Ep. 110 Anxiety Eating

Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shade Podcast. I'm Paula Parker. I'm a life and weight loss coach, and I really help people release the excess weight that they have, that they want to release, and also help them stop thinking about food all the time. So today we are talking about eating when you're feeling anxious.

It's an important topic because we know our emotions drive our behavior, what we do, how we show up with food, how we make our food decisions. And anxiety happens to be one of the things that I hear a lot from my clients in terms of the emotion that is driving any kind of overeating. Overeating being defined as Eating more food than your body needs to release the weight that you want.

So you might have already, if you clicked on this podcast episode, already self identified that this is a pattern for you. You feel anxious and you turn to food to soothe yourself and feel better. Maybe that's before a work call that you're feeling anxious about. Or just a tough conversation that you have.

Maybe this shows up for you in social situations, like at dinner parties, or there's like any kind of social event or anything you're at where there's a heightened energy and you just find yourself mindlessly eating the chips or the nuts.  I don't have it anymore, but I used to experience anxiety every Monday morning.

It was like, My body was on an anxiety clock. So between 8 and 10 in the morning, it was just anxiety time. It doesn't, it didn't matter what was going on for me that day. I just felt anxious. So you might have something similar going on. There's a certain day or a certain time where you notice you experience feeling anxious and maybe I know that it's very common on Sunday night.

So maybe for you, it's Sunday night before your work week starts. Sunday nights in particular can be a tough time. If we have some of that all or nothing thinking going on too, because maybe you've overindulged over the weekend. So your brain is saying, well, what difference does it make? You'll just start fresh tomorrow.

It's the classic diet starts Monday mentality that we all know. Very well, so here's what I want to share and teach you about anxiety and overeating. I want you to think of anxiety as just your brain is over functioning. When you're anxious, it's on high alert to your external environment. It's hypervigilant.

So your nervous system is activated from this over functioning of your brain. You experience that as physical sensations in your body. So that might be a racing heart. or change in your heartbeat, shortness of breath, a buzzing feeling in your chest, maybe a tightening in your chest or a hollow feeling in your gut, a churning or woozy feeling in your stomach, a hollowness in your throat.

You might experience tingling or pins and needles in your hands and feet or your arms and legs, a lightheadedness or a slight dizziness in your head.  Your muscles might feel tense, especially in your neck or your back, or your muscles might feel really weak. Like you're standing on top of a cliff looking over the edge and you're weak in the knees, that kind of feeling  what happens is we feel one or all or some of these physical sensations, and then we interpret them as anxiety.

We say, I'm anxious. How do I know? Because of all these physical sensations that I'm experiencing, we don't consciously have that thought, but that's like what's going on.  We then want to feel better. We want to stop those physical sensations and feel calm. So then we turn to food to soothe. Your brain will offer up food to soothe and act as a distraction from this experience you're interpreting as negative.

And notice I'm saying you're interpreting it as negative. That's important. Okay. Because these physical sensations are simply that they're physical sensations that you're experiencing. So I want you to just do this little thought work exercise with me for a moment. So imagine an alien comes down and they, you know, pinpoint you and they specifically want to interview you.

They say, you know, our species, we don't feel emotion. We don't know what it is. Please explain what anxiety is. And you say, Well, you know, my heart is beating a little bit faster. My stomach is woozy. My chest is vibrating and my head is a bit dizzy. And then they are likely to say, okay, well, tell me why this is so bad that you would then overeat and forgo feeling amazing in your human body at your natural weight.

Let's just imagine this alien is really rooting for you to say, Stop your overeating and be at your natural weight. So I want you to consider that you could have a different relationship with anxiety. You can start to see it more neutrally, see it as these physical sensations, as sense data, and really nothing more, that nothing has gone wrong.

Your brain is simply over functioning. When your brain offers up food as an idea  in that moment, you start thinking about having a snack or you start thinking like, Oh, you know, might be good to eat something. You can say no to yourself. You can say, I don't need food. This is anxiety. I'm experiencing anxiety, not hunger. 

What you will really be doing here is training your brain to understand that you can experience a set of physical sensations,  not eat food, and everything is just fine. You're just teaching, you're establishing that new brain body connection. When you continually, like in, in, Contrary to this, if you continually comply and you eat every time you feel stressed or anxious, you practice that brain body connection.

You feel this way, you eat food. So, your brain will continue to offer up food as a solution, which, you know, creates a lot of food drama, which is why we're in such, you know, agony in thinking about food all the time, and why you want more food than you actually need. Alternatively, you can practice the opposite, and eventually after practice, your brain won't even offer up food as a suggestion when you feel anxious.

It won't occur to you to eat when you're anxious. This is how we get out of all of that food drama in a really efficient way. But it will require you to change your relationship with anxiety, meaning how you are currently interpreting it. I think for me personally, the reason I stopped having anxiety every Monday morning is that I trained myself out of it.

I just kept saying to myself, Oh, this is anxiety. I'm experiencing anxiety. It's no big deal. Nothing has gone wrong. And I, you know, got on my calls, wrote, wrote emails, wrote podcasts. I did my work.  Even while I was experiencing those physical sensations that I think minimized rather than exasperated those feelings and eventually it went away.

So I'm no expert on this, but this is my theory. So I'm not promising you that you're never going to feel anxious again if you do this, but it will help you to respond to it without overeating. Here's what might come up for you when you try this, you'll notice the anxiety and you'll tell yourself, okay, I know this is anxiety.

Nothing has gone wrong, but you will still feel desire for food. You will still want to soothe and then your brain will look for signs of hunger within your body. You'll think, well, I'm hungry. I know I'm feeling a bit anxious, but I'm also a bit hungry. Am I hungry? And then you will find a physical sensation of hunger.

We usually do when we ask ourselves, am I hungry? And then we will justify overeating because the answer is usually yes. This is normal because of how our brain works. It's why they put, you know, thirsty with question mark and big letters on a soda machine. It's the power of suggestion. If you ask yourself, if you're hungry, your brain will go to work looking for signs that you are indeed hungry because we can almost always eat.

Eat unless we are, you know, overly stuffed, then we find them and we believe that we need more food, even when we don't. So decide you won't eat when feeling anxious, even if you notice signs of physical hunger. That's where I recommend you start. You'll calm yourself first, breathe Stretch, listen to music, have a cup of tea, have a glass of water, or two, you know, call someone.

Anything you can do to really calm your nervous system, then you will eat if you are indeed physically hungry. And just also a note here, I don't want to come across as minimizing your experience of anxiety. Even from my own experience, having had a panic attack before myself, I know how unpleasant it is.

And still, if we can lean into neutralizing our interpretation of how it feels in our body, we'll be able to respond in a way that serves us, that's not going to lead to overeating. You can do this. When you master your response to anxiety, which, you know, as in the human experience, most of us are going to feel.

anxiety at some point.  At any case, we're going to experience stress, right? And if you can master this response, then it won't be a trigger to overeat. You will be so much closer to reaching your natural weight because you won't be preventing your body from releasing the weight each and every time you're feeling this way, because of course you won't be overeating as often as a result.

All right, so this was a super short episode.  I think it's an important one if you experience any kind of anxiety. And you can even start thinking about it in terms of you know, start getting curious of what are the other emotions that could be driving my overeating. This could be dread, That's another common one.

It could be deprivation. It could be FOMO. It could be sadness. It could be on the opposite spectrum where there's a high degree of positive emotion. And those are the emotions that you're feeling that is creating desire and permissiveness. It's the same technique. Anxiety is very I think easy to identify in the body in terms of physical sensations, where we are less proficient in determining what does like deprivation feel like, or what does FOMO feel like?

In the body as physical sensations. So I really invite you to do that. Just get a little curious, tune into your body, see how it feels just so that you can start seeing your emotions as sense data, not a problem, not something that you have to respond to with overeating. Okay. It will just slow that down, bring in some mindfulness so that you can respond in a way that really serves you. 

If you are ready to, you know, do this kind of mindset work. If you're ready to use your mind. To change your shape, your physical body. That's whether you've got 10, 20, or over 60 pounds, you'd love to release so that you can live at what I call your natural weight. The way that you feel is natural for you.

Then I invite you to explore coaching with me, go to mindfulshape. com, or you can message me directly on Instagram at mindful underscore shape, and we can figure out what your next steps are together. All right. I will talk to you soon. Bye.