Emotional Eating 101
Emotional Eating
That term gets used a lot, but what does it mean? And more importantly what does it mean to YOU? Emotional eating shows up in many forms but the underlying mechanism is always the same - avoidance of difficult emotions resulting in eating when we're not physically hungry - aka overeating. Unfortunately, most of the time we don't even realize we're doing it until we're already doing it! Then we spiral into guilt and shame, creating more negative emotions we want to avoid. It's a viscous cycle we get stuck in and the emotional eating doesn't stop. In this episode I want to help you define emotional eating, get real with yourself about how and why it's happening for you, and what you can start doing about it right now, today!
XOXO
Tara
Full transcription available at the bottom of this post
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Full Transcript:
Emotional eating. That term gets thrown around a lot. But what does that really mean? I feel like everyone has their own definition of what emotional eating is. And lots of people have ideas about what to do about it. But not all of them are helpful. So I want to spend a little time helping you get a working knowledge of what emotional eating is why we do it, and I want to give you some real tangible steps for you to start overcoming it.
Let's go.
Before we dive in to the emotional eating, I just want to remind you to head over to Tarafaulmann.com. And check out the 12 weeks to weight loss and wellness program. We're launching it in a couple weeks, I'm very excited. So you have a couple weeks to hop in, get ready to go. This is for those of you who are tired of dieting, tired of gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight, losing weight, tired of not understanding how your body works, how food works in your body, and feeling a little out of control with the mindset piece, you're maybe an emotional eater, like we're going to talk about today. And you're maybe just not understanding your relationship with food. So I want to help you overcome those things. I want to give you the tools that you need, so that you never have to go on a diet. Again, this is not a counting plan. It's not points, you're not weighing and measuring things and tracking things. This is a plan where you learn your mind, you learn your body, and you have the tools to take you for the rest of your life, to have healthy habits and healthy lifestyle. So if that sounds good to you, head to TaraFaulmann.com check that out, and then ask me some questions. If you have them, get yourself signed up and get ready to go.
Okay, emotional eating. I want to normalize the idea of emotional eating, but also not normalize it. I'll explain. So emotional eating really all that is is any time that you eat food, when you are not physically hungry. So by that definition, everyone alive has emotionally eaten at some point, right? We have all been in a social situation where this has come up. Take for example, you're at grandma's house, you already ate dinner, you are not hungry at grandma's house. And grandma brings out the special cookies that she made just for you. You physically are not hungry anymore. You don't need any more food, but you eat the cookie, because you love grandma. And because she took the time to make that for you. That's technically emotionally eating. It's eating any time when we're not physically hungry. So by that definition, we've all done it. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Food is connected to culture for us. Food is connected to love in so many families, that I think those things are okay, because you're aware of it. You are aware in that moment that you are not physically hungry. But you're also aware that you love Grandma, and you want to make her feel happy. And so you have some of that Dane cookie, right? We make those decisions consciously all the time. And I don't think there's an issue with that.
The problem comes when we are not making those decisions, when we are not the conscious actor on those decisions. Does that make sense when we are kind of mindlessly eating, when we are binge eating when we are doing what you would typically associate with emotional eating. Those are the things that we're going to Talk about today where it becomes a little bit more problematic. And I don't want to delude you in any way that somehow I'm going to give you all the answers to emotional eating in a 20 minute podcast episode. But I am going to leave you with a couple real tangible tools that you can start using right now today when you're done listening to this, so that you can walk away with something that you can start putting into place. So make sure you listen to the end so that you get those tools.
So let's start out by talking about those kind of more problematic situations of emotional eating. So that's going to encompass those things like the binge behavior, where you just start throwing shit in your mouth, and you're not really paying attention, and you just keep going and you ate an entire bag of Oreos, like in a sitting, or really any overeating in general, I would consider this problematic emotional eating. So you will actually hear me from time to time use overeating and emotional eating interchangeably because to me, they're the same thing. I'm, I'm not emotionally under eating, I'm emotionally over eating every time, right? Because I'm no longer hungry, but I'm still going for it. So overeating and emotional eating the problematic of emotional eating, those are kind of one in the same to me. You might be "fuck it" eater." Fuck it" eater is someone who "messes up their diet", she says an air quotes, falls off the wagon doesn't stick to this, and then just says, okay, might as well go for it. And then you just start shoving all the rest of the food in your face, because you're going to start again tomorrow, or next week or next Monday, whatever. It also includes that kind of mindless eating that grazing like you're just picking food off your kid's plates, you're not really paying attention to what you're eating, you're not eating on purpose, that falls under this emotional eating overeating category as well. If you're a food sneaker, maybe you went out with friends and you ordered the salad and then you came home and you just ate a crap ton of ice cream by yourself or no one could see you. If you're a sneaky eater that also falls under this umbrella of emotional eating this problematic emotional eating. Or maybe you are and I deserve this person I worked out really hard today. I deserve this. I had a tough day at work, I deserve this. Those are all some common emotional eating profiles that I see there's several more, but those are the most common ones. So you might have been one or all of those at some point. And you might be one of those regularly. And so I want you to start recognizing that and yourself. Listen, when you talk to me. It's a little bit of tough and a little bit of love, but it's always tough love.
They come together for me. So I want you to get real honest with yourself and really call yourself out I might and I deserve this eater. Did you do that yesterday? Did you do that today? Did you mindlessly eat ate an entire bag of chips while you sat and watched that Netflix movie? Like, get honest with yourself. That's the only way we start dealing with this. One of my favorite life coaches. Her name is Brooke Castillo of the Life Coach School she uses the word buffering, to talk about overeating and over drinking. And I love this word because I just feel like it's the perfect fit for what we're talking about. When we're talking about emotional eating, you are buffering difficult or negative emotions with food when we're talking about over drinking, you are buffering difficult or negative emotions through drinking. So buffering is a word you're going to hear me use a lot. And what that means is you're avoiding you're avoiding something by doing something else. Why do we do these things? Like why are we like this? I get asked that question a lot. And the answer is because it works. If it didn't work, you wouldn't do it. The reason we buffer is because it works. It helps us avoid the hard things. And as humans we like to avoid the hard things. Eating and food are a very effective avoidance technique. So our drugs so as alcohol, but food is more socially acceptable, right?
It's more socially acceptable somehow, for you to overeat as a form of buffering instead of for you to over drink or over drugs as a form of buffering. What this means is that we are avoiding painful, difficult and negative emotions. Why? Think about this. As kids we're taught to avoid things that feel bad. Our brains by nature, our pleasure seeking our brain is always looking for the easiest path, the path of least resistance, the path that's going to cause the least least amount of emotional harm to me. So in the moment, grabbing that bag of chips feels a lot less emotionally harmful to me than dealing with the negative shit emotion that I'm having in that moment. So we reach for the bag of chips, because our brain really wants us to think about when you were a kid when I was a kid. So I'm in my 40s when I was a kid, and we had difficult or negative emotions come up for us as children. What did we hear the most, we heard things like suck it up, we heard things like stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about, or boys don't cry, right? We were really taught, if you will, to take those negative emotions and just get over it, stuff it down, get over it, move on with your life, we ain't got time for that.
And interestingly, I feel like the next generation that came along was a total pendulum swing to the other direction. I feel like the generation after me got all the messages. They were like overcompensating for the suck it up mentality of their parents. And they say, this is the generation where everyone gets a trophy, and everyone's a winner. And everything is great. And you're so magical, you're such a unicorn. It's like this total other pendulum swing. But the problem with both of those is that neither one of those is addressing or teaching those children how to deal with difficult emotions. One is glazing over it saying suck it up and get over it. And one is glazing over it saying there is no negativity everyone wins. But that's not true. None of those things are true. There is negativity, there is negative emotions, there is shitty stuff that happens. There is shitty stuff that that you think that is happening in your life, you have negative emotions. And most of us have zero tools for dealing with them. Why? Because our parents didn't have them and their parents didn't have them, we don't have them. So one of the things I really want to teach all of you is those tools, I want you to have the tools in your toolbox. So when negative emotion comes up, you don't have to turn to things like food, you actually can just turn inward and process and move on. There's no such thing as moving on, if you haven't processed, that's my therapist part speaking, but it's the truth. So we have no tools to deal with negative emotions. So we create tools to deal with negative emotions. And those tools generally are things that avoid negative emotions, like alcohol, drugs, and yes, food. So then we get into this cycle, where we are avoiding eat, we're avoiding negative emotions, that emotional avoidance, then we eat, then we overeat. And then we beat ourselves up, and we have guilt and shame about what we just did. And then we have more painful emotions. And then now next time, those painful emotions come up, we need to avoid them again. And so we overeat again. And then we have more guilt and more shame and more negative emotion, right, you see how we get stuck in this cycle? And do you see the similarity of the food cycle to the drinking cycle to the drugs cycle, the cycle is the same, the cycle of emotional avoidance is the same for all of them. So really, you got to give yourself a little bit of grace, you got to forgive yourself a little bit because you have been set up to fail. Think about all the marketing messages that you receive every day connecting food to good feelings. That beer commercial that makes that's going to make you feel like you belong to the group, that chocolate that will make you feel so relaxed and happy and take you away that pizza that's at the party. And it's so much fun, right?
Constantly, we are bombarded with messaging that connects food to positive emotions. So when you are in a state of negative emotions, you have been conditioned to associate positive emotions with food. So of course, your brains like oh yeah, so that'll make me feel good. Let's do it. It's not even like a conscious thought. It's just like this habitual pattern that your brain has learned. And so part of what we're talking about is how to break that habitual pattern. But I I want you to see the big picture here. I want you to see that it's not just somehow you and isolation. You are part of this environment that is teaching your brain conditioning your brain, that happiness comes from food. And that's not true. And if we cognitively Think about it, we know it's not true, but our brain does not usually stop and cognitively Think about it, it just act. So the only way to overcome this is to actually feel the shitty feelings, process them and then move through them. That is a learned skill is something that takes a lot of practice, but out Absolutely you can do it. You have to start approaching your feelings and your body with kindness, and start to learn that you know how you no longer have to overeat to protect yourself from those feelings, I want you to sit with that thought for just a second, what have you just told yourself, I no longer have to overeat to protect myself from hard feelings, from negative feelings from sad feelings from anxious feelings. You just conditioned your brain conditioned your body to with the understanding, I don't have to eat to deal with this. I don't have to eat. To deal with this, I'm strong enough to just deal with it. Imagine if you start telling yourself that, that in and of itself would start to change everything. I can't talk about emotional eating without talking about the physiological piece because there is a physiological piece happening that you don't have control over. Usually, when we emotionally eat, binge eat overeat, it is those sugary, salty, fatty foods. Well, those sugary, salty fatty foods act as opioids on your brain, it acts like a drug on your brain. And it does make you those opioid reactions make you feel happy and soothe. So not only is there in an emotional soothing, that happens right at first. But there is a physiological soothing, soothing, that happens in your brain. So your response makes you feel better, that is very hard to quit, it's very hard to quit that kind of opioid hit that your brain gets when it gets that hit of sugar or that hit of fat hit assault. So I just want you to be aware of that, that there is a physiological piece happening as well, that has to be broken. So what the heck do we do about all this? That's a real big question. But I want to help you start really, like I said, building that toolbox, so that you start to have an understanding when it's happening, what to do and how to stop it in its tracks.
So we're gonna start, I think with the easiest thing to tackle. Whenever you're trying something new. Start with the lowest hanging fruit start with the very easiest, simplest thing that you would hear. And you'd be like, Oh, my gosh, I could totally do that. That's super simple. Terek, I got this. That's where I want us to start. So that is this.
You're gonna ask yourself two questions. Before you put food in your mouth. I want you to just ask the simple question, am I hungry? Ask it out loud if you have to ask it in your brain. But just ask yourself, Am I hungry? So you are triggered by something, you're kind of in a tailspin. You're walking to the pantry, you're about to put that cookie in your mouth. And I want you to just stop. Ask yourself before it goes in your mouth, am I hungry? And then really started to pay attention to your body? Like really start to listen? Do I feel hungry? Or maybe I feel thirsty? Or maybe I just feel shitty and emotional. And I just don't like how I'm feeling? Or maybe I am actually hungry. And then you can ask is a cookie the best choice if I'm actually hungry? It's a simple question. The only thing required of you is to remember to ask it and then to listen. The second question is while you're eating, ask, have I had enough? So you're sitting there, you're eating that bag of chips. And in the middle of that bag of chips, you realize, whoa, hold on, what am I doing? Ask yourself? Am I still hungry? Have I had enough? And if you say I have not had enough, I am still hungry, then you can make the constant conscious decision. Okay, well, do I want to keep filling up with chips? Or should I do something a little better for myself? That's a choice that you can make. But you have to be aware of what you're doing so that you can make the choice. So before you put food in your mouth, you're going to ask yourself, Am I hungry? And while you're eating, you're going to stop? And you're going to ask yourself, have I had enough?
If the answer is yes, then you can be done? And if the answer is no, I have not had enough, I'm still hungry, then keep eating. But this is just gonna start to stop you from being mindless and shoving things in your mouth for reasons that you're not paying attention to. And make you stop and ask a question of yourself make you stop and actually make a conscious choice. I want to move this eating pattern for you from the unconscious to the conscious. Now, you're not going to do this perfectly every time you're going to mess up you're going to forget to do it. You're still going to binge you're still going to do your crazy emotional eating shit that you already always do. That's still going to happen sometimes. But I if you can start doing this at least part of the time, then you are making great progress and good for you. Okay, So that's the first thing that you're going to do, you're going to work on that mindfulness piece moving things from unconscious habit to conscious choice. The second thing that you're going to work on is that formula for success. Now, if you have not listened to that episode, go back and listen to it, it's at the very beginning, it might be episode three or four, somewhere in there. I will link it in the show notes so that you can listen to it again, the formula for success is going to help you start to deal with difficult emotions by separating facts from feelings. So in that formula for success, you'll remember really quickly, we start with the fact line, the fact line is just the facts of life. I got no control over those things. It's just what is then I have thoughts about those facts. And then I have emotions because of those thoughts. And then those emotions elicit elicit actions or inactions, and then those actions and with my results, so what I'm doing is starting to put my emotional eating situation into that model into that formula, the eating part that you're doing that is the action, right, the eating is the action line of that formula.
So you want to start to identify what is the emotion that is triggering that action? And then above that, what are the thoughts that are triggering those emotions. So we are going to notice without judgment, when you are not eating because of hunger, and we're going to start to unpack the emotions and the thoughts that are triggering those eating actions. Okay, let me give you a personal example, a time when I was doing some emotional eating some kind of unconscious emotional eating, and it was total avoidance behavior, what I would do is I would sit down at my desk, and I would have to do all these things. And I would have to like call people and like post stuff on social media and like, do these things that were like really putting myself out there that made me really uncomfortable. And I would sit there and I'm stare at my computer, and then I would get up and I'd walk to the pantry. And I'd be like, Oh, it's nap time. I would go like, find some food to eat and like, have some snacks and just kind of sit there and Munch for a while. It was 100% pure avoidance behavior. Because I was avoiding the uncomfortable, difficult emotions that were happening in my brain. I was feeling fear. I was feeling discomfort. I was feeling anxiety, I was feeling worried. So what I had to do to stop that pattern of behavior, I had to start understanding what are the thoughts that are creating these emotions? For me, when I'm sitting down at my computer, what am I telling myself, that are creating these emotions of fear and discomfort and anxiety? Well, I was having a lot of thoughts about failure, like I'm going to do these things, and it's not going to work on my business is gonna fail, I'm not going to be good at this, I was having thoughts of rejection, I was having thoughts of judgment, people are gonna judge me, they're not going to like me, they're not gonna want this message. They're not going to look at this post. Like all the things right? I was I had thoughts of failure and fear and rejection and judgment. So that I have to go up one more. Those are all my thoughts about the situation, the situation is inert. The situation is benign. The situation simply was, these are the things I'm going to do in my business to grow my business. The fact is, people are going to judge, right, I have no control over that people are going to have opinions about what I say and what I do, and I have no control over their opinions, I just don't. So if I understand that I am going to be judged. I no longer ascribe any power to that judgment. I no longer ascribe any power to that rejection, I have no control over it, the only thing I can do is be the best me. And I can't control other people's opinions of that. So when I start to change my thoughts about the fact that I am growing a business, I'm putting myself out there and I will be judged for it.
I can change my thoughts to that's okay. I don't give a shit. I no longer care, I'm going to do what I think is best, I'm going to serve the best way that I can. And if people don't like it, they don't like it. Those were the thoughts that I had to change, right? those thoughts now elicit very different emotions in me. those emotions now include confidence, they now include not giving a shit about other people's opinions, they now include being able to just do me and feel okay with that. And those new emotions, elicited new actions and those new actions had nothing to do with going to my pantry and getting food those actions now are growing my business and putting content out there and recording podcasts and doing all the things that I was scared to do. So do you see how if you move down the chain, you can start to really pay attention and really pinpoint? What are the things that are triggering this? What are the thoughts that I'm having about it? What are the emotions that those thoughts are creating? And what is the action that those emotions are creating the action generally being that emotional eating behavior, right? So do you see how if you just start putting all of those things into the formula, and at the beginning, I will tell you, for sure I wrote all of this down, I couldn't always work it through in my head, I sometimes had to just write it down and really think about it. And like really get down to the nitty gritty about what was going on. But if you can start to put it in those frameworks, if you can see the emotional eating, and then start working yourself back up the chain, of all the things that aren't working, and then work yourself back down the formula for all the ways that you want it to work, it can be so amazingly useful. So if you're struggling with problematic emotional eating, I want you to know that you're not alone, it happens to a lot of us. But I also want you to know that it's not okay, it's not a place that we want to stay, we need to start tackling those things, you need to start having an understanding of what you are doing. And you need to start being conscious and making conscious choices, instead of just habitually doing these things habitually eating to avoid emotion, habitually drinking to avoid hard emotion, we need to start being aware. So hopefully, those two tools will give you a really good start.
Now, you could work on just those two things, just the two questions, and then putting things into the formula for success. You could work on just those two things for the next entire month. And it would take you at least that long to start mastering them and getting really good at them. So give yourself time, real long lasting change takes time, it takes practice. So don't get frustrated, if you don't get it right away. Don't send me a message and say, Tara, this is bullshit. It doesn't work. It absolutely does work. But you have to give this time you have trained your brain for this many years to act the way it is. So we need to spend a lot of time and give it a lot of time to retrain it to act the way that we want it to. Okay, so if you are struggling with emotional eating, I do want you to check out that 12 weeks to weight loss and wellness program. It's like this podcast plus a million times bigger and a million times more helpful. And you get me personally coaching you through some of your struggles, I will walk through this formula with you and help you do it. So if that sounds like something that you need, I want you to hop online, check it out, get yourself signed up and get ready to go. We're going to start in a few weeks in April. So I really want you to be on board with us because I want to see the changes for you. I want you to achieve the changes that you want to achieve.
Alright you guys, thank you so much for being here. I hope that was super duper helpful. Until we talk next time be well.