Ep. 43 Emotional Eating

Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker, and I’m a weight and life coach. We’re going to tackle a big concept today: Emotional Eating. I want to clear up what I think are some misconceptions about this and provide a very practical way of dealing with emotional eating. And this episode comes with a pdf handout, so if you don’t want to take notes or you’re in motion, you can always go to my Free Resources section of my website or click the link in the description and download the pdf on Emotional Eating. 

Perhaps you’ve already identified yourself as an emotional eater or you think, MAYBE but I’m not really sure - I just need to eat healthier. Either way you know emotional eating is bad right? In this episode I’m going to help you see where emotional eating is showing up for you (and I promise you it is) AND how it’s actually a really good thing. I know that sounds crazy right now so stay with me. 

When we think of the term emotional eating or you think of someone as an emotional eater you get a vision of a women on the couch crying her eyes out while shovelling icecream in. For those Seinfeld fans out there, you’ll notice they show Elaine eating Jerry’s icecream straight from the carton when she’s upset about something. But these are very flat, reductive portrayals of emotional eating. It’s much more nuanced, subtle and complex than this. 

Emotional eating can be defined as ANY time we’re eating food for reasons other than physical hunger. So let that sink in a little. I’ll say it again - when we aren’t eating for true physical hunger, we’re emotionally eating. 

There is NOTHING wrong with this ok? Like all types of eating, it’s totally neutral.

We eat out of guilt, to be polite, out of boredom, when we’re in physical discomfort - like being tired- I joke that for me even being a little cold was reason enough for a snack. We eat to celebrate, to reward ourselves, to numb or escape, to entertain ourselves, to squash anxiety, to relax, to procrastinate, we even eat to fit in and connect with others.

What is your reaction when I suggest only eating when you're physically hungry? What happens in your nervous system? Does it scare you? Do you dismiss it without even giving it any consideration? Does it intrigue you? There’s no right answer here. I just want you to get curious about your immediate response. It may be an indication of how intertwined your emotions are with food right now. 

I know that when I first heard someone say their goal was to only eat when they were hungry EVER - I rejected it for myself and thought they would be living such a boring, pleasure-less life. This was probably 15 years ago. At that time, eating for entertainment and stress relief was part of my life. So the idea of not having that sounded absurd and not fun at all.

So if that’s you right now, it’s no problem. I’m not suggested you don’t enjoy your food or eat for pleasure. I’m offering that there’s a reality in which you only eat out of a natural, healthy desire for food and don’t have any drama around it. 

I want you to imagine a venn diagram. So there’s 2 circles that are overlapping in the center. On one side you have eating. On the other side you have emotions. And where they overlap is emotional eating okay? Now this overlap can be as big or small as you want. There can be a dance happening there or fighting. It’s totally up to you.

Okay so let’s get out of the theory and into pragmatics because you probably know by now I am all about what’s practical. 

I’m going to tell you what I’ve decided when it comes to emotional eating for myself and then HOW I do it.. As you listen, I want you to be thinking about what YOU want to decide and create for yourself. It may look different and that’s great. 

So I’ve decided I really don’t want much emotional eating in my life at all. I don’t want much overlap in my venn diagram. I want my eating to be predominantly for fuel and my emotions to be separate. 

I never eat when I’m upset, even when I’m physically hungry. I want to process my emotions first and then I’ll eat. 

I only eat when I’m physically hungry unless I’ve decided ahead of time that I want to have something out of celebration like a drink or dessert. That for me is the dance. That’s how emotionally eating can feel healthy to me.

I never use food as a reward because I’ve cleaned up my thinking around this. I don’t really need rewards at all actually because I’ve created a pretty great life - when I’ve had a bad day I’m not thinking I DESERVE something because I’ve had a bad day. It’s simply part how I live to take care of myself if I need to take care of myself. So now if I have a hard day, it’s like, it’s fine - it’s just hard sometimes to be a human. I’ve practiced NOT turning to food enough times that it doesn’t even occur to me anymore. 

Now full disclosure, every now and then I’ll find myself slipping into old patterns of all or nothing thinking or feeling kinda crappy and thinking about food more. I’m not perfect at keeping eating and emotion completely apart. So I’m working at this too to be honest. But I will say that now when it happens, it does feel very unusual because it happens so infrequently. 

So it’s one thing to DECIDE to end your emotional eating but it’s another to actually do it right? 

The reason it’s hard to lose weight is because when we say no to ourselves, a painful emotion comes up. We can easily click the escape button, eat the food and not have to feel that way in that moment. And when we do, we get very good at eating but not very good at feeling emotion. 

THEN when we experience painful emotions in life like stress, we turn to food to cope and overeat. So it becomes this cycle we can’t get out of.

So this is why as I mentioned at the top of the episode, if you’ve identified these patterns in your life, it’s a good thing. It’s because now you’re going to be fully equipped with how to solve for this AND as a result release the weight. But not only will you release the weight by doing this, you’ll feel better in every aspect of your life too. 

First, I want to offer a framework for how to categorize emotions in a useful way: 

There are 2 types of emotions - ones that move us forward and ones that keep us stuck.

There are some really common painful emotions that come up around food, weight and our bodies that keep us stuck. They prevent us from taking action if we spend a lot of time feeling them. I’ll give you some examples.

• Confusion -This shows up as being unable to decide on a plan of how you’re going to eat or deciding and then second guessing it the whole day and as a result not being fully committed.

• Overwhelm -If you are either overwhelmed by how much info there is out there on weight loss or by the amount of weight you want to release, it can stop you from trying something at all.

• Frustration - This is the most common one I hear from clients and we can usually uncover some pretty big thought errors here. When we’re frustrated, we think that despite our efforts, our weight loss goal is out of our control. This is very disempowering. Frustration happens when you want something and there’s something that feels out of your control that is preventing you from having it. But that’s actually never the case when it comes to weight loss. Whether it’s what you’re doing or not doing or if it’s just how you’re thinking about it, there is always something within your control. You can try something different, you can change 1 thing this week, you can shift your focus from what isn’t working to what it is, you can even start letting it be hard if your brain is telling you it’s too hard. 

• Self Pity - Notice when you’re feeling bad when you’re not eating everything you want and it’s hard and you want it to be fun and easy. Or this can look like comparing yourself to others - how they look or eat and saying it’s not fair. I won’t argue with you on that one - it’s not fair. But so what. What now. It not being fair that some people can seemingly eat whatever they want and stay thin is a waste of your brain space. I remember Oprah saying something similar to her trainer Bob Greene and his response was, “Yeah but that’s not you.” She was speechless and a bit taken aback I think. 

• Deprivation - 

  Deprivation is maybe my favorite because this one comes up so often. How many times have you said, well I would do this or that but I don’t want to feel deprived. As IF we are not in control of feeling deprived or not. 

  So that’s key here okay - pay close attention. We THINK that being deprived is inevitable when it comes to not having the food we want to eat in the moment. We feel deprived. But what I’ve noticed with myself and with my clients is that the icecream does NOT cause the deprivation. Their thoughts about having the icecream or not having the icecream creates the deprivation. Are you with me?

So if you have really decided that you’re not a woman who eats icecream on a regular basis, and someone offers you the icecream, you don’t feel deprived when you are thinking, I don’t want that - what I really want is to fit into my clothing - is to be that vision I have of myself. I’m actually happier without it. It’s not worth it.

Now in the beginning this is really hard. You probably DO want the icecream because your body is used to the intense pleasure AND so your desire is strong. When your desire is really strong it’s hard to manage your thinking in that moment right? It’s like in that moment we don’t really care that much about being the fullest expression of ourselves and living our dream life in our dream body do we? No. We want the icecream. 

So, this is why you need to do your daily 15 and your thoughtwork so that you’re always in touch with what you truly want. It makes it easier in that moment to stick to your plan. After awhile your physiological desire will diminish, your identity will start to shift and you will have zero desire for it, I promise. I’m telling you I would have NEVER believed this unless I had experienced if for myself, so I urge you to take a chance on it for yourself. 

How many times have you decided to have something because you’ve been “depriving” yourself all week and you just can’t take it any longer. If that’s the case you may be believing that deprivation accumulates but is that true? How can you feel past deprivation? The deprivation from last week? It’s not possible. What happens is you feel deprivation in a moment and your thought is, “I’ve been so deprived, I deserve this.” That generates a feeling of more deprivation and intense desire. We think deprivation is going to be inherent in weight loss. It’s not. Do we need to be eating sufficiently? Yes, of course, but deprivation is a feeling caused by how we’re thinking about what we want and saying no to ourselves. When we decide we don’t REALLY want it, instead we want more, we’ll experience less deprivation.

• Impatience - I did a whole episode on this one so I’ll just briefly mention it here. Impatience can get in the way of our progress when we want to see the numbers go down faster, when we calculate how long it’s going to take us to reach our goal and it’s not good enough. Then we feel defeated and tend to be operating with less motivation, less energy and eventually quit altogether. 

• Loneliness - I mention this one because I’ve spoken to women who say they eat in the evenings when no one else is around. They say they’re lonely, and want to feel better. But why would you ever choose to be lonely? Your thoughts on being alone can generate loneliness or not, depending on what you think about being alone. Being alone is neutral. I also know women who are alone and thrilled about it. I know women who are with someone and feel lonely. I’ll bet you do too. 

• Regret - regret gets in our way because it’s so past focussed with no upside. Whether it’s the years you regret so focused on your weight or food OR it’s regret about the bagel you ate yesterday, it doesn’t generate activation energy forward. If you find yourself regretting something, the anecdote is self compassion and curiosity. What can you learn to help you move forward?

• Entitlement - You SHOULD be able to eat whatever you want. You SHOULD be able to eat whenever you’re hungry. You SHOULD be able to have a few days off and not gain any weight…I want you to question all of that. It’s like what they say in relationship counseling, you can be right or you can be happy. You can eat whatever you want, whenever in as much quantity as you want, always - AND you get to choose not to because you want to change your shape. 

• Aversion (disgust/dislike/contempt) - If you have aversion to eating healthy or to your body the way it is, you may want to shift your thinking in these areas. Again, same theme overall - so long as we’re dwelling in these emotions, we’re NOT feeling empowered, optimistic and problem solving. And that’s what will make the difference. 

If you have ever felt stuck on your weight loss journey, I guarantee you were actually feeling one of these emotions but maybe weren’t aware of it. So when you think you are stuck or you find yourself feeling one of these emotions, it’s a signal that it’s time for thought work. We need to explore the thinking that’s generating feeling this way and clean up our thinking to shift out of it and move forward.

It’s really an opportunity to get to the truth. And oftentimes we’ll uncover a root feeling (like anger, sadness, fear) in which case we don’t want or need to change our thoughts, but to move forward, to take action, we need to feel it and process that emotion through. So let’s talk about those emotions. 

Painful Emotions we need to process:

• Anger

• Sadness

• Fear

• Disappointment

How this might show up for you is in your eating, so if you’re really food focused, or you haven’t been following your protocol, there may be some underlying emotions here. They will also show up more when we’re not distracting ourselves with food. 

Learning how to princess your emotions is arguably the MOST important skill you can learn to release the extra weight. So I’m going to give you a step by step technique on exactly how to do that. Because most of us were never taught how to do this. I even remember being grumpy and my parents saying, maybe you need to eat something. So, we often need to learn this later in life. 

You can do this when:

1. you’re not sure what emotion you’re feeling

2. You’re in a bad mood and not sure why

3. you’ve been eating off plan

4. you’re very aware of the specific emotion and want to process it.

Emotion Processing Technique

1. Deep breathing

2. Check in with the body to see what's coming up 

3. Can you identify the emotion (it's okay if you can't name it just yet)

4. Where is it in your body?

5. How would you describe it? (Shape, texture, temperature, size, color, intensity from 0-6)

6. Notice how it changes 

7. Remind yourself it's okay to feel this emotion

Repeat steps until you feel complete and or the emotion has dissipated. You can stop at ANY time if it gets too intense.

I was thinking it might be helpful for some of you to listen to a guided version to do this and so I’m also going to provide that on the podcast. It will be called Guided Emotion Processing Technique so that you can quickly reference this whenever you feel called to do this work and you want to do it with me. 

You can also do this emotion processing technique to celebrate and amplify your wins. How often do we really take the time to feel our sense of accomplishment? What I’ve started doing is doing this as a reward. Sure it’s fun to go out for dinner or buy something when we achieve a goal - if you follow me on instagram you may have seen I celebrated by going to the bookstore with a girlfriend and we let ourselves buy all the books we wanted. It was an interesting exercise because I kinda thought that if I let myself buy as much as I want, I would go nuts but turns out when I allowed myself that freedom, I only really wanted 4 books. Just 4 - not a hundred like I thought I might do! I’ll let you draw the connection with food on that one yourself. 

AND we know that when we feel that sense of accomplishment, really feel it, we get natural dopamine which helps us stay motivated to keep going and keep achieving. So there is no downside to it. 

Okay that’s what I have for you. If you want to get the handout for this episode to use as a reference you can go to the free resources link in my website and there’s also a link in the description. You’ll also get access to ALL of my free resources there, so not just this one and you can get all the tools you need to self coach on weight loss. And be sure to try out the guided emotion processing technique episode to help you practice this skill. It will be a foundation for not only releasing the weight, but keeping it off forever. Talk to you next time. Bye.