Break the habit of comfort eating By Paul Mckenna Paul McKenna shows you how to stop your emotions from compelling you to over-eat Letâ€™s admit one thing: if youâ€™re overweight, there have probably been times when youâ€™ve used food as a comfort or reward. Of course, we all know that taking, say, a tub of ice cream to bed at night isnâ€™t healthy. Part of us is perfectly aware that we wonâ€™t feel good about it the next morning. But, in the middle of the night, that litre of ice cream seems to deliver a moment of comfort. For some people, emotional eating happens so often that it becomes a habit of eating too much all the time. Then they get upset that theyâ€™re overweight, so they eat even more to suppress the feeling, and it all becomes a vicious circle. Sound familiar? If so, at least a part of you is desperate to change your relationship with food, lose weight and generally feel much better. If youâ€™re ready to try something new, I honestly believe Iâ€™ve found the answer. In the past two years, there has been an extraordinary scientific breakthrough in our understanding of emotions. Emotional eating is the number one cause of excessive weight gain. Thatâ€™s why Iâ€™ve put together a simple, powerful new system that will reduce overwhelming emotions, reset your brain chemistry and restore your emotional equilibrium. Some people automatically reach for the biscuits whenever any emotion gets too powerful. They eat because theyâ€™re happy or excited, but just as often they eat because theyâ€™re lonely, disappointed or bored. Others eat because theyâ€™re stressed, or they may have started using food as a comfort when they had difficulties or a trauma in their childhood. Then there are those who have been abused in the past, and find being overweight helps to protect them from further abuse. All of them have discovered that, whatever happens, they can rely on eating to make themselves feel better. Yet their biggest challenge is not food or weight, but feelings. They turn to food because itâ€™s the only thing that helps them to cope with their sensitivity to emotions. No one is born an emotional eater. Emotional eating is a learned behaviour. And if youâ€™ve learned to do it, you can unlearn it, too. In fact, if youâ€™re overweight, I firmly believe that itâ€™s not your fault. It really isnâ€™t. Itâ€™s the fault of your programming. Your brain is like a computer â€" and just like any computer, it can be programmed. By addressing the emotions that underlie excessive eating, youâ€™ll start losing weight â€" safely, permanently and enjoyably. We wonâ€™t be removing habits, just altering them. Weâ€™ll be taking each of the triggers that used to lead to emotional eating and redirecting them. I know this system delivers results. Working with Dr Ronald Ruden â€" whoâ€™s at the cutting edge of the latest neurological research â€" I have already used the new techniques successfully on more than 1,000 people. And if you've learned to do it, you can unlearn it, too Dr Rudenâ€™s research suggests that if stress appears to be inescapable, certain receptors on the brain undergo a chemical change. This sets the pathway of the stress response permanently to â€˜openâ€™. The good news is that we now have a mechanism to reset your brainâ€™s response to stress. In a nutshell, we can uncouple the thought from the feeling â€" so you can remember what happened, but your distress is removed. Together, Dr Ruden and I have worked on relationship issues, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, addiction and many other conditions. But itâ€™s the work with emotional eaters, in particular, thatâ€™s been almost miraculous. Many say itâ€™s like a switch has been flipped in their brain and they simply donâ€™t have the compulsion to over-eat any more. Just a few short, simple techniques will be enough to get you off to a flying start. But for those who feel they need more help, my new book comes with a CD that includes a safe hypnotic trance and a track to listen to while you eat, as well as a DVD containing the Havening therapy technique, described above right, to help you deal with the underlying stress beneath your emotional eating. Strange as it may seem, the route towards greater fulfilment â€" and controlled eating â€" is directly through the feelings we think we donâ€™t want. Most of us tend to avoid the ones that feel uncomfortable. That seems like common sense. But it leads to problems â€" because if we donâ€™t pay attention to uncomfortable feelings, we can fail to get the message. Itâ€™s a bit like this. Imagine youâ€™re the boss of a big business, and all day long people bring you messages. Good news comes in a gold envelope and bad news comes in a black envelope. At first, half the envelopes you get are gold and half are black. You like gold ones, so you open them and reply to them. You donâ€™t like the black envelopes so you send them back again. After a while, you get more and more black envelopes because the same ones get re-delivered, and more things go wrong because you hadnâ€™t read the earlier messages, and you get fewer gold envelopes. If we reject the envelopes because of their colour, we fail to get half the messages from our emotions. That means the same emotions will keep coming up and asking for our attention. Strange as it may seem, the route towards greater fulfilment - and controlled eating - is directly through the feelings we think we don't want Yet apart from therapy, thereâ€™s very little money in helping people to understand themselves. If people are unhappy or discontented, thereâ€™s an awful lot to be made from selling them things that temporarily make them feel better: Food, fashion, shopping, drink and drugs all give people a temporary high. When it fades, as it will sooner or later, they can go back for more. The other big reason we avoid feelings is that so many of us have under-rated ourselves. We fear that we wonâ€™t be able to deal with what our emotions tell us, which is related to low self-esteem. As you process your own emotions, youâ€™ll get to know yourself better and youâ€™ll no longer need to use brands or possessions to build an image. Youâ€™ll discover that your true self is more likeable and attractive than any image you tried to build in the past. There are five questions we can ask which have a miraculous effect. Itâ€™s not essential that you answer them all perfectly or even correctly. Just make an honest effort. The questions work with any emotions, but people mainly concentrate on the painful ones because they want to change them. Sometimes the answers arenâ€™t clear â€" so you may need to ask yourself the questions several times. As you continue doing this, youâ€™ll find more and more answers. 1 What is the trigger of this emotion? 2 What is the belief or judgment included in this emotion? 3 What is the need or care beneath this emotion? 4 What is the positive intention behind this emotion? 5 What is the first practical action I can take to fulfil the positive intention? Let me illustrate how this works. I am sitting writing in a cafe, and a bus stops outside. The engine is running; itâ€™s loud and I feel annoyed. Q What is the trigger? A The emotion is a response to the noise. Q What is the belief or judgment? A I believe the noise is unpleasant. Q What is my need? A I have a need for a level of quietness to concentrate on my writing. Q What is the positive intention behind this emotion? A The positive intention of the annoyance is to re-establish the level of quietness I desire. Q What is the first practical action I can take? A I can move to another cafe â€" or I could ask the bus driver to turn off his engine. This sort of thing is so common-place that youâ€™ve probably done a version of it 1,000 times â€" but you didnâ€™t need to work through each question. You probably jumped to answer number five. The key is to realise that however baffling or uncomfortable an emotion may seem, we can use the Five Questions to unfold its meaning, even if thatâ€™s as apparently meaningless as â€˜I feel badâ€™. Hereâ€™s another example. One sunny morning, Iâ€™m driving down the road and suddenly I feel tense. I ask the Five Questions and realise I left home in a hurry while my girlfriend was trying to talk to me. The tension I am feeling is because I believe I should have taken time to listen to her. What is the need underneath this emotion? Itâ€™s my need for a loving relationship, and the positive intention is to protect that relationship. The practical action I can take is to make time to listen to her. When I decide to do make some time for her, the tension fades away. Emotions are like a colour filter that affects everything we see. That often makes us feel and behave as though the emotion we feel is permanent. However, it can change at any moment. Furthermore, emotions arenâ€™t rational, yet theyâ€™re more powerful than reason. In stressful situations, such as a divorce, people may say and do things that arenâ€™t in their own or their childrenâ€™s best interests, and they may claim theyâ€™re being rational. By addressing the emotions that underlie excessive eating, youÂ¿ll start losing weight So emotions can dominate our experience to such an extent that our mind thinks up reasons to justify what we feel. The key to changing any emotion is understanding the message. Sometimes, however, it seems we canâ€™t even answer question one. We canâ€™t discover what triggered or provoked a feeling; we just feel it. At other times, the trigger doesnâ€™t make sense. If you canâ€™t answer question one, or the answer doesnâ€™t make sense, thereâ€™s a strong chance that the emotion youâ€™re experiencing actually belongs to the past. It may even include a judgment thatâ€™s false or out of date. Hereâ€™s an example. One man I worked with told me he always avoided asking out women he found truly attractive. The moment he thought about it, he was overcome with shyness. It was clear that the trigger for shyness was thinking about asking them out. So I asked him the second question: what is the belief included in the emotion? The belief was that heâ€™d be embarrassed â€" another emotion. Then I asked: what was the belief included in the embarrassment? He found that more difficult to answer, but then he realised the belief was that if he was rejected, the pain would be unbearable. Paul McKenna's Freedom From Emotional Eating is published on January 2 and is on sale for Â£12.99 I asked if that was still true today. The answer was â€˜Noâ€™. He was braver than heâ€™d thought â€" the belief inside his emotion dated from his childhood. Now that heâ€™d asked himself the question as an adult, he realised heâ€™d gained a lot of confidence since then. His belief had been out of date â€" as soon as he realised that, it faded away. There may also be times when you find that a belief includes an expectation of yourself. Let me give you a useful hint: look out for the words â€˜shouldâ€™ or â€˜oughtâ€™. Very often, the judgment includes these words â€" as in â€˜I should be gratefulâ€™ or â€˜I ought to have known thatâ€™. Every â€˜shouldâ€™ and every â€˜oughtâ€™ refers to a rule, a standard or an authority. Itâ€™s worth checking very carefully whether you still feel you agree with that rule, standard or authority. Sometimes, you donâ€™t. And then a new emotion is free to emerge. Some emotions are based on judgments that donâ€™t even belong to us. For example, many of us have feelings based on beliefs that we have inherited unconsciously from our parents. When we ask the Five Questions, those beliefs are revealed, and we can start to examine them. If we no longer agree with them, we can let them go. Our emotions are like another sense: by paying close attention, we understand the world around us more deeply. More than that, they lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves. As psychologists have shown many times over, what gets measured gets done. Therefore, I would like you to write down whatever stands out most to you in your emotions each day. This is a very personal thing; thereâ€™s no right or wrong. Do this every day for four weeks. As time passes, youâ€™ll begin to notice patterns that will make everything clearer. Once youâ€™ve started learning how to understand your emotions, itâ€™s safe to start altering your eating behaviour. So, on Monday, Iâ€™ll be giving you a number of essential techniques. But please donâ€™t be tempted to skip the Five Questions. Theyâ€™re key to breaking the habit of overeating â€" and they truly will transform your life. Havening therapy, created by Dr Ronald Ruden, has been hailed as a remarkable breakthrough for reducing stress Havening therapy, created by Dr Ronald Ruden, has been hailed as a remarkable breakthrough. As research studies have shown, itâ€™s amazingly effective at relieving sadness and reducing stress, trauma and compulsion. Dr Ruden discovered that patterns of repeated touch to certain parts of the body, combined with specific eye movements and visualisations, have a rapid, reliable and predictable effect on our feelings. These touch patterns are hard-wired into all of us from infancy. Theyâ€™re what enable a mother, for instance, to comfort her baby when it cries. What Havening does is to activate deep-rooted patterns of reassurance and comfort. The therapy achieves this with sequences that de-link unhappy thoughts from your feelings. As a result, within just a few minutes, you can reduce the intensity of an emotion or feeling of unhappiness, and establish enduring calm. Research has shown that this technique is certainly not just a distraction from what youâ€™re feeling at the moment. It fundamentally changes the way the brain processes thoughts and feelings. The specific sequence Iâ€™m giving you here will actually reset the way in which your brain interprets and responds to stress. If you keep doing this exercise, it will alter the neural pathways in your brain. Please read through the following exercise before you do it. You should practise this sequence of eye movements, body touches and visualisations several times until you know it off by heart. Use this exercise any time you need to reduce stress or unhappy feelings. 1 - Notice any uncomfortable feeling that you have right now and rate it on a scale of one to ten. This is important as it lets you measure how much you need to reduce it. 2 - Now, clear your mind, or just think about something nice. 3 - Cross your arms, then place your hands on the tops of your shoulders and close your eyes. 4 - Stroke your hands down the sides of your arms from your shoulders to your elbows, down and up, again and again. 5 - As you carry on stroking the sides of your arms, imagine youâ€™re walking on a beautiful beach. With each step you take in the sand, count out loud â€" from one to 20. 6 - Keep stroking the sides of your arms and open your eyes, but keep your head still. 7 - Now, while you keep stroking your arms, move your eyes laterally to the left and then laterally to the right. 8 - Close your eyes and stroke the sides of your arms as you imagine walking down a flight of stairs. Count out loud from one to 20 with each step. 9 - Open your eyes and check, on your scale from one to ten, the number of the feeling now. If itâ€™s way down at the bottom, congratulations â€" you have personally changed your own feeling. If you think the unhappy feeling hasnâ€™t been reduced enough yet, just repeat the Havening sequence until youâ€™ve reduced it as far as you want. Extracted from Freedom From Emotional Eating by Paul McKenna, to be published by Bantam on January 2, Â£12.99. Â© 2013 Paul McKenna. To order a copy for Â£11.49 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157.