We’ve all been there… on the couch with a bag of chips, cookies, or even a pint of ice cream, eating well beyond our hunger levels.
As a dietitian with a private practice in NYC, I work with a lot of people who struggle with stress eating and emotional eating. I’ve spent years working on educating my clients with better coping skills, tricks, tips—you name it—but it was always a gamble on what would work.
After I saw what CBD did for my husband and his pain, I started doing some research into this compound. The first couple of studies I found were all about how CBD can be beneficial for people suffering from anxiety. Often, emotional eating was a reaction to anxiety, so I spoke to a few of my clients about bringing CBD into their supplement regime. I asked them to take CBD about an hour before their usual emotional eating took place—for many women in my practice it was after dinner.
The results were pretty awesome. And that led me to want to learn even more about how CBD works. When it comes to emotions or anxiety, the key is always in serotonin. Serotonin is a chemical in the body often referred to as the happy chemical because it directly affects the overall feeling of well-being and happiness. Evidence shows that CBD might positively influence serotonin receptors. It’s similar to what many of the prescription anxiety medications do. Basically, the prescriptions prevent serotonin from being reabsorbed into the body, which allows for more availability of serotonin in the body. CBD might influence serotonin even faster than prescriptions.
This made total sense to me. If CBD allowed for more serotonin to be present or active in the body, then people taking CBD would feel better, less stressed, less anxious All of that might lead them to stop their emotional eating.
Being proactive has been incredibly helpful to my clients. Knowing when their anxious eating times tend to be and taking a high-quality CBD product beforehand was a way to circumvent that moment. Other times, it’s just possible to be that on top of their eating and emotions. In these cases, I’ve had them leave a container of CBD in their snack drawer where they can easily see it. The hope is that they opt for the CBD instead of whatever unhealthy snack they were about to grab. One client put a sticky note on her containers of ice cream that read, “Do you need CBD?”
Emotional eating affects many of my clients and I know it affects so many others too. Using tools such as a food journal, emotions chart and now CBD has made a great impact in my practice. Would you consider using CBD to help you with your emotional eating? Fill me in!
