

How Can We Increase Our Serotonin Levels & Stop Feeling So Crap?

Just eating foods with serotonin in them won’t cut it because the brain needs to break down the essential amino acid tryptophan into 5HTP and then to serotonin. What you need to do is:

Exercise – it is thought that the upbeat mood induced by exercise is more likely to be the result of serotonin and adrenaline release, with a small contribution from brain endorphins. Exercise uses calories for energy, reduces tension and anxiety, enhances mood and self-esteem and can help to curb food and alcohol cravings. Moderate to intense exercise also helps suppress the appetite.

Manage Stress – this will stop the body using up its supplies of raw materials and co-factor nutrients so that they will be available for serotonin production. Serotonin synthesis and uptake needs a good supply of B vitamins (particularly B1, B5, B6, B12, and folic acid), Magnesium, Vitamin C, Iron and Chromium (for the production of insulin).

Get Some Sunlight – darkness signals the pineal gland to convert serotonin to melatonin. Bright light tells it to stop. People who don’t get enough bright light may therefore get overloaded with melatonin and deficient in serotonin.

Diet – if you’re struggling with carbohydrate cravings you might be unknowingly boosting your low serotonin levels. Eating carefully chosen carbohydrates at particular times can help to keep serotonin levels high, improve your mood and reduce the cravings that provoke binges. In other words, carbohydrates are both part of the problem and part of the solution.

The best diet for maintaining good serotonin levels is one that is rich in complex carbohydrates (60-70%) from vegetables, fruits and grains, balanced with protein (12-15%) and with sufficient essential fats, particularly Omega 3, essential for the neuronal membranes where serotonin works.

The important issue is to have a snack or meal high in complex carbohydrate at the time when you’re most likely to give in to cravings. This helps to clear a pathway for tryptophan. A high-carbohydrate snack or meal can boost serotonin levels for about three hours. A protein based meal will block tryptophan uptake for at least two hours.

NB: It’s important to ensure that carbohydrates come from complex, unprocessed sources in order not to cause reactive hypoglycaemia which will only serve to make symptoms of serotonin deficiency worse and add to problems with weight gain.

What Foods Contain Tryptophan?

Tryptophan is found in milk, cottage cheese, poultry, turkey and chicken, eggs, red meats, soybeans, tofu and nuts, especially almonds.

Tryptophan Containing Foods

Do you binge on carbs to stop yourself feeling crap? Do you crave carbohydrates at particular times of the day? I’d love to know so leave your comments below

It may seem odd but you’ve got to eat yourself out of an eating or weight problem and this delicious meal ticks all the boxes.

Getting enough protein, essential fatty acids and complex carbs is essential if you want to keep binge eating at bay and stabilise your moods.

It can sometimes be difficult to judge how much protein we should have in a meal – visualizing the portion size is a great way of getting round this problem. For example, if you know how much a portion of chicken needs to be you can make sure that you’re getting enough – particularly when you’re eating out.

For chicken dishes a medium sized chicken breast, that fits in the palm of your hand, is ideal. It’ll be smaller of course when cooked – but you get the idea.

Ingredients

2oz brown or basmati rice
1 medium brown onion
3 spring onions
5 medium closed cup mushrooms
1 stick celery
6oz butternut squash
1 medium chicken breast
250ml vegetable stock
1 tsp Very Lazy Ginger (pre-chopped pickled ginger)
Soy sauce
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Place the rice in c. 600ml of water. Bring to the boil, cover with the pan lid, and simmer for about 25 minutes. If you’re using basmati rice adjust the cooking time accordingly.

In the meantime chop the brown onion and put aside. Chop the chicken into thin strips or small chunks and put to one side. Finally, chop up the spring onions and celery and dice the mushrooms and butternut squash. As you can see from the photo there’s plenty of gorgeous vegetables there just oozing with goodness – a real powerhouse of complex carbs.

Heat a small amount (not too stingy – it’s good for you afterall) of olive oil in a frying pan or wok with a lid, add the chopped vegetables and fry for a minute. Add 250ml of the vegetable stock and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down, put on the lid, and simmer gently for about 15 minutes. Add a splash of soy sauce and the chopped ginger (I added a bit of the liquid too for some extra zing!) during cooking. The liquid will reduce but don’t let it dry out – we’re aiming at a slightly moist consistency.

Once you’ve got the vegetables started it’s time to get on with the chicken.

Heat a small amount of olive oil into a frying pan or wok and add the chopped brown onions. Sweat the onions gently until tender and then add the chicken and stir fry until cooked all the way through. If the meat ‘catches’ a little that’s ok – it all adds to the taste (just don’t burn it ). Once it has cooked, and if the vegetables haven’t finished cooking, take the chicken off the heat and put to one side.

Once the vegetables are ready you can add the cooked rice and the chicken to the pan. Continue to cook for a short time (until any liquid has evaporated) and add a small amount of salt, pepper and soy sauce to taste.

This is a complete meal so just serve it up and tuck in!

As I sit in Costa Coffee between King’s Cross and St. Pancras train stations after yet another course I see the world walk by. Literally! There are people from a dozen or more cultures and just about every body shape you can imagine. Looking at these people makes me wonder why, as women, we are so caught up in being perfect? Why do we obsess about being a perfect weight and shape when it is so blatantly obvious that there is no such thing.

Why is it that when we look at celebrity photos in magazines we judge ourselves against their airbrushed images and find ourselves wanting. We berate our fat thighs and our less than perfect abdominals. We squirm as we compare their thin thighs to our fat thighs and the creeping of inadequacy takes hold.

But what are the options? The choices seem fairly obvious: Barbie-style slim hips with impossibly big boobs a la Jordan aka Katie Price or pencil-thin and flat-chested a la Kate Moss.

We look at ourselves and rubbish our bodies, ‘my thighs are too fat!’, ‘My breasts are too small, too big, not perky enough, not the right shape etc. etc.’ Some of us even go the extremes of having bits of us chopped off or filled with artificial, man-made body parts or liquids. Some of us live for the day when we will be perfect and this is the real tragedy!

Living for a future that might never come whilst living in a present in which we are never quite good enough.

I think that it is time we all stopped living for a better future or pining for a happier, slimmer, fitter past and live for now, today and in the moment.

The next time you are out and about take a look at all the amazing people that surround you. I can guarantee that none of them will be perfect. It’s time that we started to appreciate what we are, warts and all, and live a life of self-love so that we don’t look back at old photos in ten years time and think, ‘I looked great then! Why didn’t I know that?’

Reducing this tension can set you free from the problems that you have with food that cause you to be overweight in the first place.

Quick Tip

Check yourself out and think about all the wonderful things that your body does for you. It is incredible and you are amazing! Love your body and you can begin to free yourself from the constant negative feelings that you have about yourself.

The Benefits of Keeping a Food Diary for Emotional Eating

A food diary is an essential tool for you to use if you want to get to grips with your emotional eating, whether it comes in the form of comfort eating, binge eating, or compulsive eating.

At its most basic a food diary can help you to recognise that you are overeating and perhaps help you to curb the times that you nibble.

However, the benefits of keeping a food diary go so much further and can, particularly, when used with a trained practitioner, help you get to the bottom of many of your habits and help you to make the links between what you eat, how you eat, and your emotions.

Examples of some simple links to be made when keeping a food diary

When you first start using a food diary you will perhaps not see a pattern emerging from what you are recording but as you collect more information about what you are eating and how you are feeling you will be able to see the links. These links can be both physical and emotional. So for example, you may record that on one morning you ate a bowl full of coco-pops for breakfast and that by mid-morning your hunger level was high and that you also felt rather tired. At this time you also had a cup of coffee and an unhealthy snack. Later in the day you couldn’t resist eating more unhealthy snacks and had given up trying to control your eating by the early evening and noted the thought ‘I’ve blown it now so why bother’.

This could quite simply be your body’s reaction to having an unsatisfactory breakfast high in sugar. Because your body has had too many fast reacting carbohydrates during breakfast it has hopped aboard the blood sugar roller coaster and by mid-morning your energy levels have slumped leading you to try and keep going and re-fuel by taking on caffeine and more fast-release carbohydrate snacks (cakes, sweets, chocolate, crisps etc). This only perpetuates the problem, and also because you haven’t taken on enough protein your hunger levels remain high. Of course, your thought processes also interrupt your attempts to control your eating here too and you begin to sabotage your efforts with ‘I’ve blown it’ thinking.

On other days it might be emotional factors that come into play and although you’ve had a decent breakfast, porridge with a piece of fruit for example, by mid morning you find yourself unable to resist eating a piece of chocolate. What can have gone wrong here? Your body doesn’t need the extra energy but you’ve lost control any way. Looking back on the day you notice, for example, that you’d had words with your partner before setting off to work and when you’d got there some information you’d requested from a colleague for an important presentation in the afternoon hadn’t arrived. These events had tweaked your stress spring and you’d reached for the chocolate to try and assuage the feelings of anxiety and frustration that were rising up within you.

What You Should Include In A Food Diary: A Sample Food Diary Template

You can create your own weekly food diary template quite simply and with minimal cost. All you need is to create your own food diary template in a word document using the following headings and then print off seven copies or alternatively you could just get seven sheets of A4 paper with the following headings written across the top:

Time | Food & Drink | Where | Hunger Level | Mood & State of Mind | V/L | Comments | Today’s Summary

The table should also be divided into three rows – these are for the food that you eat: morning, afternoon, evening

Here is an explanation of what the different columns are:

Time: Enter the time of each snack, meal, binge, or nibble.

Food & Drink: Describe the food or drink you just had. Never weigh your food but give an idea of how much is eaten. E.g. ‘a small piece of chicken’ or ‘two slices of toast thickly smeared with butter’

Where: The exact location in the house or anywhere else. Say if you are alone or with others. Are you doing anything else like standing up or watching television? Was this eaten in secret?

Hunger Level: Rate hunger on a scale of 0 to 5 where 0 = not hungry and 5 = starving. Or just say how hungry you are or if you have cravings.

Mood and State of Mind: This is open for you to record how you are feeling or if there is anything on your mind when you are eating. Are you bored or lonely, anxious or feeling ‘fat’? Are you having any physical symptoms like bloated or headachy or tired.

V/L: Write V if you made yourself sick or L if you took laxatives.

Comments: Is there anything else important that may be useful? E.g. were you thinking ‘I shouldn’t be eating this’ or ‘I am fat anyway so why shouldn’t I have it’ or ‘I’ve blown it now’. Is anyone influencing your eating choices?

Today’s Summary: Highlight any significant events today. How well did you cope?

The food diary can be a very effective tool for you to use in your efforts to overcome and emotional disorder by helping you to make the links between your nutrition, your habits, your lifestyle, your stressors, your eating and so on.

Using a food diary in conjunction with an emotional eating treatment plan is, of course, the most effective way to stop emotional eating, but beginning the process of self discovery yourself is also a first step on the road to recovery.

In today’s lesson you’ll begin to understand where your beliefs about food and eating come from.

Kicking binge eating into touch means that you’ll need to begin to understand why you behave the way you do around food.

Yep, you’re just going to have to dig deep into your past experiences and look at the way you talk to yourself about food and start putting that jigsaw together.

It’s no good burying your head in the sand and reaching for the next bag of crisps in the numb way you do right now.

That’s just got to stop if you want to off-load binge eating and tell it to take a hike.

Instead you’ve got to get clarity and understanding about what influences you absorbed as you grew up and how you talk to yourself now.

We’re talking here about influences from home, school, your culture, religion, and all those pesky emotional meanings that you confer upon food.

So, have you ever been faced with a plate full of food and not been able to stop eating even though you felt full?

That’s your food script rearing it’s ugly head!

Perhaps your inner parent is berating you, “You shouldn’t waste food”. But do you know that really you should be able to leave food if you’re full. It is allowed.

So if we want to get to grips with this food problem, this bloody binge eating that’s blighting our lives, then we’ve got to get digging down into what has formed us.

We’ve got to understand our food script, what it is and where it came from.

Once we do get some clarity here then we can begin to recognize our responses to food and slowly change them to healthier attitudes and behaviours.

We all have a food script that we’ve taken on board, usually unconsciously, from being very young children.

We get this information from our parents, from friends, from magazines, television, advertising, public health messages and so on.

The experience of one of my clients, Amy (name changed) illustrates this well.

Amy had a real problem with leaving food which meant that even when she was uncomfortably full she felt compelled to clean her plate and would even finish the children’s leftovers.

As we discussed her food script she began to remember the messages she’d picked up about food as a child. From the media she remembered regularly seeing images of starving children in Africa, on the News and even on children’s TV.

At the table with the family pressure was put on her to eat what was on the plate and she remembered being told, “Eat it all up. Your father has worked hard to put food on the table” and “Eat it all up. There are children in the world who are starving”. Sound familiar?

Coaching Assignment:

So now here’s the work that you have to do.

This assignment may seem simple enough but it can evoke a powerful and transformative understanding of why you treat food, and yourself, in the way that you do.

There are two parts to this assignment:

Part 1

What do you say to yourself about food? Do you give yourself permission to eat certain foods? Do you berate yourself? Just what is going on inside your head?

Think back carefully to the last few times you had an issue with food.

Your inner parent might have been saying:

“You shouldn’t waste food”
“Have a sweetie it will make you feel better”
“Go away and eat some chocolate on the Motorway”
“You’re a greedy pig”

Your inner adult might have been saying:

“You would have to eat 20 Magnums to gain 1lb”
“One slice of chocolate cake has 300 calories”
“Lentils are a good source of protein”

Your inner child might have been saying:

“Yum, yum. I want it now”
“I hate vegetables”
“I feel fat so I mustn’t eat”
“I deserve a treat”

Think carefully and write down your answers if it helps.

Part 2

Think back over your childhood. Do you have any food related memories? Think carefully and write down the answers that come to mind if it helps.

Here are some useful questions to help prompt your memories:

Were you forced to eat everything on your plate as a child?
Were you ever made aware of food shortages e.g. the starving children of Africa?
Were you ever told that certain foods are good for you?
Were you ever rewarded with food treats?
Did you parents eat between meals?
Were you given special foods when you were ill?
Did you ever sneak food as a child?
What about your mother – did she enjoy cooking? Who did she cook for? How did she feed herself? (Last in line?) What does that tell you about how she felt about herself?
Family mealtimes – did you eat together? How was the atmosphere?

Explore your memories and images that these questions bring to your awareness. What have you come to understand about yourself and your relationship with food through this exercise?

Perhaps you can talk to your siblings to discover more of your family’s food script.

If you found this lesson valuable then others might too. Please feel free to share it on Facebook or Twitter etc.

This it the first post in our mini-course, ‘Five Strategies to Stop Binge Eating’.

There’s a complimentary coaching assignment at the bottom of each post to help mobilize you into action

In this first lesson we’ll be looking at what you need to eat to begin to stop binge eating.

Strategy 1: Control your Binge Eating with Optimum Nutrition

It’s a paradox but you need to eat your way out of a weight or eating problem. This bit is crucial! I won’t work with clients who don’t make a real effort to rehabilitate their nutrition as it is so difficult to get results otherwise.

Once you start dieting, comfort eating, or bingeing your physiology is sent way out of control and it can make it nearly impossible for you to resist urges and cravings, particularly for sugar or starchy carbohydrates. Further, this kind of eating actually makes you crave sugar and starchy carbohydrates!

Put simply here’s why:

Foods that are high in sugar (e.g. chocolate, biscuits, sweets) or refined carbohydrates (e.g. white rice, pasta and bread) are digested very quickly. A lot of glucose is produced, our blood sugar levels rise rapidly and the pancreas releases insulin to remove glucose from the blood.

But…a rapid rise in blood sugar can cause the pancreas to release too much insulin. Blood sugar levels then fall rapidly until the level is too low.

Low blood sugar levels can lead to a wide range of symptoms. Since we do not enjoy these symptoms (fatigue, poor concentration, mood swings, depression, confusion, forgetfulness, irritability, insomnia, headaches, shakiness), we often reach for something to give us a lift and increase blood sugar levels again quickly e.g. more chocolate, biscuits, cakes, and fizzy drinks.

How and what you need to eat to stop binge eating

The solution is really very simple: eat three nutritionally balanced meals and two protein and carbohydrate rich snacks each day. Always eat breakfast. Avoid refined carbohydrates.

Nutritional strategy to stop binge eating:

• Eat three balanced meals (containing protein, fat and carbohydrates) per day with an emphasis on nutrient dense foods designed to improve nutritional and biochemical status e.g. plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, wholegrains, quality protein such as fish or chicken, pulses beans, nuts, seeds and small amounts of good oils for essential fats.
• Include 2-3 small snacks daily of fruit and vegetables with proteins (e.g. nuts, seeds or cheese) and avoid snacking on sweets or refined carbohydrates such as white bread, cakes, and biscuits.
• Treat food as medicine and eat at least every 3-4 hours to balance blood sugar and insulin output.
• Ensure that each meal has 20g of quality protein from organic (if possible) meat and poultry, fish, eggs, low-fat dairy products, pulses, tofu and nuts. This helps to reduce cravings.
• Include some good fats each day for health and to manage appetite e.g. deep-ocean, oily fish, nuts, seeds, olive oil, avocado.
• Eat unlimited amounts of green vegetables with protein foods and include some red, orange, purple and yellow vegetables as well. Vegetables supply carbohydrates for energy and are also a very rich source of minerals and phytonutrients. They also provide enzymes, vitamins and some protein and help to sustain the alkaline balance of the body.
• Ensure adequate fluid intake (1-1.5 litres per day).
• Eat food high in the amino acid tryptophan – chicken, turkey, tuna, kidney beans, oats, lentils, chickpeas and seeds. This can help raise serotonin levels and improve mood.
• Eat a good quality breakfast with some protein food.

Coaching Assignment:

Design a sample menu for the day using the information you have just read and researching nutrition on the internet if necessary:

My sample menu:

Breakfast:

Mid-morning snack:

Lunch:

Mid-afternoon snack:

Dinner:

You have come to the end of the first lesson. The next lesson will help you to understand where your beliefs about food come from.

I understand the turmoil that overeating causes and as a binge eating therapist I know how to help. To your success in your journey to free yourself from emotional overeating.

Keeping a blog allows you to see just how people find you online. That is, what search terms people type into the search engines to arrive at your blog, such as ‘find inner peace and stop binge eating’.

Today, someone used this phrase to find this site and reading it touched me and reminded me of why I work as a coach helping to free women from emotional eating.

Their search, ‘find inner peace and stop binge eating’ is a simple phrase but one in which lies a ton of heartache and anguish. It denotes a life only half lived and one that is wrapped up in turmoil and perhaps self-loathing. It is certainly one that is nutritionally unbalanced.

So what are the causes of binge eating and how do we stop it? Well, the phrase itself allows us some insight into part of the problem. Binge eating can be a response to a lack of ‘inner peace’ where we use food to assuage our feelings, to take the edge off of our emotions, to numb us into unfeeling.

Solutions: 3 Ways to Find Inner Peace and Stop Binge Eating

I don’t believe that there is any one solution to stopping binge eating. Rather, there are numerous areas in our lives that we need to deal with along with changing our behaviours, habits, and nutritional status.

Below you can find three ways you can begin to find inner peace and stop binge eating:

1. Find a passion in life
Finding something to be passionate about can reach us at a deep level. Once this source of unfulfilment has been filled then we will stop turning to food to fill the chasm within us.

2. Learn how to deal with your stress
Stress is a major factor in binge eating. Not only does stress upset our blood sugar and help to cause cravings but we also seek to soothe the tension with food. Learning strategies to deal with stress can be very effective in reducing binge eating.

3. Begin to understand your feelings
Often we mask our feelings, such as anger, resentment, guilt, and shame, with food so it is important to begin to explore those feelings and learn where in our past their source lays.

Once we do this it can lead to an understanding of how we experience them emotionally and physically. Only then can we begin to break the food and feeling nexus find inner peace and stop binge eating.

Help for binge eating means that along with dealing with the emotional side that causes binge eating it’s also important to deal with the nutritional imbalances that also cause cravings and binge eating. Once you’ve started to balance your blood sugar and improved your nutritional status real changes can happen.

So you think that you comfort eat and it’s a bit of a problem – stops you losing the weight that you just can’t shift. But when does this ‘comfort eating’ become a problem and what is it really all about?

Well comfort eating or emotional eating, and this is my personal view, encompasses a whole range of problems that people have with food and can be a fairly innocuous nibble of a biscuit when you’re feeling a bit tired to constantly nibbling away when you’re feeling anxious and even wholehearted binges when your self-esteem has been knocked down another peg, possibly even followed by purging.

We all comfort eat to some extent, we are all emotional eaters. Anyone who says that they don’t eat for emotional reasons is self-deluded. It’s just that for some of us, emotional eating can make us overweight and, in its most sinister form, very ill.

We’re programmed from birth to experience food as comforting but in some of us this need for food becomes a way of assuaging feelings of emotional discomfort and can become a real issue. The problem is that turning to food can never really give you relief from your problems, it only masks them, and unfortunately it can in turn lead to an increased dependence on using food for comfort! Eating food for comfort becomes a vicious circle both emotionally and physically.

Emotional eating takes on different forms for different people but perhaps you recognise some of the ways that people think about their emotional eating problem:

• “I feel out of control with food”
• “I’m addicted to chocolate/biscuits”
• “Even when I’ve had enough I can’t stop eating”
• “I eat huge amounts of food in a short space of time”
• “I eat whether I’m sad/lonely/angry even when I’m not hungry”
• “I constantly pick and nibble at food”
• “I go backwards and forwards to the cupboards/fridge nibbling food”
• “I’m always on a diet”
• “I get cravings for food”
• “If I eat one I have to eat them all”

Comfort Eating Can Be a Real Problem

Some of the forms of comfort eating in its more extreme form are:

Compulsive eating

Nibbling, picking, going backwards and forwards to the fridge but never feeling satisfied; even having just one chocolate bar too many but feeling guilty and worried about food. Compulsive eaters may say “I am not sure I have an eating disorder, perhaps I am just greedy” but they need just as much help as everyone else who struggles with control of food.

Binge Eating

This involves repeated episodes of uncontrolled overeating large amounts of food, often in secret, which are not accompanied by purging but which lead to a great deal of shame and guilt. People may binge on any kind of food or specific foods like chocolate, biscuits or cereal. Binge eating feels for many people as if they have been “taken over” by someone else.

Bulimia Nervosa

Bulimia Nervosa is condition in people of normal or excess weight where there is recurrent binge or overeating followed by harmful and dangerous weight control practices to prevent weight gain. These practices include using laxatives or diuretics, vomiting, detoxing, slimming pills and excessive exercise. There is also an over-preoccupation with and concern about body weight and shape.

The good news is that with eating disorder treatment even these more extreme forms of comfort eating can be treated successfully with the right knowledge and support.

Got Cravings? Eat Food To Boost Your Mood

If you suffer from cravings, overeating, comfort eating or emotional eating then it’s likely that you’re sometimes a little moody and you need to concentrate on eating food to boost your mood.

For one reason or another your serotonin levels aren’t what they should be which causes your mood to swing about and make you feel pretty miserable and this is where eating food to boost your mood can really help.

The recipe below is not only delicious, nutritious, and easy to prepare but it will help you to balance your blood sugar, lose weight, and improve your mood!

Eating Food to Boost Your Mood Gives You Tons of Energy Too

Eating food to boost your mood is a clever way of raising your serotonin levels and if your meals are as healthy as this one you’ll not only reduce cravings but have tons more energy too.

Not bad going – but this should be the case with anything you eat really.

Recipe

1 medium sweet potato
1/4 red cabbage
1 medium tomato
1/2 red pepper
1/2 yellow pepper
2 good tbs cottage cheese

For the dressing:

1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
3/4 tsp dried oregano
Freshly ground black pepper

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 175-210 degrees C
2. Prick skin of potato and place in the oven
3. Bake for 50 minutes or until soft

For the salad:

1. Chop peppers, tomato, and red cabbage and place into a bowl
2. Drizzle with the dressing (the remainder can be saved in the fridge)

Once the potato is soft it can be sliced and topped with the cottage cheese. Serve with the salad and enjoy!

Losing weight, and maintaining that weight loss, means that you’ll need to change your habits permanently so that you don’t pile on the pounds once you’ve slimmed down!

One of the major mistakes that most dieters make is that they don’t break down old habits and replace them with new ones. Unfortunately, this means that they’ll either break their diet or just put the weight back on once they’ve reached their target.

Here are five weight loss coaching tips that you can easily incorporate into your new lifestyle to achieve weight loss success and maintain it:

1. Eat regularly throughout the day

Eating at regular intervals throughout the day will ensure your blood-sugar levels stay stable. This will help you avoid sugar cravings and their associated energy dips. Choose high-protein snacks, such as soya nuts, seeds, yoghurt or a rice cake with a little peanut butter.

2. Say no to processed food

Diet ready meals can seem like an easy option but don’t be fooled. Even those that are labelled low in fat and calories can contain high levels of sugar in the form of refined carbs, which the body will then store as fat.

3. Drink two litres of water a day

Your body needs water to function well – and that includes your metabolism. Good hydration will help you keep your digestive system working well and ensure your muscles work at an optimum level. Drink before you get thirsty – by then you’re already de-hydrated.

4. Exercise three times a week

This could be walking, going to the gym, taking an exercise class, riding your bike or gardening. Work out at your own level and push yourself a little at a time. The more you do the more energy you will have and the more you will WANT to exercise.

5. Lean red meat

Red meat has had a bad press, but lean red beef is an excellent source of iron, as well as a good source of protein and conjugated linoleic acid, which stimulates the conversion of stored fat into energy.