Avoid Eating Eating With Broccoli Dough
You start your day when the urge to eat arises. Sure, you might be physically hungry … but you might be looking for a protective blanket to reduce stress. Or maybe you’re just bored. Use the Broccoli Test to determine emotional hunger and prevent it from ruining your diet.
There is a reason “comfort food” exists. When you are under stress, your brain looks for ways to reduce these stressors by eating certain foods that lead to unwanted calories. If that weren’t enough, self-medication with convenient foods alsoincreases your body’s tendency to store abdominal fat , leading to agreater risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease .
By submitting to emotional addictions, we simply prolong the problem. According to fitness trainer and founder of My Body Tutor Adam Gilbert:
Emotional eating only suppresses feelings. It doesn’t change them. It’s like the pesky door salesmen … if we don’t open the door, they keep knocking. We might as well have answered it sooner rather than later. Until we open the door, we will hold back our emotions.
Adam offers the Broccoli Test to help you distinguish between physical and emotional hunger. You may have heard the various variations of this test – apple test, fruit test, etc. – mostly asking if you are eating healthier foods. According to Adam:
Ask yourself, “Would I eat broccoli right now?” If your answer is yes, then you are physically hungry. Go and eat.
If you answer no, you are emotionally hungry. You are not really hungry. You crave something different (stress relief, distraction, quick escape, etc.). The idea is that when we are physically hungry, we like any food. If the thought of vegetables doesn’t sound appealing, we are not physically hungry.
To learn more about the broccoli test, as well as other mindfulness strategies , visit the link below.
Broccoli Test: How To Stop Emotional Overeating | My body mentor