Why Some People Find Comfort in Food After a Breakup?

We all know that a depressed and broken-hearted soul that digs their spoon into a pint of ice cream is one of the main ways of coping with a painful breakup. Finding comfort in food is very common, and it’s part of a practice called emotional eating. While some people can’t eat anything for days, others divulge their sadness into food, and it all depends on a person.

It’s not uncommon for people to crave ice cream, french fries, chocolate, and other foods that are high in calories, especially if they just got through a breakup. Comfort food provides us a temporary sense of wellbeing, and they tend to elevate mood by stimulating the brain’s reward system.

Let’s be honest, breakups sucks. In fact, breakups are one of the top ten stressful things people go through in life. While it’s not simple to start feeling like yourself again after a breakup, there are some things you can do to get through it, and comfort food is not one of them. While most people seek an advice on how to cope with a breakup, be it from friends or the Internet, others close and don’t share their pain with anyone. But all people feel the same painful physical aftereffects of a breakup, even after a bad relationship you actually want to end.

Effective Ways to Stop Eating Comfort Food After a Breakup

Sometimes it can feel impossible to put down your fork after your ex-spouse just broke your heart. While it’s absolutely normal to eat comfort food like cake, hamburger, french fries, Nutella, or anything else you desire, to cry it out, you should not let yourself eat junk food all day, every day.

Studies have shown, times and times again, that restrictive eating leads to binge eating, and you don’t want to do that. You should 100% listen to your body and eat until you feel full; you just have to make healthier food choices for yourself. For starters, replace your high sugar and high carb meals with foods rich in protein like seafood, vegetables, eggs, and lean meats.

Try to Understand Your Behavior

If possible, try to write down what you are eating and drinking through the day and at what time and place. Additionally, any other comment that may help you better understand your current behavior, such as how you were feeling at the time or what your energy levels were like afterward, can go a long way to overcoming your problem.

As you may already know, binge eating is a big problem that can cause many health problems, and you certainly don’t want to be in that state after a breakup. Instead, you should give it your best to pull yourself together, snap out of grief, and show what a dime your ex has lost.

Don’t Skip Your Meals

Regardless of whether you gained or lost some pounds since the breakup, you mustn’t skip your meals. Eating regularly combats two dangerous dieting behaviors, such as undereating and fasting.

Many studies have shown that these two dieting behaviors can lead to many negative health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, and binge eating. Eating regularly will help you gain more control over your eating and will minimize your urges to binge, and will eliminate any other problematic forms of dieting.

So, the question that you may ask yourself now is how to do that efficiently? Well, that’s the easy part, plan. The hard part is when you have to obey and buy those things that you wrote down. While you will probably want to eat based on your body signals, you need to be aware that these signals are usually disrupted in those who binge.

Move on and Do Bigger and Better Things

While it’s totally valid that you feel down after a breakup, especially if you’ve been together for years, you need to broaden your scope of self-evaluation by increasing the importance of other aspects of your life and remember how much you are worth.

Basically, it’s time to move on, both metaphorically and literally. One of the best ways to manage your food problem and stop thinking about your ex is to try some activities that make you happy, bring you joy, and interest you, preferably an activity that requires you to be more physically active.

Implementing all these steps and fully healing from a breakup will take time, so be patient. However, be aware that, as long as you are trying and giving your best, you’ll start to see improvements in your health, mental state, and lifestyle soon.