4 easy tricks to STOP eating when you’re bored.
Patron Saint of Chic, Iman, photographed by Richard Corkery
Trigger Warning + Disclaimer
We talk about food and body. We’re pretty unabashed in describing self-deprecating thoughts, binges, specific foods, and dieting.
Sugar Sober (it’s content and offerings) is absolutely not intended to substitute for psychological counseling, therapy, or professional health care advice.
If this is triggering for you and/or you need qualified, professional health care, we recommend you check out our Eating Disorders Resources page first.
Today, I’m going to teach you 4 ways to end boredom eating.
I bet you found this post while bored, scrolling online and munching on something.
Caught ya, bitch!
Allow me to present some powerful options to help you stop:
overeating
grazing
snacking
munching mindlessly
when you’re simply, terribly bored.
>>Make sure you check out our recent post<< about how to keep up your diet motivation long-term. It doesn't have to be fingers crossed and hope for the best. There’s actual science behind to this stuff. And we included some really cool tricks to make meal prepping more sustainable (death to the chicken breast and steamed broccoli Tupperware!)
The behavior of constantly consuming food, mindlessly moving hand to mouth – that runs deep. Once that becomes a habit, there are real neurological pathways established in your brain like super highways.
If your plan is “just stop,” it won’t work. Your brain will fight back. With cravings. Cravings are those neurological pathways screaming at you to keep doing what you’ve been doing - keep munching.
What you have to do is make your boredom-eating habit malleable and start to shift it softly.
No cold turkey, white knuckled, brut force actions here.
It’s all about gentle changes and embracing the process.
Trick #1
Shift from snacking to drinking tea.
Bodum Schiuma milk frother
This is a milk frother. It’s Bodum brand. (No I’m not getting paid for this shout-out, I just love decadent hot drinks.)
This thing was $7.
Get yourself some coconut creamer and start making London Fogs,
golden lattes,
herbal teas…
It’s perfectly halfway between consuming nothing and eating snacks. Retrain that brain!
Side note: let me be perfectly clear. If you are actually hungry, please go eat something. This article is about shifting out of boredom eating, not tricks for starving yourself.
Trick #2
Another thing you can do if you’re bored and mindlessly shoving shit in your mouth: Write down everything you eat. We need to take your eating out of mindlessness and into mindfulness.
A lot of people are very resistant to writing down. The long list in black and white staring back at you, growing longer with every bite. It’s so objective, so honest. It can feel...confrontational
But food journaling isn’t meant to be confrontational! It’s meant to be supportive.
Think of your Food Journal as your accomplice. It’s your teammate in this game of long-term behavior change.
Many of our clients and students want to start by simply keeping a note in their smartphone. If that’s the only way to get you to start, fine. But, the goal is really to migrate to pen and paper. Because when it’s on your phone, as soon as you click of that lock button, *poof*, your food journal is gone from the environment. No more accountability, you can go on as though it never happened.
That’s why people prefer it!
However, when you put pen to paper, your Food Journal is physically present in your space. It’s very real. You maintain that awareness and accountability.
Our brains physiologically process writing more deeply than typing. The thoughts and lists we write down using a pen and paper impact our brains’ neurology (and thus our behavior) remarkably more than those we type out.
If you want to change your eating behaviors, it starts with writing down what you’re doing.
Awareness is the first step toward change.
You know we’re serious about this because we made this Food Journal specifically for compulsive eaters.
If you don’t want ours, no hard feelings, get any notebook and a pen! We just want you to take the first step and start writing it down.
Trick #3
(is it really a trick, though?)
This is not going to be a very popular answer. But, we’re going to go ahead and put our feelings out there and call it like we see it:
Why are you bored?
Go do something with your hands!
Get involved.
Put.down.the.phone.
Or, maybe actually call someone on it. You know, connect.
Checking out with a bag of pretzels or carton of ice cream is not an actual break for your brain. You do not emerge calm and collected. You simply kicked that mental de-load process down the road a bit further
Cal Newport, best-selling author, Georgetown professor, and fellow nerd does a gorgeous job of describing this process in this interview with Chris Kesser.
If you don’t have time to listen now, a reasonable summary is:
the amount of time you spend checked out and distracted is directly proportional to how anxious you are.
The remedy is to check in.
Get involved.
Deep work (Newport’s term), not busy work. Not escaping.
Together, Hanna and I research how to heal food addiction, write blogs, and create educational material for this here little website you’ve stumbled upon. Nobody read these when we started. Zero readers and a whoooole lot of laying our hearts out there.
We just got started. We talk about what we’re passionate about.
What are you passionate about? Start doing something with it!
Listen to Newport riff for 2 minutes on specific activities that are perfect for filling the void at minute 32:16 of this interview with The Breakfast Club.
So many of us are sitting around eating not because we’re bored. Rather, on a deeper level, we’re unfulfilled.
I know this was my truth.
I know I was a compulsive eater, a constant grazer, a closeted binger because I was completely unfulfilled. I hid from what I really wanted, and then unconsciously filled that void with more and more food.
Trick #4
This very practical, so-obvious-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that trick was pivitol for me in the darkest days of my binge eating:
Get out of your house.
Get out.
Even if you’re sitting around doing nothing, go sit around and do nothing in a different space.
Changing the environment is a key element to changing a habit.
If you’re not going to do anything but sitting on your couch and snack, go do nothing and walk around the block. Go do nothing and walk around the mall if it’s cold outside. Go to a café and do your bunch of nothing. I go to cafes probably four times a week! Just to change the environment.
Head to a different part of town and just walk around for an hour.
Ask a friend or neighbor to go for a stroll.
Get out into the world. See some shit. Smile at someone
I think it’s possible you clicked on this post hoping I would give you one magic trick so you’ll never eat while bored again.
But, there’s more to this than just handing you 20 different mini activities you could do to distract yourself. Those are band aids. We want to heal.
The way we coach and teach is to dig deeper and deeper until it gets edgy and a few emotions start bubbling up. That’s when connections are formed between what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and the world you’re doing it in.
So let me help you out with the first step.
This food log is the exact layout that’s in the Sugar Sober Food Journal. Take it. Print it. Get a feel for it. we made it so you can use it!
Start using them right now.
Right now, while you’re scrolling online, sitting and snacking.
That’s why it’s here.
That’s why we’re here.
We want to be the support we needed 6 years ago...
Six years ago I was binge eating, restricting, and exercising in an abusive way to myself.
Do you know how good it feels to not do that anymore?
Do you know how good it feels to spend my life sharing everything I’ve learned about ending that shit?
How good it feels to watch other women break out of the restrict-binge-guilt cycle and blossom into their true selves?
It’s a dream come true to get to do this and connect with you.
I’m so proud of you, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Pin this blog to come back to later!
We’d really love it if you’d tell us in the comments below:
Where are you struggling with most in your diet right now?
Is it when eating you’re bored? Is it some other situation or scenario? Some other emotion in your life right now? Let us know.
We’d love to write a post or even create a video that speaks to directly to what you’re going through because, as you can see, we love this.
Think of it as your way of helping us not boredom-eat ;)
