Any ideas of a good place to start to try to address emotional eating issues? I had a horrible day on saturday and ended up on a massive carbo-binge.

I want to try to avoid that kind of self destructive behaviour in the future. Any words of advice? or book recommendations?

Definately the Dr Phil "Ultimate Weight Solution". You can tell by my title, I'm a big fan. There's a link in my signature to get an idea of what he addresses.

Thre's another good book "Thin For Good", I can't remember the author's name. I'll come back and edit to post it if you can't find it by title alone.

How did you feel after your cheat, both physically and emotionally? I had about 4 days of cheating once. I didn't even enjoy them. I was a grumpy, unhappy, pain in the a** with a KILLER headache and zero energy. Oh and did I mention bloated, crabby, and miserable for days even AFTER the cheat. (PS i also gained 4 pounds that took forever to get back off)Everytime I feel the urge to cheat because of some underlying emotional cause (or any other reason for that matter) I think about those feelings and decide that its NOT WORTH IT.

"Constructive Living" by David Reynolds ( i think) is an awesome book and it is only about 100 pages, so I've read it over and over again; It really helps me with my emotional eatting or the bad feelings of wanting to binge. READ IT! Let me know what you think.

I don't know if you're religious or not, but I, too, am an emotional eater and I find prayer and/or meditation to help me.

Here's an article on emotional eating:

Emotional Eating

(I do this, too .... arg)

All of these are good suggestions, and I would add that you absolutely MUST come up with new coping skills to replace the bad ones (like carb binging.)

Otherwise, all you'll do is pace around your place going "must not eat donuts, must not eat donuts...") and we all know how well that works for Homer Simpson.

I use to eat when bored and not eat a things when upset. It was a bad bad habbit.

Angel

You might seriously consider a program like overeater's anonymous which can be amazingly helpful in talking these issues through. Their website is www.oa.org and they have listings for meetings all over. You might be amazed at how helpful it can be.

Good luck!

Orchid

thanks for all the replies.

i'll be sure to check out some of the book recc's.

I haven't mastered emotional eating for sure, but I HAVE mastered carb-binging. Binge on LC. In the transition, it will make a HUGE difference, because the LC foods just don't have the same positive feedback cycle that makes you want to never quit, AND they do tend to stop a binge (but that's not guaranteed--just more so than HC). Plus, you won't gain as much from overeating LC foods as you will HC.

It's not a "clean" answer--but it has helped me make progress.

You know what, cs carver? It may not be a "clean" answer, but you do have a point. Until you master the behavior, at least minimize the damage.