How to Motivate Yourself to Stop Stress Eating
What’s your motivation kryptonite?
When you don’t feel good about yourself, soothing yourself with food is easy. But, when it leads to even more stress in your relationship with yourself, that’s problematic. Finding the motivation not to stress eat can be challenging, but it is essential for improving your well-being. Understanding what might motivate stress eating can help you address and prevent those stressors more effectively.
Maybe your body is too big or too small or something else you don’t like, and your solutions are to stress eat, over-exercise, or do nothing.
Do you feel like you hide from your thoughts, and feelings of discontent and unworthiness become part of the daily stress that leads to stress eating?
The relationship you have with yourself and, more especially, your body is at the very core of your being.
Kindness can motivate you to stop stress eating.
We can’t separate our feelings about ourselves and our relationship with food from our feelings about our bodies. Keeping them separate only leads to self-deception and things never being quite right. Preventing stress eating is challenging when all you want is stress relief.
Gratefully, you can learn to relieve stress without using food. You can live free from the vicious cycle of attempting to relieve immediate stress that only heaps on more stress. It’s an effective cure.
Actively being more kind to yourself helps to motivate you with more options for stress relief so you can stop stress eating.
Here are three ways that stress eating steals your motivation.
1. Stress eating shatters your confidence.
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
― Simone de Beauvoir
I have spoken with countless people, mostly women, who talk about their confidence in many areas of their lives. From being a great parent to achieving top positions in large corporations to leadership positions in community organizations, meaningful work in government, clergy, educators, and entrepreneurs.
These women “have it all together” in many ways that society values. They are making significant contributions to the world. There are aspects of their lives at which they know they excel.
I also talk with many people in not-so-grand positions who are held back by their relationship with food. They feel small and unworthy of positive nurturing attention from their self. It’s another case where stress eating destroys dreams and goals.
Many outwardly successful people speak about the dread they feel when they think about the toll of stress eating as those who are less successful.
Both sides of the success coin are not living their lives to the fullest. No matter what you see outwardly, at work, at school, or on social media, stress zaps confidence in your abilities.
The confidence to stake their claim on the life they want to live is squashed by the foreboding thought, “They’ll find out by looking at my (pick a perceived flaw) and know that I’m a fraud.” The definition of imposter syndrome.
This thought loop, “I want this; no, you can’t have it, but I want it,” zaps any hope of pushing yourself through fear and imperfection to your humanness. The reality is that when you go through the thought loop and create a new pattern, it will help you move forward.
What if you accepted that your stress eating does not determine your worthiness in living your life to the fullest? What if worthiness versus feeling worthless is a judgment thrown in the path of your personal growth?
You can be motivated to stop stress eating when you decide you want a different life. There are skills you can learn along the way to support your changes. Making decisions while also maintaining a position of respect, love, and kindness with yourself helps enormously.
Being in the process of change is being in the process of life.
You can be where you are right now and move toward your goals. You’ll grow confident that you don’t need to be at some artificial endpoint where everything is set and only then live your life. This is part of the myth of perfection that keeps you stuck.
- Break down your goal into smaller parts.
- Dip your toe in and test the water.
- Assess what worked and what didn’t. Make adjustments.
- Go a little further toward your goal and reassess.
Each time you learn more, you live your life how you need to, and it heals your soul.
2. Stress eating destroys your will.
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.
― Geneen Roth
Maybe you have the confidence but not the will.
Action is what makes the difference between disappointment and satisfaction.
Hoping and wishing is the stuff of fairy tales. They are good. We need fairy tales to help us understand the world and the possibilities of our futures. They help us see past the obstacles, both real and imagined.
If only we could recall how we felt when we were small, or could imagine how utterly defeated a young child feels when his play companions or older siblings temporarily reject him or can obviously do things better than he can, or when adults—worst of all, his parents—seem to make fun of him or belittle him, then we would know why the child often feels like an outcast.
― Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Our call as adults is to shift out of this mindset. Perhaps the messages you received as a child weren’t helpful. Perhaps they didn’t support you in the way you most needed. It’s not okay, and at the same time, you can change what you tell yourself now.
You can live today with grace and transform the pain into self-compassion to nurture and support you. To move beyond the pain and into a more peaceful, satisfying life is one of the most healing things you can do for yourself.
Healing stress eating happens bit by bit, and motivation happens by taking kind action filled with self-compassion. It heals the soul, which motivates my clients to stop stress eating.
3. Stress eating makes your life miserable.
If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.
― Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs
Think about the low hum of criticism throughout your day. It’s everywhere, from the news to social media to our opinions about other drivers, the weather, food, and our body size, shape, and health.
Complaining and fault-finding are far too easy to slip into.
When you engage in criticism, which often results in stress eating, you add to the hostile environment you’re living in. Since it’s you that you’re living with all of the time, your thoughts are your mindset. Shifting your focus is the only way out of the misery.
Changing your focus may require you to actively filter out the stuff that doesn’t add meaningful information to your life.
As you change your mindset and take the steps you need to motivate yourself to stop stress eating, you’ll find that you’re less interested in the petty criticism, the stories that keep you locked in negativity, especially as it relates to your body and your health. You will also find that it’s easier to take action on the things that enhance your personal development.
Kindness heals.
Not just from the “learn to love yourself” platitude but from a deep sense that you can change. You can change your relationship with yourself. Changing your mindset with hefty doses of self-compassion and loving kindness nourishes your ability to take the action you need to take to make your life better.