The Rookie Diaries: A Day in the Life of an Emotional Eater

Are you an emotional eater? I might as well ask if you're human. Very few of us eat JUST because we're hungry. And even when we think we're hungry, we may instead be tired, stressed, nervous, or even happy or excited (birthday + celebration = cake!). There's nothing wrong with the fact that food gives us pleasure—that's why God invented taste buds, right? But when eating becomes therapy, it's time for an intervention.

I know I'm an emotional eater—I tend to eat as a way to cope with stress and as a reward for hard work, whether it's desk work or sweating at the gym. I don't consciously think "Wow, this work deadline is ratcheting up my anxiety, must eat chocolate"—it's more automatic than that, like how I'm conditioned to cross the street when the light is green. The irony about emotional eating is that we eat to feel better, but we often end up feeling worse because we've eaten too much of the wrong foods! So to bring more awareness to my emotional eating—and to hopefully break some of the patterns—I kept a diary for a day to track why I was eating and how I was feeling while munching. Then I had The Best Life's lead nutritionist Janis Jibrin, M.S., R.D., take a look at my intake and assess it for calories, fat, sodium and overall health.

Here's the big reveal, nitty-gritty details and all:

8 a.m. Breakfast: 1 cup of coffee with low-fat milk and 1 cup of cereal with 1/3 cup low-fat milk
I'm feeling tired and hungry. Legitimately hungry because I haven't eaten for eight hours and legitimately tired because I only slept for six. I gulp down the coffee and cereal at light speed and race out the door to make it to a 9 a.m. press event. I'm feeling satisfied, but still tired.

10 a.m. Snack: 3 pieces of fruit (1 section of orange, about 10 grapes, 3 pineapple chunks)
There's a post-press-event breakfast for attendees. I only know a few people here, and when I'm standing alone, I feel self-conscious, so I gravitate toward the food table to give myself something to do. I see plates, forks and a fruit plate. To help myself look busy—and because, frankly, the food is free—I help myself to an orange, grapes and pineapple. I eat them quickly. I hover around the table for a few more minutes and, still left to my own devices, I head toward the smoothie stand and order a smoothie and make chit-chat with the server. A colleague I know comes over and we catch up. I only take a few sips of my smoothie—I'm no longer nervous and realize…I'm not really hungry after all.

11 a.m. Another Snack: Large latte (10 ounces) with soymilk and a Clif energy bar
I'm at a café with my laptop, working. This is a danger zone—me, with my computer, on deadline for a story, and an array of menu choices only a few feet away. If I have several deadlines piled up, back-to-back, like today, having a snack at the ready is practically a prerequisite for finishing the task. Today, my trusty assistants are a latte and a peanut power bar. The only feeling I pinpoint is a slight sense of impatience and mild stress; the drinking/eating-while-I-work feels more like a compulsion and a habit. I down the whole latte in five minutes and nibble on the energy bar. And finish my assignment.

2 p.m. Lunch: Frozen cheese pizza (single serving size, people!) and a side salad (1 cup greens, ½ cucumber, 6 olives, oil and vinegar dressing)
I'm pretty hungry, so the only feelings going on here are honest-to-goodness hunger pains and a touch of grumpiness because my blood sugar is low—hmmmm, not eating affects your emotions as well, it appears.

4 p.m. Snack: 3 ounces of cheese
I JUST ate, so I can't be truly hungry, but here I am eating feta cheese, straight out of the carton as I type this. I check in with myself and am feeling…tired. I think I'm misinterpreting fatigue as hunger. Plus, I'm still working on an assignment that's due at the end of the day, and cheese is my friend right now. It's salty creaminess says, "Don't worry, I'll help you meet your deadline." And it does.

8 p.m. Pre-dinner Snack: A pear
I just returned from yoga class and am starving. To stave off hunger while I cook dinner, I grab a juicy pear. I'm feeling energized from my class and virtuous because my pre-dinner snack is so healthy!

9 p.m. Dinner: 2 huge bowls of sausage-kale-white bean stew
This recipe is supposed to serve four, but I eat enough for two adults while watching a cliffhanger episode of Damages on FX. I don't even realize how quickly I'm eating until I'm into the second serving. I'm feeling amped up by the intensity of the show and that tension is fueling my feeding. I make a mental note not to eat dinner while watching hair-raising TV in the future.

10 p.m. Another Snack: 2.5 ounces of chocolate and 1 cup of popcorn
The TV-watching continues, as does the late-night snacking. This is the witching hour for me, the time of day when I reward myself for all my hard work by enjoying two of my favorite things: Chocolate and television. It's a form of celebratory feasting, but I have to remember that food hangover I'll feel in the morning will negate the joy.

The Postmortem: Looking at my day, I clearly use food to cope with work stress. And not just any food, but high-fat, high-sodium food. "You took in about 4,000 mg of sodium, which is almost double what you should have in a day," says Jibrin, who adds that emotional eaters tend to grab salty, fatty (and sugary) foods. That explains why I was parched all day long! "And your saturated fat intake was about 40 percent higher than your day's limit, thanks to the feta, sausage and cheese pizza." Sigh.

As for calories, she says I came in at around 2,300, which isn't bad, but in a perfect world I'm closer to 1800. High-fat foods like cheese are also high-cal, so bingeing on cheese is a double-whammy. The good news? Jibrin says I hit my quota for fruit and veggies! (There's always a silver lining.)

My goals moving forward: If I can replace some of the higher-fat snacks (like cheese) with lower-fat, healthier ones, like whole-grain crackers or veggie sticks—even chewing gum!—I'll be in better shape. FYI, researchers have done studies showing that chewing gum while working increases your alertness and mood. So if you're like me and feel an urge to chew while you work, there's a logical, underlying reason you're compelled to do it—sugarless gum, here I come!

I also have to keep an eye on my TV-eating, which can be a recipe for weight gain. I should have probably stopped myself at one bowl of stew, and may have done so had I not been so distracted. And one ounce of chocolate—which is heart-healthy in small doses, I might add—should have been enough. (The popcorn is safe as long as it's air-popped.) If I can't learn to control my late-night nibbling by limiting portions or swapping in healthier foods, I'll have to uncouple my snacking and TV watching. One way to keep TV snacking to a minimum: Heed Bob Greene's two-hour eating cut-off. The Best Life Diet recommends that you stop eating at least two hours before bed (the time I usually park myself in front of the TV) to ensure you're hungry enough in the morning for a good-sized breakfast and so you avoid the black hole of night eating.

Do any of you have suggestions for how to curb emotional eating, or, at the very least, snack on something healthy to keep your emotions from eating you? Please share!

The Rookie Diaries: The Big Turn-Off—A Week of No TV

As I type this, at 8 p.m. on Monday night, I am hyper aware that I am not watching one of my favorite shows (The Bachelor). I know exactly what I'm missing tonight on the other channels, too, because I've read all about it on tvguide.com. It's torture, but it's as close as I can get to my addiction without cheating.

A few weeks ago, my editor suggested I tackle a week of no TV (not even DVR!) to determine how my life would change in the absence of the black box. Turns out, turning off your TV is one of the best things you can do for your health. A study in a recent issue of the journal Circulation found that people who watched more than four hours a day were at an 80 percent increased risk of dying from cardiovascular causes compared to those who watched less than two hours a day, due in great part to increased sitting and lack of exercise.

"I'll consider it," I responded, while thinking "not on your life—I'd sooner walk on hot coals." I'm addicted to television. Everything from Frontline to Lifetime movies merits a spot in my DVR list. I'm rarely happier than when I'm on the couch at the end of a workday or—even better—a Sunday afternoon, no dinner plans, gym workout completed, remote in one hand, bag of popcorn in the other, settling in for a four- to five-hour marathon of programs. Cut out TV for a week? Um, no thank you, I'd rather give up chocolate (which I have, see "What I Learned from My Week Without Added Sugar").

As if on cue, about a week ago, my cable went out in the middle of the new PBS production of Jane Austen's Emma. Like a baby whose bottle has been plucked from her in the middle of a feeding, I freaked. I rebooted my cable box, my modem, turned my TV on and off with three different remotes about a dozen times. I became angry and panicked. I cursed my cable company, but as upset as I was, I couldn't bring myself to spend 30 minutes on the phone with an outsourced agent. So I took a few deep breaths, thought, "You’re a grown woman, snap out of it," and I went into the kitchen and washed some dishes. Then I answered some emails. Then I read 20 pages of a novel and went to bed at a decent hour. The next morning I thought, "OK, I can do this, no TV for a week." (Yes, I checked my cable, it was back on…so tempting!)

Like breaking any serious habit, there are stages of withdrawal to turning off the tube. Here, a short synopsis of my transformation to encourage you to do the same, even if it's to get your viewing time down to an hour a day. I promise you, it will be worth it.

Stage 1: Anxiety. When you rely heavily on something to relieve boredom and de-stress—whether it's TV, food, alcohol—you feel at a loss when you don't have it anymore. I recognized immediately on Day One that I was using the TV to avoid dealing with things in my life that stressed me out. A big bad bill arrives in the mail? I'd watch The Office to cheer myself up. If a date canceled on me at the last minute, a romantic flick on Oxygen would swoop in and rescue me.

TV-less, I was left holding the bag and the feelings that I'd previously numbed with flickers on the screen. It was disorienting, but I quickly learned to turn to other technologies—the Internet (which is more interactive than the TV, particularly email) and the good ol' home phone, calling a friend to brighten my mood. Another anxiety-soother? Exercise! I had one less reason to sit on the couch—200 fewer reasons, to be specific (the number of cable channels I get)—and when boredom or anxiety hit, I was practically forced to take a walk, go to my yoga class or run errands.

Stage 2: Awareness: I'm no longer spending two or three hours a day staring at one fixed spot in my living room. My eyes (and feet) are roaming once again and I start to notice things about my apartment and myself that went unnoticed before. I clean out a closet that has been disorganized for a year and that finally seems to register on my radar as "bugging the crap out of me." I also become more tuned into my eating habits. For me, TV-watching and snacking have always gone hand-in-hand—I get to combine two of my favorite things at once! But I was barely noticing the food I was inhaling because I wasn't focused on the act of eating; I was mesmerized by the screen. This is the mindless eating that experts warn you about. Without the TV, I've been able to reduce much of my unnecessary snacking and use food more to quell actual hunger, not to entertain myself.

Stage 3: Increased Productivity. Wow! Look at all I can accomplish in the time it takes to watch a marathon of Project Runway! While I still miss my shows like crazy, I also know that I won't have to stop, mid-project, in order to make it to the couch by 8 p.m. The piles of paper on my desk that will take me an hour to sort through don't seem so scary now that my evening's dance card is cleared. I am also finding it easier to go to the gym. It's not just that I don't have to worry about missing a show (hello, that's what DVR is for), but I never slip into that couch-potato, zoned-out state where "there's always something else on." Inertia has been kicked to the curb.

Stage 4: Embarrassment. Mid-week, I'm able to look back and see the stark difference in my mood (brighter, I'm accomplishing more and feel more in control) and activity level compared to my TV-centric life, and it's quite…humbling. I can't believe how much I've allowed my free time to be filled with a Hollywood script-writer's version of drama, or watching other people's "realities" unfold. Yes, I still ache when my neighbor asks if I saw the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, but I don't miss the comatose stretches and that empty feeling I used to get when I turned the TV off and heard…silence. I don't want to go back to that place again, and I'm a bit disappointed that I was ever there in the first place.

Stage 5: Relapse. You knew it was coming, right? It happened on day four, when I caught a mild stomach bug. I felt entitled to soothe myself with a few hours of Golden Girls and Oprah. So sue me. Yes, it was fun and delicious, but it wasn't as fun and delicious as I'd imagined. And it sated me enough to turn the TV back off and walk away without more cravings. Relapse over.

Stage 6: Relief. By the end of the week, I'm relieved. And I'm not talking about the relief that comes with having accomplished something difficult (though there is that) or the relief that my ordeal is over (there's a little of that, too). I'm referring to the relief of not feeling chained to something, of recognizing that This Thing no longer has power over you and that you've changed how you feel about the object of your so-called affection.

I thought a week of no TV would be torture, and in the beginning it was. But I find that I don't want to go back to my old ways. I like that I am as enticed by my bookshelf as I was by the TV, that cooking in the kitchen isn't rushed so I can eat my dinner in front of the screen, that what I do when I'm not watching TV isn't just filler until the next show begins. I hope that, as I slowly and carefully re-introduce shows (yes, I will be watching the season finale of The Bachelor), I can maintain my sense of independence. And I'm very hopeful I will. How's that for a finale?