Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week climate change lowers crops’ nutrition, beliefs impact meal satiety, and eating close to bedtime linked to body fat.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

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Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week GMO skepticism isn’t anti-science, Pubmed takes on conflicts of interest, and how parents encourage emotional eating.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »

Over the years Saba has learned to eat healthy by cutting down on processed foods. But her new healthstyle has caused her to forego nearly all the foods she loved as a child since she has moralized them as “bad and unhealthy.” Now she uses her “good behavior” to justify overeating “healthier” snacks like nuts, even though she eats so much she feels sick afterward. It’s a cycle she would like to break.

Saba’s issue combines both food moralizing and emotional eating, which makes both issues more complex and difficult to unravel. Together we come up with a plan for her to move forward.

Relevant links:

Why I’ll Never Tell You to Eat “Heart Healthy” Foods

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Listen:

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Photo by King….

Johann Helf has a passion for healthy living and its benefits. He has spent many years of his life making positive changes and likes to share tips with others to help them be successful. As owner of Lotus Blooming Herbs, he sources and enjoys sharing shilajit directly from the Himalayas as well as other high-quality Ayurvedic products.

Is It Celebrating or Emotional Eating?

by Johann Helf

Most people think of emotional eating as a response to stress, depression, or other unpleasant life experiences. But have you ever noticed how much unhealthy eating is related to celebrations?

Birthday cake. Anniversary dinner. Office milestones. Cocktail parties. Even when celebrating personal goals such as exercising regularly, losing weight, eating smarter, or breaking “bad” habits, we often celebrate with food.

It’s easy to forget that happiness and pride are still emotions that can invoke emotional eating.

Don’t get me wrong. Rewarding one’s self is a great way to stay motivated. And the occasional food reward can be good for your future resolve. But too often reaching for high-calorie, low-nutrient gratification can be self-defeating.

Is it really rewarding yourself to sabotage what you worked so hard for?

Try these ideas as alternatives to food rewards. Calorie-free motivation not only keeps you on the right path, but can actually generate more fun and memories:

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For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week wheat is let off the hook, you’re still not eating enough egg yolks, and happiness slows aging.

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. I also share links on Twitter @summertomato,  Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you. (And yes, I took that pepper heart pic myself).

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For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week multivitamins are under attack, the truth about gluten and Alzheimer’s disease, and why you don’t know how many calories are actually in a pound.

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. I also share links on Twitter @summertomato,  Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you. (And yes, I took that pepper heart pic myself).

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Photo by RenaudPhoto

Ashley Palmer is a Registered Nurse and holds a Masters degree in Human nutrition. She is the owner and founder of Youtrition®, a diet free, guilt free approach to lasting weight loss. Find her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

5 Steps to Stop Emotional Eating

by Ashley Palmer

Emotional eating can be frustrating if you are trying to improve your health. Even if you’ve worked hard to make good habit changes, emotional eating can cause you to reach for a carton of ice cream after a bad day and undo the progress you’ve made.

Emotional eating is one form of non-hunger eating, meaning it is triggered by something other than physiological hunger. For some people, emotional eating is a rare occurrence, only happening when a loved one falls ill or an incredibly stressful life event happens, while others may have developed a habit of daily emotional eating.

The danger in this is obvious on the surface: if we eat when our body has no true need for calories, it stores those extra calories (mostly in the form of body fat) for later use. But there can be danger beyond this: using food to calm emotions can become an unhealthy coping mechanism when underlying issues desperately need addressing.

Prior to receiving my Master’s degree in Nutrition and opening my own nutrition counseling practice, I worked as a Trauma Nurse in a large regional hospital. It was then that I learned, first hand, just how damaging emotional eating could be.

Although I was actively seeking positive change in my life and attempting to lose weight, I found that the stressful days at work made it all but impossible to stay away from large quantities of comfort food. Despite my desire to use food to make me feel better, it actually made me feel worse––uncomfortable, lethargic, sick, and guilty.

Over time I learned some incredibly useful strategies to help me overcome these tendencies. Years later, as a nutrition counselor, I continue to use many of these strategies successfully with my clients.

I’ve found that while each person finds one or two of these strategies to be the most beneficial, they still get the greatest benefit from using and implementing them in the order provided. So here they are, my top five tips for combatting emotional eating:
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