In this episode, host John delves into the topic of stress and emotional eating.
He highlights that these behaviors are not solely about the emotions themselves, but rather our unease in dealing with them.
John explores the historical background of emotional eating, drawing comparisons between simpler times in the past and the distractions of the present.
Listeners are urged to acknowledge and comprehend their emotional discomfort.
The concept of emotional eating as a cognitive distortion is discussed.
John suggests a strategy of delaying the impulse to eat, gradually becoming more comfortable with experiencing emotions.
It is emphasized that the objective is not to immediately cease emotional eating.
Small, mindful changes are encouraged as a way to address emotional eating.
Throughout the process, self-compassion and understanding are promoted.
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Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
In this episode, host John delves into the topic of stress and emotional eating.
He highlights that these behaviors are not solely about the emotions themselves, but rather our unease in dealing with them.
John explores the historical background of emotional eating, drawing comparisons between simpler times in the past and the distractions of the present.
Listeners are urged to acknowledge and comprehend their emotional discomfort.
The concept of emotional eating as a cognitive distortion is discussed.
John suggests a strategy of delaying the impulse to eat, gradually becoming more comfortable with experiencing emotions.
It is emphasized that the objective is not to immediately cease emotional eating.
Small, mindful changes are encouraged as a way to address emotional eating.
Throughout the process, self-compassion and understanding are promoted.
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome to today's episode, which is focused on stress eating and how it really doesn't have much to do about stress. Before I get into that, if you like getting tips for me throughout the week, you should sign up for my newsletter. There's a link below in the show notes. Definitely get signed up for high quality stuff. Good stuff, and I'm only going to be leaning into it more in the coming weeks. I have some some big goals for it and want to make it more of an all encompassing resource. I won't go into too much detail, but I want to compile a lot of good stuff in one place for anybody who's interested. Sort of a Wikipedia gist of John's thoughts on mental health and weight loss. A lot of people deal with stress eating with this form of emotional eating. A lot of people just don't know how to survive hard times without increasing the total number of calories that they're taking in, or specifically taking in more calories from sources that aren't good for them. Eating more times throughout the day than they need to, or eating just total quantities more than they need to, or in some cases, having a full on binge.
Speaker 1 (00:01:06) - So first, let's note that stress eating falls under the category of emotional eating. And if you are a binge eater, you are an emotional eater and quite often a stress eater. So this can run with different names, but ultimately we're talking about very similar things. Of course, there are people who emotionally eat even when they have good emotions, because if you don't have much of an ability to process emotion, even times of celebration are hard to handle without food. So just jumping into my first point, the first thing I want you to know about stress eating is that it had nothing to do with stress. It's not about stress at all. It's about your relationship to stress. If there's one emotion that emotional eating is really caused by, it's not by anger or stress or fear. It's caused by discomfort, discomfort at whatever emotion you're dealing with at the time. So if you come home and you're really upset about something that happened that day, it's not so much that you're upset. That's the issue.
Speaker 1 (00:02:05) - It's that you're uncomfortable with the fact that you're upset. We can't process that emotion of upset or anger if we can't welcome it, if we can't accept it. And so often when we're uncomfortable with an emotion, that means we aren't processing it, we aren't learning from it. We're not taking assertive action. These are all things that we do after we build comfort with our emotions. So much of our emotional circuitry relies on us accepting our emotions so that we can respond in assertive ways, keep balance in our lives, and learn all the things that are subconscious mind is trying to teach us. And if you think back to the context of human evolution, I've been talking about 20,000 years ago on the plains of Central Asia, but anatomically modern humans have been around for at least 100,000 years, maybe two, which means we we were basically cooked. We're basically who we are a long time ago. So that's right. You could go back in time and let's say we could teleport someone from 100,000 years ago and teleport them into this modern age.
Speaker 1 (00:03:07) - They could learn language just like we could. They could learn math. They could learn anything that you and I can learn. They would have the same brain. It's pretty wild to think about. But for that person, let's call them Rick and Janice. They're hanging out 100,000 years ago. Plains of Central Asia or. Well, actually, we haven't really left Africa at that point. I don't think so. We're hanging out on the plains of the Serengeti, and let's say you have a bad day at the office. You go home, there's no TV. There's no there's no such thing as cupcakes. You pretty much have to just sit around the fire or go for a walk, or sit there watching the animals, watching kids play. Maybe you go shoot some arrows for fun, do a little target practice. Little something. We've something work with your hands. All of these activities, we're going to be prone to helping us work through difficult emotions and our overall lack of distraction was really beneficial because if something was bothering us, we weren't going to be able to bury it under oceans of sugar and alcohol and Netflix and video games and all the stuff that we have to distract us now.
Speaker 1 (00:04:17) - And that was a blessing. Life was a little bit boring, but it was healthier. So if one was 50 years old, she was born in 1973. She would remember what it was like to ride her bike around the neighborhood when she was bored and just look for things to do. I was a boy growing up, not in the 70s, but in the 80s and 90s and man, I just grab a stick and just whack things like just there's nothing much to do. A lot of the time you just grab a stick and you just walk around. You hit stuff with the stick and hey, look, another stick. Let me bang these two sticks together and see what happens. Relative to Rick and Janice on the Serengeti 100,000 years ago, a kid growing up in the 70s or 80s has way more, had way more. Distraction at their fingertips. And yet we can easily recall that it was a healthier time mentally because we just weren't so inundated by information and stimulus. We had time to let our thoughts simmer, to let emotions simmer because some of our emotions are adverse, some of them are difficult to process.
Speaker 1 (00:05:21) - That's okay. That was never a huge detriment until we humans developed more and more ways for us to distract ourselves from our emotions. And certainly we have found ways of doing that for thousands of years. So the issues I'm talking about today did not start in the 90s or early 2000. People have been overeating for thousands of years to soothe their emotions, never on the scale that we do it today. But nevertheless, there's nothing new under the sun, just different variations on the same theme. So all that's to say that if you're the type of person who is upset at the end of the day and you just don't process your upset, you just don't process your jealousy, your rage, your disappointment with yourself. I don't want to say it's okay, because I mean, that sucks. Like it sucks that we don't do that and we want to change that, but it's okay in the sense that, hey, you're not alone. It's happening to pretty much all of us, certainly all of us involved in the production of this podcast or listening to it.
Speaker 1 (00:06:21) - Us, we get it. Everybody else listening to this gets it. From that starting point, let's notice that the stress is not the issue. The resistance to the stress. It's the discomfort at the stress because we're not able or willing to sit with the stress. Pick through it. Sift through it to find what's real, what's not, what's important, what's not. What we need to do versus what we can ignore. What we want to focus on, versus what we can safely ignore, what we want to do or what we want to not do, or who we want to ask for help, or the assertive action we want to take in response to whatever stressing us out. And so really a great place to start is simply accepting that discomfort. That's what is for Rick and Janice on the plains of the Serengeti 100,000 years ago. They had to be very accepting of reality, and oftentimes for them, that meant being very accepting of lack. When it was there, you couldn't you weren't going to waste a bunch of time or energy crying about the fact that you didn't have food, because that's those are precious calories you're wasting on crying when you could be spending those out doing your best.
Speaker 1 (00:07:27) - There's something about accepting the truth of what you're dealing with that gets you really closer to a place where you can attend to it, where you can actually have influence on the thing that you're accepting. Accepting a certain circumstance does not promote that circumstance. It's actually the quickest step toward changing that circumstance or affecting it in a positive way, in a way that works to your advantage. And so for many people today, if they could see their emotions as somewhat circumstantial things that just pop up, that don't always have a really clear cause. But hey, now this is happening. I didn't plan for this. I don't necessarily want it, but it's happening, so I'm going to accept it. And maybe you notice it during the middle of the day and you're like, okay, I'm going to accept this. I'm really busy right now. I don't have the time to really take some alone time and work through this. But at the end of the day, I'm going to remember that this needs my attention. So however you do it, accept the discomfort and have some grace for yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:08:24) - When you accept the discomfort, say, of course I'm uncomfortable. Of course I'm uncomfortable with these emotions. Clearly, I don't know exactly what to do when these emotions crop up. Literally, I don't feel super comfortable standing up for myself or my boundaries or taking assertive action in these types of situations. Okay, if you don't know how to handle those situations, okay, let's accept that. Let's just accept that now we can all calm down and just say, okay, why don't you know how to handle these situations? Well, I never learned, no one ever taught me or the few times I tried to do it, it worked out horribly, and I've just been skittish about it ever since. Okay, that all makes perfect sense. 1 to 1. One plus one equals two. That makes sense. Okay, so having an expectation that you should already be amazing at this, that doesn't make sense. We're going to accept the reality. That's not where you're at and there's no reason you should be there.
Speaker 1 (00:09:20) - So let's start to think about how you can get better at feeling your feelings. And that's topic for another day because emotional processing and relating to our emotions is something that is definitely a conversation in and of itself. I have other podcasts on that topic specifically. If you're curious, let me just buzz through. I would say put down the berries, Dale. The immense power in honoring anger. That would be a good episode to go back and listen to. Perspectives on hunger. That would be a good episode. The invalid Logic of survival how to dismantle emotional eating. That would be a great episode to go back to if you're interested in that topic. So I will share a really effective tactic from that discussion that I think you can apply in this situation, especially if you are a babe when it comes to feeling your feelings and processing stress in ways that doesn't require or involve eating or drinking or smoking or whatever your thing is. Because all of this applies to whatever your compulsive behavior is, to understand that this is a cognitive distortion.
Speaker 1 (00:10:24) - It's a psychological distortion, really eating doesn't make the stress go away, right? It can temporarily change the emotional, biochemical makeup of your brain, but it doesn't make the stress go away. Tomorrow, that stress is still going to be there. It's still going to be a problem, and most likely it will have festered. And as you learn to accept the discomfort around your emotions, even if you don't know what to do about it, simply accepting the situation you're in is going to be very helpful. It's difficult to see the way that our minds are distorting things. It's difficult to see the way that we learn to relate to food. As a young child, when our imaginations were running wild, it was really easy to make connections between things that were more symbolic and correlative really, than causative or logical. There's so many reasons why we create connections between A and B that's just not true. Ultimately, it has to do with a story that we tell ourselves in order to give ourselves some kind of comfort in a situation where we're really lacking the essential.
Speaker 1 (00:11:26) - What we truly need. So that's the distortion of emotional eating, of stress eating. And that what you need in this moment is food. Now, when you first start this work, thinking that or hearing me say it isn't going to magically unscramble, your brain isn't going to magically undo all the knots in your psyche. But you might be surprised how little growth or change it takes to start making shifts in how you think and how you eat. So one of the cleverest ways I've ever found of of helping people get on this path. We have to create some space for your brain to learn to play with these ideas in a different way, in more of a realm of acceptance, grounding realism for us to really look at these things in real life, in real time, to understand how they work, and ultimately to understand how to pick them apart. We have to spend time with them. This is ultimately how we rid ourselves of discomfort around anything. We spend time with it. We learn that, hey, this actually didn't kill me.
Speaker 1 (00:12:26) - It's not as bad as I was making it out to be in my head. And the more we can have those experiences, the more we erode whatever resistant feeling we have about whether it's going to a certain event, or going to school or going to the gym, whatever you have it in your head as is some terrible thing. By showing up repeatedly, you will learn this. No matter how I feel about it, it's not as bad as that. So in the context of showing up and trying out new things, you have to actually show up, but with feeling your feelings, they're already there. So all you have to do is not actively resist them. You just have to not actively seek out a distraction. And you don't have to do that forever. You don't have to hold on for dear life and never be distracted again. All you have to do is create a space of distraction that lasts longer then it normally would delay. Basically just delay. So when you're first starting this out, even if you have no clue, balance your emotions.
Speaker 1 (00:13:28) - How to regulate your emotional world, how to process your emotions. What you can start to do is simply notice the discomfort you're having around your emotions. Even if you can't understand or identify what emotion you're uncomfortable with, just you have that urge to eat and you know what that urge feels like. Then you go, okay, I'm really uncomfortable right now, okay? I'm going to try to solve that discomfort with food if I don't make any changes, and maybe I will one way or another tonight. But in the long run, the real shift is going to happen here. If I notice what's happening, okay, I'm uncomfortable. And if I'm going to order a pizza and eat the whole thing, I'm doing it because I'm uncomfortable, not because there's stress at work. I'm going to start to see the truth of that. And this allows me to accept the discomfort and understand, like, okay, yeah, I'm stressed, but that's not ultimately why I'm eating. I'm eating because I'm uncomfortable with my stress.
Speaker 1 (00:14:21) - Okay. So if you order the pizza, you're going to have half an hour or 45 minutes to wait for the pizza. Oftentimes, you're just pacing back and forth in front of the door, waiting for your pizza to get there, or you start eating something else, right? In this case, whether you're waiting for a delivery or you're just giving yourself five minutes before you pop something in the oven or in your face, just say, okay, I'm just going to take five minutes. I'm just going to take five minutes to set my keys down, change my clothes, I'm going to get comfortable, and then I'll have my whatever I'm going to eat and use that time of delay to begin experiencing what's going on inside of you. Spend five minutes with it. No matter how disordered your emotional world is, no matter how messed up or scary it is, you can wait five minutes between the moment you get home and the moment you start eating, and that five minutes can be five minutes. That ends up changing your life because today it's five minutes.
Speaker 1 (00:15:16) - Tomorrow it's six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 20, half an hour. And by that point you are getting to to notice, see, understand and eventually influence the level of discomfort that you're experiencing around your emotions. You're able to build comfort with that discomfort, effectively leaving you with the original emotion that's setting it off, which means you can identify it, you can identify what's causing it, and you can begin to go to work. The work of processing, the work of taking assertive action, the work of closing these emotional loops so that you can move on without feeling like there's just this thing that's constantly dragging in your body or in your mind. And ultimately, whether you eat or not, that's not the point. You just want to deviate from the path. You know, you want to realize, like, okay, I am currently coming home and eating emotionally, constantly. I don't need to stop emotional eating today. Like, let's think about a ship on the ocean. And it's sailing straight for the coast of Spain.
Speaker 1 (00:16:23) - Okay, don't have to be somewhere other than where I am in the ocean right now. If I want to change my destination, I just need to change the way I'm pointed. I just need to change my path. And it starts with something very small. But hey, if you make a small change, if you make a small tilt in the rudder after days and weeks, that's going to create a very different destination for a sailing ship. And so no matter how mired you are in emotional eating, no matter how hard it is for you, realize that these small changes are all that's required to change the course of your life. You're not going to die by taking five minutes between having the compulsion to eat and doing it, trying to just white knuckle your way through compulsion. They call it compulsion for a reason. It's that you can't really stop it. Sure, some people are going to expect you to do so, but a lot of people who are loudly out there. Banging the drum about self control.
Speaker 1 (00:17:20) - We know how often those people are struggling in their own lives and banging that drum publicly as a way of dealing with their inner turmoil, or the fact that they're not feeling in control of themselves. So when it comes to your emotional eating, don't try to control it. Bring in some compassion. Bring in some understanding. Let's lower the emotional temperature, okay? That's going to help make it easier to not have everything boil over into survival mechanism and your trigger responses. Be kind to yourself, even if that means that hey, I couldn't stop myself from eating that pizza, okay, I'm going to be present while I ate the pizza. I'm going to try to really enjoy it because hey, if the point here is ostensibly that eating this pizza is going to make me feel better, then why not really lean into that? And if that's what you need, then you're going to be getting more enjoyment out of less pizza. But if it's not what you need, if it ultimately just shows you that pizza doesn't actually make your feelings go away, that it's just a reflex that you've learned to do, that somehow allows you to check a box and say, okay, now I'm allowed to relax a little.
Speaker 1 (00:18:25) - You can watch that happening and you can learn from what's going on. You can accept it again. In other episodes. I've gone more in depth on emotional eating. I certainly go very in depth on it. In the Weight Loss Freedom Academy, which is my main coaching program. So if you'd like to learn more about how to end emotional eating, you can inquire about coaching, email me at John at Oaks Weight Loss, the email is in the show notes. I'll be writing about emotional eating on the regular with my slightly revamped newsletter, which you can check out also in the show notes below, and you can check out those other podcast episodes that I mentioned from the Easy Way Out podcast. If you have questions you would like to write into the show for a special Q&A episode, plan on doing. Please do that. Email is in the show notes, of course. Be good to yourself. I hope this was helpful and we'll talk to you soon.