Recognize Emotional Eating_Final
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>> Welcome back.
It's great to be here with you as we move
through this journey to explore emotional eating together.
Emotional eating begins with emotions,
being able to recognize, understand, regulate,
and express emotions will help you begin to make sense
of why you're eating for reasons beyond physical hunger.
This is a helpful foundation for working with clients
around this often difficult and isolating topic.
With that said, the focus of this lecture
is to gain a better understanding
of what emotional eating is.
So what exactly is it anyway?
Odds are, you have your own personal way
of understanding emotional eating.
What does that mean to you?
How would you define it?
Hit pause and take a few minutes right now
to jot down some thoughts.
Did you find that challenging at all?
Emotional eating is far from clear cut,
and we all have different ways of defining it
based on our personal experiences
and ways of processing information.
Sometimes, an example can help bring the material to life.
Let's start with a story about a guy named Joe.
Joe had a rough Saturday.
He spent three hours driving through the pouring rain
to attend a high school reunion.
He arrived soaking wet
and exhausted after getting lost about five times.
After catching up with many former classmates,
Joe felt like he was the only one without a family
and stuck in a dead end job.
That night at his hotel feeling lonely, worthless,
and ashamed that he had nothing to show for his life
since high school,
he ordered his favorite meal,
a Bacon Deluxe cheeseburger, fries,
and a chocolate peanut butter milkshake
with a bottle of wine on the side.
He just needed to feel good,
and comfort food was his medicine.
However, after eating the entire meal
in front of his favorite TV show,
Joe went to bed feeling even more ashamed
and worthless than he did before.
Can you relate to the story?
Have you ever made food choices based on
how you felt in that moment?
Have you ever eaten to fill a void or self-sooth?
Emotional eating is about your relationship with eating,
your food choices, plus the emotional motivation
behind those choices.
It means using food for purpose other than nourishment
or satiation,
as a coping mechanism for emotions
that you don't want to feel,
to feel better, self-soothe,
numb, fill a void, or to feel some sense of control.
Emotional eating is complicated
and it's different for everybody.
However, here are five things to keep in mind
that might help you make sense of the big picture.
One, we all eat emotionally sometimes.
It's perfectly normal.
We all use food as a pick-me-up or as a reward for a job
well done.
Eating is by nature tied to emotions.
Good food makes us feel good,
and eating for comfort at times is perfectly acceptable.
It can actually be a helpful part of an emotional toolkit
that we use to help manage emotions.
The problem is when we feel out of control
and guilty about it.
When we do it consistently and chronically
and when it negatively impacts our overall quality of life,
it's time to reassess.
So if you feel down and out
and simply want to eat a piece of cake
because you legitimately just want a piece of cake,
not because you're using it
as a substitute for something else,
then this isn't necessarily dysfunctional.
Beating yourself up over your food choices
and then depriving to compensate is the issue.
Two, eating emotionally is about emotional hunger,
not physical hunger.
Emotional hunger often starts suddenly, feels insatiable,
wants instant gratification,
and inspires cravings for specific, often comforting foods
that are high in sugar, carbs, and/or fat.
Emotional eating can leave us feeling guilty, ashamed
and out of control.
On the other hand, when we eat due to physical hunger,
the hunger increases gradually over time
and is satiated by a wide range of foods.
Typically, we eat until full and then we stop,
and we feel pleasantly satisfied afterward.
Three,
emotional eating is basically eating habits plus emotions.
Habits play an important role in emotional eating.
These habits include what we eat, how we eat,
and when we eat.
Habits can be hard to break,
especially if we've been eating a certain way
for a long time.
Adding emotions into the mix can make eating habits
especially difficult to break.
The habit loop provides a helpful framework
for emotional eating.
Charles Duhigg explains the habit loop as follows,
you see a cue, and you're motivated to do a routine
in order to get the reward.
Using this framework,
you could say that emotional eating
is motivated by an external cue
that triggers an emotion and food is the reward.
In other words,
food becomes the coping strategy to help us distance
or remove ourselves from emotions we don't want to feel.
For example, I once had a client
who reached for her favorite cookies
every time she called her brother
because it was always a stressful conversation.
In this case, the cue, calling her brother.
The emotion, anxiety about a stressful conversation.
And the reward, cookies.
As you probably know all too well,
we can become less and less conscious
of our habits over time.
You reach for your first mini muffin on a rough day
and the next thing you know,
you're eating an entire box of mini muffins
on a weekly basis without even realizing it.
Habits are a slippery slope and emotional eating
easily becomes a habitual coping mechanism
as we become less and less aware of what we're doing.
This brings me to the next important aspect
of emotional eating, disconnection.
Four, emotional eating disconnects us from ourselves.
First of all, it disconnects us
from the body's true hunger signals.
Clients who eat compulsively
often tell me that they have a hard time
knowing when their bodies are actually hungry.
Deciphering physical hunger
becomes baffling after some time.
When we eat emotionally, we're essentially disconnecting
from our bodies by not listening to them.
We ignore the body signals for hunger
by either eating when we're not hungry
or not eating when we are hungry.
In other words, the satisfaction we get
from particular foods or portions
depends on the emotions we feel.
That's right, emotional eating can mean either overeating
or undereating, otherwise known as restricting or depriving.
Either way, the amount of food consumed
doesn't correlate with the body's need.
The type of food also matters.
This differs from person to person.
For example, one person might reach for a bag of salty chips
to help cope with stress,
while another person might reach for a box of chewy cookies.
We all have our personal preferences
when it comes to comfort food.
What we eat is less important than how and why we eat.
Individual eating patterns can reveal important clues.
We typically associate comfort foods with rich,
sugary, and high fat foods,
and this is a common choice during emotional eating.
However, some people cope with tough emotions like anger
or loneliness by restricting and depriving themselves
with super healthy foods.
For these people, food becomes a method of control
when life feels overwhelming.
We'll talk more about both sides of this coin
later in the course.
For now, I simply want to introduce the idea
that emotional eating comes in all shapes and sizes,
just like the people who struggle with this issue.
Emotional eating also disconnects us
from our values.
We get so stuck in the urgent need to satisfy our cravings
and eliminate distress that we can't look beyond the moment.
When we eat based on emotions,
we ignore other areas of life.
Again, we'll dive more into that later.
For now, I want to highlight two more key points.
Five, emotional eating includes
connecting any emotion with food, positive or negative.
You might have noticed a theme so far,
emotional eating isn't black and white.
This point is yet another example of this.
I've certainly celebrated a happy occasion
with a hefty portion of dessert,
and I'm sure you can think of examples in your life.
Ideally, food brings us pleasure
and nourishes us in body and spirit.
It only tends toward problematic
when we repeatedly turn to food
as a main way to celebrate positive emotions
at the expense of things like relationships, career,
physical movement, and spirituality
when we substitute primary food with secondary food.
It can also become problematic
when we use food as the main way
to cope with difficult emotions.
In short, when we place food at the center of our lives
consistently and chronically, it's time to take a step back
and reassess how it's working for us
because odds are, it's doing more harm than good.
How are you doing?
Time for a movement break?
Hit pause and take a quick minute
to get the blood flowing.
Hi again.
Homestretch, here we go.
To recap,
here are five ways to conceptualize emotional eating.
We all eat emotionally sometimes,
but when food is consistently and chronically
a number one coping mechanism, it's time to reassess.
Emotional eating means using food for a purpose
other than nourishment or satiation.
It stems from emotional hunger, not physical hunger.
Emotional eating is basically eating habits plus emotions.
Something triggers an emotion and we use food
as an emotional reward, AKA a coping strategy.
Emotional eating disconnects us
from the body's hunger signal
and from personal values.
And emotional eating includes
connecting any emotion with food,
positive or negative.
Okay, one more piece today.
What does emotional eating look like?
Emotional eating follows the principle of bio-individuality.
Everyone has a different experience
and there's no one-size-fits-all
when it comes to identifying it
or figuring out how to work with it.
It's not as simple or as clear cut as recommending
that a client just crowd out sugar or eat more vegetables.
If it were that simple, we'd all do it.
Emotional eating is a sensitive and complicated topic,
and we all have our own unique journeys
as we muddle through it.
That said, here are a few possible signs.
Eating alone or eating in secret,
eating foods alone that you wouldn't eat with others,
hiding packaging, feelings of sadness, anxiety, guilt,
shame, worry, or powerlessness,
and digestion issues, difficulty sleeping,
and weight fluctuation.
Again, there are many signs depending on the person.
Also, do not underestimate the importance
of trusting your intuition.
If something that a client says stands out to you,
perhaps that's something to explore.
Remember Joe,
maybe his hamburger episode was a rare occurrence
or maybe it happens frequently,
maybe this particular reunion hit him hard
or maybe he often copes with distress by turning to food.
These are just a few things to consider.
Explore these types of things with your clients,
ask powerful high-mileage questions,
and take the time to fully step into their world
rather than forming assumptions.
In the meantime, try applying this material yourself.
We've included a handout for you
called the Food Relationship Questionnaire.
Keep in mind that this isn't meant to be a diagnostic tool
rather think of it as a guide
to help you start exploring your own relationship with food.
After you go through the questionnaire,
spend 5 to 10 minutes journaling about anything
that stood out to you
or any feelings it brought up.
Has your thinking about emotional eating changed at all
as a result of viewing this lecture?
How can you apply this material
to your own eating habits?
Doing the work yourself reflects your work
as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach.
Send out with your course mates in the Facebook group.
Again, we're here to support each other.
And remember, we all eat emotionally sometimes.
Thank you for joining me, I look forward to seeing you soon.