Have you ever wondered why you are eating? Or why do you always eat at a certain time during the day? 

Structure and routine do wonders, and we encourage you build a strong habitual routine in order to have success towards your goals, but we also encourage you to bring awareness to your actions and answer the question that you may not think to answer: “Why am I eating right now?”

There could be many reasons why you reach for something on the self, including:

Emotional reaction (upset, happy, sad, frustrated, anxious)

Social gathering

Convenience- being offered to you, or it’s sitting out leftover from kiddos or the last meal.

It’s routine, you always eat at this time

Boredom

Habitual

It’s human nature to have the occasional emotional eating experience or indulgence, but becoming completely detached from the awareness of why you are eating can lead to lack of control in your thoughts, reactions, and emotions, as well as a continued road block in progress towards your goals.

Working to better your nutrition is so much more than eating a healthier, more balanced diet. It’s even more so learning about and re-building the relationship with food and how you view/use it in your daily life. Part of this is learning about what we use food for and if it’s being used in the proper spaces of our daily life such as fuel, recovery, energy, mood, weight gain, and weight loss.

To bring more awareness to your eating habits, you can: 

Make a switch:

Take 5-10 minutes to evaluate and process why you are reaching for the candy bar. If you are frustrated and anxious about a deadline at work and you commonly find yourself in this position with food during stressful situations, it’s important to break the cycle and work to find a better alternative to dealing with your emotions.

Some ideas include:

Taking a break and going on a walk

Journaling your thoughts and feelings

Calling a trusted friend to work through and talk out your emotions together

Putting on some calming music/podcast

Rather than looking for instant gratification, choose an option that won’t push the root source down, rather dig up the roots and plant a healthier, more sustainable system. 

Ask a simple question:

Ask the simple question “why am I eating?”

This sounds silly but can be a very simple solution to breaking multiple habits created over time. We can do things for years without knowing our reasoning behind it, and simply bringing awareness to those thought processes can be the solution to choosing a different option, or deciding the reasoning isn’t good enough based on the consequences it brings.

Eat when you are hungry:

If you have gotten in the habit of eating at specific times and have become very regimented with your eating window, take a period of time to simply listen to your body's needs and eat when you are hungry; mindful eating. This can bring out awareness in your eating and reconnect your mind with your appetite rather than your appetite with the time of day. 

"What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds." -- Wayne Dyer

Stretch your mind and learn to become more aware of your appetite, it will help change the course of how you view and use food in your daily routine and lifestyle.