Trauma and Weight Gain
How to Heal and Lose Weight
It's not uncommon to turn to food and gain weight as a reaction to experiencing trauma. Emotional and behavioral responses to trauma lead to destructing eating patterns. Emotional eating is a difficult pattern to break. Unless you deal with the trauma and let yourself heal, you'll keep returning to food. It's not the answer, yet it provides a level of comfort.
People tend to eat as a way to cope with a difficult situation, loss or negative feelings or emotions. They eat to ease the pain of a traumatic experience and they eat to take focus off of a painful event. Of course, any time your body takes in more calories than it burns off, it will store the extra calories as fat. Emotional eating caused weight gain and can make people have a bad body image.
Tips on how to heal from painful, traumatic experiences to lose weight:
• Talk about it. Express how you are feeling about the trauma. You can talk to someone in person, use an online support group or even journal about the event.
• Seek support to help deal with the trauma in your life. Lean on family and friends, doctors or anyone else in your corner.
• Give yourself permission to heal. When you stop dwelling on the painful experience you can look to the future with a clean slate.
• Explore your spirituality. Many people find that their faith is what gets them through the traumatic times on their lives.
• Be good to yourself. Treat your body with respect. Eat healthier foods and exercise regularly to reduce stress and promote health.
• Do things you really enjoy doing, whether it's fishing, shopping or volunteering. Finding something to do with your free time will keep you from dwelling on the trauma or overeating.
• Indulge in your creative side. Write, draw, paint, redecorate or build something to get your creative juices flowing and keep your hands busy so they aren't grabbing for food.
• Challenge the negative thoughts that run through your head.
• Stop blaming yourself for things that are out of your control.
• Learn to express your feelings in a healthy way
• Learn to accept your feelings for what they are.
• Find ways to become completely relaxed. Try yoga, meditation, prayer or even a warm bath to stay relaxed and keep stress to a minimum.
You can't heal from a traumatic experience and lose weight until you are fully ready. No one can make it happen for you. Trying to lose weight without dealing with the underlying issues may work for a while, but you will regain the weight and struggle until you have inner peace. Be willing to put the traumatic experience in the past. This doesn't mean you will completely forget it ever happened, but you need to let go of the negative feelings that go with keeping it bottled up inside. As long as you allow the traumatic event to define your life you will have trouble losing weight and managing your emotional eating.
Trauma Causes Emotional Eating
|
Reaction to Trauma
|
What do you think about this article?
Comments
More in Health & Wellness
Latest Articles