Episode Description: Do you identify as an emotional eater? Emotional eating often makes women feel shame and feel like a failure. But is emotional eating actually the problem? Join me as I unmask some aspects of emotional eating that aren’t talked about, often.
Disclaimer: This podcast does not constitute medical advice. You should always speak to your doctor before changing your nutrition or exercise habits.
SHOW NOTES:
Episode 2 Download – Journal Prompts and checklist.
The Joy of Missing Out, by Tanya Dalton (affiliate link)
Continue the Conversation – Rock Your Wellness Podcast Official Facebook Group
Work With Me: Your Daily Journal – Cracking The Wellness Code – Wellness Reborn
EMOTIONAL EATING – EPISODE 2 TRANSCRIPT
What is up party people! I am super pumped for this episode! I’m going to say that every time I record a podcast because I’m always pumped to talk to you guys!
But this one is special because I had you vote on the topic that you wanted to hear next and it was overwhelmingly emotional eating! And the fact that this was voted for in such an overwhelming manner just makes me so excited because it reminds me how many of you guys really need some freedom around this topic!
So, let’s get right into it. Emotional eating, when you guys identify as an emotional eater, when you tell somebody, when you tell me or a friend, that you’re an emotional eater or that you’re struggling with emotional eating, I want you to really think about how that makes you feel for a second. Let some words pop into your head. Really sit with how emotional eating has affected your sense of who you are. Because for most of us, we feel a lot of shame when we identify as an emotional eater.
We feel like, somehow, we’re not good enough. Like there’s some part of us that’s broken or something in us that just doesn’t work right. Maybe we feel like we’re too much when it comes to our emotions. Like our feelings are too big and we shouldn’t feel as ‘big’ or like we just have a hard time dealing with life the way that other people seem to deal with it.
All in all, when I usually hear people talk about being an emotional eater, it very rarely has made them feel good about themselves, right? I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody who was talking to me about emotional eating because they felt good about it. It has a very negative connotation, something that really has affected our sense of self in a really bad way. Right?
So, I think it’s really important that we recognize that at the beginning of this conversation, because what I’m about to say is going to give you so much freedom when it comes to how you feel about yourself. And that is what I have come here to do with this podcast and with this episode. To free you guys from all of this negative crap that is weighing you down, preventing you from being able to use your best energy for the things that really matter, right? For really experiencing growth in your life, for really doing the things that give you purpose. So, let’s blast this out of the water!
So, my new little tagline, that a lady named Holly helped me come up with for my business is “It’s not you but it’s not up to you because your happiness is more important than your dress size”. And what I’m really going to get into today is why what you think is emotional eating may really not be.
There are people who genuinely struggle with the very textbook emotional eating of like, “I’m happy”, “I’m sad”, “I’m sad and I eat”, “I’m upset and I eat”, “I stifle my feelings with food”. But, in my almost 14 years of experience in the wellness industry now, in my time on planet Earth as myself, I’ve come to see that there’s really very few people in my experience who truly are suffering from only emotional eating. And there’s a couple of different things that we’re going to talk about.
I think actually four or five different points that are going to make you see emotional eating is something else.
So, let’s get into that, the sort of introductory material that is always necessary for you guys to understand my work and in this case, I want to talk about how food is profitable, dieting is profitable and nutrition is profitable. And for them to be profitable, marketers know that if we’re going to purchase food products, if we’re going to purchase fitness products, nutrition products, then we have to have three things.
We need to think that we have a problem and we need to know what that problem is. So, in this case, you guys think you have a problem with emotional eating.
We need to believe that the problem is solvable. And ideally, we need to believe that the solution is easy and painless.
Now, you won’t find very many programs out there that are really designed to help you not emotionally eat because many people don’t really believe that the problem is solvable. And they don’t believe that the solution is easy and painless, right?
This is one of those challenges where we all just kind of feel a little bit hopeless with our emotional eating. And so, as a result, what’s usually marketed instead is weight loss plans. Because with emotional eating, oftentimes people are not in the ideal body that they want to be in so they know they have a problem with that and they do believe that that problem is solvable.
If they have the right diet plan, the right exercise plan, whatever it is, and with fitness marketing and nutrition marketing, they’ve gotten really good at making us believe the solution is easy and painless.
So, on top of the fact that all those things I just talked about are profitable, I think we also have to recognize that we learn something new with every generation and our generation of women right now is awake to a lot of things that the generations before us weren’t really awake to. I know that when I talk to my mom’s generation, my grandmother’s generation, my mother in law’s generation, emotional eating is a word that they’re very familiar with.
I was not alive when they were going through their 20s and 30s but I imagine there were probably a lot of magazine articles and just a lot of buzz about emotional eating at that time. And now that we’ve moved into this generation, we have all learned about health and wellness from the women that came before us. But now, in our generation, there’s new research in psychology and sociology and women’s issues that we have yet to apply to our own wellness. So when we take this new lens of the scientific work that our generation has done, and we apply it to the situation that we thought we were in, we get a really different vision of what we actually are.
So, I’ve teased you guys enough, let me get into it and tell you what it is!
So, a long time ago, well maybe not a long time ago, maybe two years ago now, I was reading a book called The Joy of Missing Out by the amazing Tonya Dalton. If you have not read this book I highly recommend it. It is fantastic! In that book, I learned for the first time about something called decision fatigue. And you may be having an aha moment about what I’m going to say already if you know what decision fatigue is, but I would like to read a passage from this book that really sparked the beginning of my understanding of this issue of emotional eating.
So, I’m going to read that now, again it’s called The Joy of Missing Out. It’s by Tonya Dalton. Tonya writes:
“That moment, at the end of the day, when you feel brain dead, that feeling is real. Your brain is literally running out of calories and simply can’t function. It’s not about willpower or discipline, your brain simply has no gas left in the tank. And no real desire to make good choices. Most times we aren’t even aware we’re low on mental energy, and our brain continues working but starts to look for shortcuts. It does this in two different ways. One, it acts impulsively. In other words, it stops spending the energy needed to think through our actions or two, it does nothing. It simply chooses not to choose.
Our perfectly rational brain loses its ability to make good decisions when we overload it with work. In a Stanford University study, researchers divided students into two groups. Group A had to memorize a two-digit number while Group B memorized a seven-digit number. After memorizing the number, they were asked to walk down a hall where they were offered two snack choices, a piece of cake or fruit salad. Students who memorized seven digits were more than twice as likely to choose the unhealthy snack as Group A. When we give the brain extra work, in this case simply five extra numbers to memorize, it gets overloaded and loses the ability to make good decisions”.
I hope some of you guys are already having a “Holy Cow” moment, right? Because what if you aren’t actually an emotional eater? What if your brain is just exhausted? What if it’s just exhausted and you’ve lost the ability to make good decisions because your brain simply can’t function? You’ve gone to that impulsive place. How would that really change how you view yourself? How you view your relationship to emotional eating?
I will tell you, most of the people who talk to me about emotional eating are women. I very rarely have had men come and talk to me about emotional eating. Now I haven’t looked up statistics on men and emotional eating or anything like that, and I probably should do that before I go yapping my trap on the episode but it is what it is. I would be interested to research that more but most of the people who talk to me about this are women.
And then on top of that, when people talk to me about emotional eating, and they explain what’s happening and when it’s happening, most women that I speak to are experiencing emotional eating at night, after the kids go to bed, when everything settles down. That’s when they just go into the kitchen and they just binge eat. Sometimes it’s very late at night. Some people even get out of bed to go and get something to eat right. And of course, it feels emotional to them.
But we’re not respecting the fact that your brain is done and your brain is the key component in making good decisions. Your heart doesn’t make decisions. Your intestines don’t make decisions. Your brain helps you make decisions, right?
So, what if your emotional eating is actually brain-dead eating? And let’s take a little bit of a look at the brain-dead women’s studies portion of that. There’s been a lot of research in the last several years that women carry a significantly higher mental load in households than men do.
And I want to stop and say I am so pro man. I love men! I love husbands! I think men are phenomenal! This is just something that we’re working through in our culture right now. The relationship between men and women in the household and all that and just the way it stands is women have a higher mental load.
That means that if you have a man and a woman who are married in a household, and both of you work full time, and both of you seemingly should be carrying the same amount of responsibilities, oftentimes behind the scenes, the woman is keeping track of more things in her head for the family than the man is.
So, she might be keeping track of when the leprechaun trap is due for their kindergartner and whose soccer uniform needs to be washed today so that they have a uniform for the next day, the list is oftentimes a lot longer for women than it is for men.
So, we tend to be, by virtue of our job as mothers and by virtue of our gender as women, at a higher risk of having this brain-dead phenomenon, in my personal opinion. I have not seen research studies on this but based on the research on the impact of being overworked on the brain and based on the research that I’ve seen on the mental load for women, it makes sense to put the two together, right?
If any scientists are listening, I would like you to research this please so that I have a research study to site! But how differently does that make you feel when you recognize that maybe you’re not knee deep in this bag of potato chips because your emotional. Maybe you’re knee deep in the bag of potato chips because your brain dead and it’s just happening because your brain can no longer function, right?
So, this is so powerful from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is, it’s really freeing emotionally because it helps you to let go of all that shame that you had for just not being that good at handling your emotions because for most of us that’s really not what it is.
And then on top of that, once you understand one of these root causes of your eating, it’s going to make it much easier to come up with a strategy to change that behavior in the future. Because if you think you’re an emotional eater, and you’re going to work on your relationship with your emotions with a therapist and you’re not seeing any results because that was only part of the problem, that’s not really good, right? That’s going to make you feel like quitting.
That’s going to make you frustrated. It’s going to make you just feel like giving up right? Whereas when we understand the multi dimensionality of emotional eating, and now this thing called brain dead eating that really frees us up to try a lot of different things and not to give up on hope as fast as we might otherwise, right?
Okay, so I promised you guys a bunch of different things, but that was just the first one and I know that was a lot! This whole decision fatigue, brain dead eating thing, that was just the first point!
Now let’s go and let’s look at the next thing that contributes to our belief that we’re emotional eaters. Something that really, again, we may not be in this case.
The next one is called poor understanding of our physiology. Basically, a lot of us don’t recognize that our brain’s primary fuel source is carbs. Carbs are really necessary for your body to function. In fact, on top of that, eating carbs really helps to regulate your hunger hormones and your thyroid hormones. Your thyroid hormones are associated with metabolism.
Particularly in women, carbohydrates and thyroid have a relationship. And then, oh hold on! I lost my train of thought for a second! Bring it back, bring it back bring back!! It’s this podcasting thing. I’ve got my own brain-dead stuff going on here.
Okay, so thyroid and then, the other one I was talking about was your hunger hormone right. So, if you are depriving yourself of carbohydrates, your body is going to release a hormone that, actually not really release a hormone, but your hormone levels are going to fluctuate in a way that lets your brain know that “Hey, you need to eat something, you’re not getting enough sustenance” and there’s scientific research documenting that link between carbohydrates and your hunger hormones, right.
So, a lot of times when we’re trying to get healthy, the very first thing that we do is cut out carbs. Or at least significantly reduce them, although I do know many people who completely cut them out. On top of that there’s a whole group of us who believe that sort of urban legend from the 90s that you shouldn’t eat after 6pm. I know there’s even some popular diet plans that still tout that right now that you shouldn’t eat after 6pm.
So, I just want you guys to imagine the fact that carbohydrates are your brain’s primary source of fuel. Your body needs carbs, your hormones and metabolism require carbohydrates to be healthy, right?
And you’re going through the whole day when your brain is at its freshest, making the best choices, not eating carbs, maybe not eating any carbs, maybe only eating a little carbs, then you get to the end of the day, when your brain is no longer in a place to make good choices like we discussed in the last point. And on top of that physiologically your body is letting you know, “Hey, you need some carbs.
You need some energy; you need some food because that’s what we use to take care of your body. And I’m over here, I’m trying to keep you alive. And frankly, you’re messing this up and I’m going to try to take this over and fix it for you”! And we get hungry! We get hungry! And when we combine it with our exhausted brain, it’s a recipe for overeating, right? So, I just want you guys to understand your physiology.
Next, oftentimes, we are really out of touch with our what our bodies need in general, whether you’re dieting or not. So oftentimes I’ll have people come to work with me in The Wellness Reborn Intensive, which is my one-on-one intensive program and I’ll look at what they’ve been eating and they are not fueling their bodies during the day.
Whatever they’re eating is not giving them sustenance, it’s not keeping them full, it’s not nourishing them and I’m not really surprised that at the end of the day, their body is giving them signals to eat because your body again is trying to keep you alive. And when it recognizes that it’s not getting enough or it’s not getting the things that it needs, it’s going to tell you to eat.
That’s part of what the whole Intuitive Eating movement is based off of right now is that your body is smart, and it knows what it needs to some extent. So again, if you’re labeling yourself as an emotional eater, you may really just not be nourishing yourself during the day and your body is doing a good job of trying to keep you alive! So instead of feeling bad about what’s happening, you actually should be like applauding your body and saying “Hey, good job trying to keep me alive over there. You’re doing exactly what you were built to do”, right?
Okay, next point. Some people are going to get really mad at me for this one! I hope you guys still love me!
Caffeine, caffeine, caffeine, caffeine! Listen, guys, I love my coffee. I love my coffee but I did quit recently. And in the process of quitting it, which has been an on again off again, on again off again, now actually has stuck process, I’ve learned a lot about the body and I’ve learned a lot about caffeine. And one of the things I’ve learned is that caffeine blunts our hunger response. And I always kind of knew this intuitively.
A long time ago, I was really into fasting and I always knew that if I had a cup of coffee right when I got up in the morning that it would get me through the morning and I could probably go without food until like 12 or one o’clock, which I’m not recommending that you do that. I’m just using that as an example right now. I would have to do a whole other podcast episode on fasting. But I’ve always known it suppresses your appetite. But I’ve never really connected it to emotional eating until recently.
So, for those of us who are coffee drinkers, if you are let’s say a first thing in the morning cup of coffee person, you’re going to suppress your appetite until that caffeine starts to wear off from your body. If you are a two cup of coffee a day person, like I was for a while, I used to drink like a 7am cup and a 1pm cup, that caffeine may not wear off until close to dinnertime.
So, what is happening when you consume caffeine and oh gosh, I don’t even want to talk about the three cups a day people! Yes, I used to be a three cup a day person too so I’m not shaming you but we won’t even talk about three cups a day because that’s just ugly. But anyways, back to the point. I digress!
You are suppressing your appetite with every cup of coffee you have. So, you’re probably, if you’re doing that, either under consuming your food because your appetite is suppressed by the caffeine. Then you get to five or six o’clock when all the caffeine is finally worn off for your system and you’re hangry because your body is finally getting the signal that you need to eat, right?
Or you’re one of those people whose appetite is suppressed from having caffeine and so you’re only eating things that look tasty. You’re not eating things that your body is craving. When I have a lot of caffeine, personally, I noticed I’ll eat a cupcake when I’m not hungry. I’ll eat a donut when I’m not really hungry because I emotionally and, what’s the word that I’m looking for? I don’t know, there was another word but it’s tasty, right? I want to enjoy that food. But I don’t feel my normal intuitive craving for a rounded balanced meal.
When I stopped drinking caffeine, I really started to get back in touch with “Huh, I feel like having a salad with chicken right now” or “I really feel like a piece of salmon and some brussel sprouts and a baked potato” and I really lost that during the time that I was really significantly addicted to caffeine because of the way it was really blunting my hunger response. Now, if I didn’t know better, I would have looked at myself and said “I just have no willpower”, “I don’t like healthy food”, “I’m addicted to sugar”, “I’m an emotional eater”, but really what I had been doing is pumping my body full of a stimulant that suppresses my appetite.
So, I’m hoping that you guys are sitting there just going “Wow! Wow, all these years I thought that I just have a hard time handling my emotions and really I had no idea how much my physiology was stacked against me with all this!”. And I haven’t even talked to guys about processed food and how addictive processed food is right?
That’s a whole other conversation we can have here. Whether you’re an emotional eater or not. It’s really hard to get to the place where you can be around processed food and not over eat it, right? There’s a whole thing called habituation that I’m going to talk about in another episode but that’s definitely a bearing here! Like, let’s layer that on. You’ve been drinking coffee all day. You haven’t been nourishing your body with what it needs to really be nourished and to feel like your appetite has been sustained. We’re brain dead because we’re overworked and underpaid.
And on top of that, we’re women who carry the mental loads for our families. And then we’re supposed to resist processed food that literally there are 10 scientists sitting over at the processed food companies trying to make sure that however they make their food, we don’t want to stop eating it! Does this sound like it’s very easy to be successful with for you? It doesn’t sound like it to me, right?
So okay, let’s rein this back in. So, the number one thing that you should be getting out of this is that it’s not you, right? There’s a lot stacked against you with binge eating, with emotional eating, and that we need to really take the word emotional off of it for most of us and recognize that this is a multi-dimensional problem.
If you still believe that your emotions have something to do with it, yes, we all need to be in therapy. We all need to be working on ourselves because let’s just be honest, life is hard, life is messy, and it’s not getting any easier, right? So, we all have some work that we need to be doing around our emotions, and I highly encourage you to do that.
But let’s stop acting like that’s the only work that we need to do and let’s stop internalizing this whole struggle with emotional eating as something that’s wrong with us because it is not. It is something that we are all going through, which is why I had such an overwhelming response to the polls on the topics for this podcast. And it’s something that we’re all experiencing the same set of physiological challenges with.
So, I want you guys to know that I’m introducing a lot of complex ideas and a lot of science and none of this stuff is easily marketable. Remember, if we’re doing marketing, we need to believe that the solution is easy and painless, right? And when the problem itself is so complicated, it’s impossible for people to believe that the solution is easy and painless.
So, I just want you guys to know that like this is not the normal dumbed down stuff that you hear in mainstream fitness and nutrition. And because of that, it’s not going to be solved with the same quick fix easy solutions that mainstream media wants you to believe are the solutions to all your problems.
So, this is one of the reasons that I do what I do. This is why I created my wellness method. And this is why I believe that you have to stop jumping from diet to diet and find what works for your unique body and life because for all of us, the solution is going to be multi-dimensional.
This is one of the reasons that I created Your Daily Journal, which is my mini course where I created this journal that teaches you how to take data on yourself so you can start seeing the different things about your wellness journey that are creating your current reality, with how you look, how you feel and how you’re showing up in the world because it is multi-dimensional, and you have to start being a student of yourself in order to figure out which aspects of these challenges are affecting you the most because when you get to the root of the problem, like I said in the first episode, then you can start to solve the problem.
So, I know a lot of you guys after the first episode were like, “Oh, I just want to know what the next step is. How do I help myself now that I understand this?”. That is the next step. You have to become a student of your body. You can do that with Your Daily Journal, which is my program or you can just do it on your own. Get a notebook and start writing down whatever you need to write down to understand yourself and understand what is going on with your body and with your life.
And I put those two things together because they are interconnected. They will always be interconnected. Humans are emotional creatures. Eating is supposed to be an emotional experience and I want you to let go of any shame or any idea that you should be separating your emotion from your eating.
The only time that we really work with people on separating emotion from eating completely is when it’s a threat to their health, right? And there is a point at which your doctor will let you know if you’re in that scary situation where they’re like “Listen, we really need to get the way you eat under control”. That’s not for a wellness coach to say, it’s not for anybody but your doctor to say. For the rest of the world, eating is supposed to have an emotional component.
Humans have been sitting around tables, having fellowship with each other over food, having fellowship over food around campfires for 1000s of years and is part of the fabric of who we are to celebrate with food, to enjoy food, to share food as an act of love.
So, I want you guys to just take this whole conversation and let it free you from all the guilt and shame about emotional eating and instead, switch yourself to becoming a student of your body and a student of your life so that you can have that happiness that you deserve. Because even though this isn’t your fault, it is up to you to find the solution because your happiness is more important than your dress size. And this journey is worth it for you.
You guys know I’m all about action and not just talk so if you want to take action on this episode, I’d like to invite you to download the Exploring Emotional Eating Checklist and journal prompts, completely my gift to you guys, and you can get those by going to the link in the show notes.
I am loving the conversations that we’re having on this podcast and I want more women to be part of them. But I need your help! For the month of February, I would love it if you could text the women in your life that you really care about with a link to this podcast.
If you take a screenshot of those text messages and email them to my email address. I will enter you into a raffle to win one seat in Cracking the Wellness Code which is my signature wellness coaching program in a self-study format valued at over $500. So with every text that you get, you can have an entry to win that as my way of saying “Thank you” for bringing more people to this podcast so that more people can be free from toxic mindsets about wellness. Can’t wait to see who wins!
Have you joined the Rock Your Wellness Podcast official Facebook group? If not, what are you waiting for? It is the best place to continue conversation about these episodes and get to know your fellow listeners. If you’d like to do that, the link is in the show notes for this episode.
I can’t wait to see you there!
If you’d like to work with me more on your wellness journey, there are three ways you can do that. I suggest always starting with Your Daily Journal, which is my short and sweet program that will teach you how to take data on your body so you can figure out what is actually working for it.
Then, you can either move on to Cracking the Wellness Code, which is my signature wellness coaching method and a self-study plan or you can schedule an exploratory call for Wellness Reborn, which is my intensive program where I will hold your hand while we tear down your wellness habits and build them back up again.
