The Four Types of Eating

Eating your way to healthier you can be achieved when your eating is categorized. Categorizing eating helps to evaluate and understand when you are eating for reasons other than to provide your body nourishment.

You might have noticed that there are times when you eat to fuel your body and other times it is because you want to eat for the purpose of enjoyment. Once you categorize the types of eating, you can manage and decide how much you want to eat for each category to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

There are 4 type of eating.

1) Fuel eating

When we engage in fuel eating we know that we are eating to provide nutrition to our bodies. Fuel foods are nutrient dense and include foods like fruits, vegetables, lean meats, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats.

Fuel eating should occur 90% of the time.

2) Joy Eating

This is when you eat food simply because it tastes good. It just tastes good in your mouth. The secret to joy eating is that you must enjoy it.

Examples include cup cakes, cookies, candy and anything else that tastes delightful but provide little or no nourishment for our bodies. Chocolate cupcakes from A Piece of Cake are my joy food.

Eating for joy 10% of the time is a healthy balance.

3) Fog Eating

This is when you eat and are not conscious of it. It could be eating a bag of chips while watching our favorite program on television and not realizing how much until the bag of chips is empty. It is eating when you are not hungry or eating when you are distracted.

You should NEVER fog eat if you can recognize it.

4) Storm Eating

This is eating when you are not hungry, however you realize it but feel that you can’t stop even though you may want to. This is similar to binge eating.

Storm eating can happen when you have been on a diet and deprived yourself of a particular food. Storm eating can also happen when you feel a great sense of emotion and feel out of control.

After a storm eat it is important to wait until your hungry and eat your fuel food again.

Categorizing your eating helps to understand when you are eating for reasons other than nourishment and gives you a guideline on what you need to do to lose weight or maintain a healthy lifestyle. Always remember whenever you eat it will fall into one of these four categories.

So tell me what do you eat when you are joy eating? Do you joy eat 10% of the time? I would love to hear your comments on the different types of eating.