Do you find yourself sometimes snacking when you’re not really hungry but just because you’re bored? How to stop eating when you’re bored?
Giving into these kinds of cravings and simply eating for the sake of not having anything better to do can be bad for your self-control and can be unhealthy.
You can quickly find your weight ballooning out of control if you don’t get a grip on your eating habits. If you struggle with how to stop eating when bored, we have some methods you can use to help you control this habit.
5 Ways to Prevent Eating When You’re Bored
Do Something Active
Probably the best thing to stifle these boredom eating urges is to get up and move around. Giving your mind some sort of activity to engage it, with something as simple as walking, can dispel the snacking urge.
If you go for a walk or even a run, you’ll be burning calories instead of laying down on the couch or the bed absorbing calories.
This is a replacement treatment, and one of the most effective ways to change bad habits is to replace them with good ones. If you get into the habit of going for a walk or being active whenever you have the desire to snack, you’ll quickly replace that bad habit with a good one. This will also help with weight control and will keep you healthier overall.
Engage Your Hands
How to stop eating when you are bored if you can’t go out for a walk somewhere? Getting some fresh air or doing something active by moving around isn’t always an option. That’s especially true if you don’t feel very good or you are very tired. Going for a walk may not be very appealing to you, so we can suggest an alternative that may help.
If you keep your hands busy doing something, you’re less likely to have a desire to use them for snacking. A lot of people will turn to a hobby as a way to keep their hands busy, such as drawing, building, modeling, or even reading a book.
All of these engage your hands to some extent and can help keep you busy and keep your mind distracted from the notion of snacking. If you make your hands too busy to eat, you won’t be able to snack.
You can also try working on projects around the house, like doing chores such as sweeping, washing dishes or cleaning. It’s kind of difficult to snack on chips while you’re cleaning the house.
If you don’t have a hobby, it might be a good idea to pick one up, such as sewing, learning an instrument, or learning an artistic skill. All of these can take the place of boredom snacking.
Drink Instead of Eat
If you take a bottle of water around with you, you can take a few sips whenever you are feeling like snacking. A lot of people snack when they’re bored or when they’re lonely not because they’re hungry, but because they can’t think of anything better to do. Drinking some water can help satiate those cravings. This is a very effective method for how to stop eating when bored or lonely.
If you know that you’re prone to grab a snack when you go out for a walk, when you’re on your way home from work, or when you’re just moving around the house, it’s a good idea to keep a bottle of water with you. It doesn’t have to be water, though.
It can be tea, juice, or something else that’s healthy and that will not add a lot of calories. The problem with boredom snacking is that it’s usually unhealthy, and the foods we tend to crave are foods that aren’t very good for us.
So, if you’re replacing the snacking with drinking, you want to make sure that you’re choosing a healthy drink. If you’re replacing boredom snacking with chugging soda, you’re not doing yourself any favors.
Only Stock Healthy Snacks
A lot of people will do their boredom snacking at home. If you have tried and looked up methods for how to stop eating when you’re bored, and it just hasn’t worked, you may need to try a different approach.
If you find that your self-control just can’t handle the fact that you’re stuck at home or you spend a lot of time at home and there are snacks available, then you may need to take control of what’s available to eat in your home.
Are you asking yourself, “How to stop eating when I’m bored?” If, like many people, you have tried and failed to control the snacking, it’s time to take things in a different direction. Instead of buying soda, cookies, and potato chips to keep in your cupboards and fridge, you can instead shop for granola, fruits, veggies, and nuts.
These can be healthy alternatives to what you’re used to snacking on, and they can satisfy your urges just as well. A lot of times, people find themselves addicted to sugar or salt, and these kind of snacks can satiate those cravings in a healthy way.
This is an excellent way to replace a bad habit with a good one. What you will find is that pretty soon you don’t crave the unhealthy snacks so much. It will take your body and your mind time to adjust to eating healthy snacks instead of unhealthy ones, but after a while, you may start have cravings for healthy foods.
Here are a few snack ideas that can help you be prepared for when boredom snack cravings hit:
- sliced pears, peaches, or apples
- baby carrots
- celery sticks with peanut butter or ranch dressing
- granola bars
- whole grain cereal
- peanuts, cashews, walnuts, or pistachios
- yogurt
Another little tip that may help you is to only shop for groceries when you are not hungry. The worst time to grocery shop is when you are ready to eat, as you can buy things you wouldn’t normally buy, including unhealthy foods you would prefer to keep out of your house.
It’s best to go grocery shopping on a full stomach so you have better control over what you are buying.
Keep Track of What You’re Eating
Another method a lot of people use to help when they need to know how to stop eating food when bored is to track their food. They create a food diary and keep careful account of not just their snacks but their meals as well.
Anything that you eat through the day should be recorded in the food diary, along with any beverages you drink.
It’s easy to just eat and eat and not realize how much you’re eating until you start tracking it and writing it down. Once you see the list of foods you consume for the day and for the week written in black and white, it can have a different effect on you.
It can help you realize exactly what you’re doing to your body and how unhealthy your snacking habits are. If you do have a serious problem, this can be a great way to identify it and start doing something about it.
They say that the first step to correcting a problem is realizing that you have one, and starting with the food diary maybe right first step for you.
If you’re wondering how to stop yourself from eating when you’re bored, then planning out meals in your diary and tracking all the food there can really help.
Meal planning helps you be aware of what you’re eating and helps make you conscious about your grocery shopping. What happens when you have a food diary that you keep religiously is that when you go to snack, the food diary may come to mind.
Having that visual image in your mind of the list of foods you been eating can really help to give you a measure of self-control and self-awareness about what you’re eating.
