I’m as guilty as anyone of stuffing my face at times. I find it hard to stop at a single slice of my favorite chocolate cake, or raiding the fridge for late night feasts.

Let’s face it, the pleasure and sense of comfort Food gives us is hard to ignore. And it’s something we’ve been hardwired to enjoy since childhood.

As Michelle May, MD, author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, notes, “From the moment we’re born, we’re nurtured with food, rewarded with food, and so emotional connections to food are normal.”

So there’s no reason to feel guilty about eating for pleasure.

It’s normal.

But it can easily get out of control…

When it results in a ‘food trance’ where the urge is to eat, and eat, and eat, even after the stomach is full, is a warning sign that eating for pleasure has mutated into something more serious.

Why People Overeat

If Overeating leaves you feeling physically uncomfortable, guilty, or ashamed, it may be time to think about changing your eating habits.

Common triggers of overeating include:

1. Stress or boredom – A stressful day at work or being stuck at home with the kids can mean seeking reward through food.

2. Restrive dieting – Starving yourself of calories and relying on willpower can only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll want to rebel and find yourself eating more than before.

3. Food addiction – Processed foods high in fat, sugar, and salt have been found to trigger the same pleasure centers in the brain as an illicit drug.

Sadly, due to these triggers, overeating is alarmingly common.

In fact, 5 million women and 3 million men struggle with overeating in the US. That’s more than double the numbers battling anorexia and bulimia combined.

Health Risks of Overeating

Chronic overeating poses more risks than being overweight.

Emotionally, it can affect mood, self worth, impact relationships, and harm productivity at work.

Physically, chronic overeating can result in high blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol, bouncing blood sugar, and other health complications.

So regularly eating beyond the point of feeling full can be harmful in so many ways.

6 Ways to Reduce Overeating

Thankfully, overeating is a habit. And like all bad habits, it can be reduced or stopped altogether with the right strategy.

Here are 6 tips on how to do it.

1. Lose the ‘all-or-nothing’ attitude

Overeating and food binges often result from restrictive dieting attempts.

The problem with ALL restrictive diets is they can result in an ‘all-or-nothing’ attitude.

In other words, you feel you MUST stick to the diet rigidly.

So that the moment you eat something you’re not supposed to, like grab a piece of birthday cake from the break room, you feel like your dieting attempt has failed.

So you think ‘screw it’ and embark on feverish eating binges.

This is why the ‘all or nothing’ mindset is just a ticking time bomb

And trying to to follow a diet to perfection is doomed to fail.

It just leads to frustration and feelings of failure that feed more of the eating binges you were trying to avoid.

So if you want to stop overeating, give up on restrictive dieting.

Go easier on yourself.

Make the switch to clean eating gradual.

Instead of thinking ‘I MUST’ eat this salad instead of a burger, reframe it as ‘I choose’ this salad.

Allow yourself to eat your favorite foods in moderation and don’t stress out because you had a bag of potato chips watching Game of Thrones.

2. Find other sources of pleasure

The weird thing about overeating is it’s actually not normally because you’re hungry.

It typically arises from stress, boredom, and to fill a hole that’s leaving you feeling unsatisfied.

For this reason, finding better ways to relieve stress and doing other things that give you a sense of reward is the only way to stop overeating long-term.

So consider writing a list of all the things you like doing or things you’d like to try. Then start pursuing those things instead of filling the hole in your heart with food.

3. Avoid Restrictive Calorie Cutting Diets

A lot of diets are focused on restricting calories. And while they’re effective at triggering rapid weight loss, it puts your diet in conflict with your body;s survival mechanism.

Because your body has a weight ‘set point’ it feels comfortable at.

If you try reducing your weight too fast beyond this point, your body can play all sorts of tricks on you to get you back to your previous weight.

Chief among these tricks is releasing more of the hunger hormone ‘ghrelin’.

The more you restrict calories the more ghrelin makes you crave food.

This is why diets nearly always end in failure.

Because eventually gnawing hunger overpowers your willpower, and you find yourself back to your old overeating habits with an extra helping of rebound weight.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when you starve yourself of calories your body also goes into ‘survival’ mode.

It then holds on to more of the foods you do it. But rather than turn them into nutrients and energy, your body locks food away into your fat cells.

The bottom line is that calorie restrictive diets are a recipe for disaster. They send your hormones haywire, increase your cravings, and often end up in people weighing more than when they’d started.

4. Eat Nutrient Dense Meals

A key reason why 2 in 3 Americans are now classed overweight or obese is because of the low nutrition in processed food.

Your body craves nutrients. And it won’t stop you from feeling hungry until it gets enough.

This is why you can eat… and eat… and eat processed foods yet still feel hungry.

It’s because processed foods are typically very low in nutrition.

Luckily, the solution is simple: Eat more nutrient dense foods.

Nutrient dense foods include eggs, avocado, nuts, green leafy vegetables, and oily fish.

Eating these foods will fill you up quicker and feeling full for longer, reducing your desire for overeating.

5. Relieve Stress in Healthier Ways

A common cause of overeating is stress. Because sadly, our body’s haven’t yet adapted to handling stress in a healthy way.

For our ancestors, stress was vital for their survival.

Because the feelings of stress are simply your body’s response to danger. This is why stress is actually just your ‘fight-or-flight’ mode in action.

Sadly, modern lifestyles can cause our stress response to be triggered far more often than is healthy.

Whether it’s struggling to hit a deadline at work or misbehaving teenagers, stress causes your stress hormone ’cortisol’ to rocket.

And cortisol then sends blood and nutrients rushing to your brain and muscles.

It also trigger the desire to eat foods high sugar and carbs so you can take onboard fuel.

The reason is because sugars and carbs turn into glucose in the body. And glucose provides the quick release of energy your body needs to escape from danger.

So to avoid the chain reaction of stress leading to overeating, you need to find healthy ways of relieving stress rather than raiding the fridge.

6. Develop Body Confidence

Naturally, being bombarded with images of body perfection has resulted in a widespread lack of body confidence, among both women and men.

All of us are under enormous pressure to look good. Which explains why billions are spent on weight loss products every year.

Instead, your focus should be on having a HEALTHY body rather than achieving a body shape that only exists in photoshop.

Rather than think your butt is too big or arms aren’t slim enough, focus on your good qualities.

To do this requires self acceptance and having confidence in how you look.

Now, I know this is easier said than done.

Gaining body confidence is probably the hardest of these tips to pull off.

There are no shortcuts to doing it either.

It requires long-term investment in self development and changing how you think and feel about the world around you.

Following a System Can Provide the Path to Success

As I hope these 6 tips have demonstrated, overeating is deeply rooted in how your body responds to stress and how we connect food with pleasure.

Going on diets, relying on willpower, or taking diet pills to reduce your cravings are all just short-term solutions. Inevitably, overeating habits will return stronger than before.

So you see, the only way to cure overeating long-term is to dig deep. You need to change the subconscious emotions driving it.

As Robin B. Kanarek, PhD, professor of psychology at Tufts University, says, “It can be hard to stop overeating…particularly if there are deep-rooted emotional problems involved.”

The good news is that overeating is something you can overcome with patience and persistence. And by following a system that guides you step-by-step on how to do it.

If you’re worried about the effect overeating is having on your self esteem, emotions, and all round health, here are a couple programs you can try:

Get OVER Overeating 7 Day Jumpstart! Course – home study course

Udemy – How to get over binge eating – The Emotions Hypnosis System – video course

Rachel Foy’s How to Stop Emotional Eating – Online program

Let Me Know How You Get On

What these programs all have in common is they’re focused on addressing the underlying causes of overeating, rather than short-term fixes.

I haven’t tried any of them personally though. So if you do try them and have success (or not), I’d love to hear from you so I can ensure I’m recommending the best resources for people to overcome unhealthy overeating habits for good.

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