Healthy Eating While Staying at Home: 3 Ways to Curb Stress & Emotional Eating During Coronavirus (COVID-19) Quarantine by Susan Bowerman, M.S., R.D., CSSD, CSOWM, FAND

May is Mental Health Month, making it a great time to talk about stress eating. Boredom and stress can trigger emotional eating, particularly while staying at home more because or coronavirus and surrounded by food all day long. 

Whether you’re ordering in comfort foods that are higher in calories than your usual meals or cooking at home with limited ingredients you have on-hand, you may be eating differently than you used to. Stress eating, or emotional eating, however, can creep up on you without your knowing it, and could negatively impact your health.

The most important thing we should be doing right now is taking the best possible care of ourselves. Here are three ways to curb your stress and practice good eating habits to keep yourself healthy:

• Acknowledge Your Feelings: Own up to the emotions that trigger your stress eating. It’s OK to be mad or lonely or bored sometimes. The feelings may be unpleasant but they’re not dangerous, and you don’t always need to "fix" them.

• Eat Regularly: Now is not the time to cut back on your intake. When you’re stressed, it’s easy to put meals off or even skip them all together – but energy levels will suffer as a result; you might even end up overeating when you do finally eat. Make sure you’re eating regularly to get all of the important nutrients in your body that you need to stay healthy. 

• Eat Mindfully: When you eat mindfully, you try to become more aware of your internal signals of hunger and fullness, and also become more in tune with what triggers you to eat in the first place. Mindful eating can help you avoid overeating and allow you to enjoy your food more – even when you eat less. You can also learn to pay more attention to what you’re choosing to put into your body.
  

The information on 30Seconds.com is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be considered medical advice. The information provided through this site should not be used to diagnose or treat a health problem or disease, and is not a substitute for professional care. Always consult your personal healthcare provider.

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