How to Lose Your Stress Eating Habit (Part 1): Why Traditional Advice Fails You | TMOHP Episode 168

Welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk to you about stress eating. Specifically, I want to talk with you about how to lose your stress eating habit. And by losing it, I do mean lose it, not control it or avoid it, or distance yourself from it for a while. Be good for a while, but then, you know, continue to wonder how long this is going to last.

Today I want to talk about. What is involved in losing your stress eating habit. I have a fair bit to say on this topic. So this is actually going to be a two-part episode, or I guess it is going to be two episodes that cover the same topic.

To do this justice, I want to talk about what it really takes to cure stress eating or to change your approach to food so that stress eating isn't such a dominant coping mechanism. And to do that, we also need to talk about why all the things that you have probably tried and are currently trying aren't working.

The second part is important because if you don't understand the flaw in so many of the approaches that you have been taught or probably been taught the default, in fact, the assumption by many practitioners who teach these approaches is if these flawed approaches don't work for you, it's because you haven't applied them correctly or you haven't tried hard enough. So it's really important to understand how these plans are flawed to begin with so that you can also understand that the fact that they haven't worked is clearly not your fault.

Today, in this first of the series of two episodes, I'm going to cover why it is that what you have been taught to do about stress eating doesn't work, won't work, and can never be a permanent or satisfying solution to a stress eating habit. I am going to share a framework with you that when you combine it with what we're going to cover in next week's episode, is going to make it very clear why what I'm sharing with you on this podcast and in the work that I do with my clients is fundamentally different from the traditional model.

I think you're also going to get pretty quickly why during stressful times the old ineffective model is incredibly fated to fail you. And the piece I don't want you to miss, so I'm going to keep coming back to it, is the number that this old model has done on so many of us and the repercussions that this has had and continues to have.

Stress eating is probably the most easily understood type of emotional eating. Even people who don't stress eat, who lose their appetites when they're under stress, understand the link between stress and food and eating. And incidentally, it's not unusual to have different responses to food that vary with the level or with the type of stress that you're experiencing.

So your stress eating might feel out of control during a stressful period at work, but at the same time, you're somebody who lost 20 pounds when you went through that awful divorce. Stress impacts us physiologically. It affects your hunger. It affects your digestive system, your ability to sleep, which then in turn impacts your appetite and even your metabolism.

When you're in a stressed out, emotionally reactive mode, your brain might even be processing information differently. When you're stressed, you're less able to think, to focus and to problem solve. You're more reactive. And all these things all of them are a setup for turning to old habits, ingrained habits and thought patterns. And they're also a setup for reaching for something sweet or salty or comforting to eat because you want to feel better who wouldn't?

If you're listening to this episode, you probably are or have been a stress eater. So I want you to take a minute and think about what you know about what it is that you're needing or wanting when you reach for something to eat. That you're not physically hungry for when you're under stress. Even if it's an automatic reaction that feels almost out of control.

Take a minute, pause the episode if you need to, and take note of what you know about what you're wanting the food to do for you or what you know about what it does do for you. Really take a moment to do this. Okay.

Do you have some ideas or germs of ideas, beginnings of ideas? Now I want you to think about what you know about what you absolutely don't need in these moments of stressful or stress filled reaction. What do you know that is absolutely not helpful in those moments or what would be absolutely not helpful in these moments?

There aren't any right answers here. I want you to play with these ideas. Also, this is not a prompt when I ask you what you don't need. This is not a prompt to get you to beat yourself up for the choices that you have made in the past or that you tend to make. I am not asking you to think, "well, eating all that chocolate definitely isn't helpful."

Because the truth is there is something helpful. There is something that chocolate provides you in these moments. That's why you're reaching for it. I want you to ask yourself without judgment what the chocolate or whatever the it is the food is, what does it provide you?

What is that thing that you reach for, that you eat? What does it do for you? And also what do you know about the very last thing you need? The most unhelpful things or the things that would be the worst in these moments.

Write these things down if you want to. Don't worry, there's not going to be a test. There aren't any right answers, but what I'm going to share with you is going to be most helpful if you have a personal experience or set of experiences that you can relate to what I'm sharing with.

 So stress eating is a fairly common response to stress. It's an attempt to cope, to feel better, maybe to numb or to procrastinate, or to give yourself a break from a stressful experience. When you are stressed, reaching for something to eat, it could accomplish a variety of things. And it could be different in different situations. That's why I asked you that first question about what, what do you know about what that food does for you in certain moments?

A lot of the time, reaching for something to eat is a way to try to minimize or to escape or to not think about the stress. Or maybe to provide some comfort, maybe even a little reward because you're in the middle of something so hard and you deserve it. You deserve something. Maybe it's a way to perk you up or to give you a bit of energy.

Or maybe you feel so overloaded you just don't care. You just don't care. And you're having thoughts like, screw it. What does it even matter what I eat? It's not even going to make a difference.

If you have listened to at least one of my other podcast episodes, you know that one of the tenets of what I am teaching here is that there is a reason you eat. There's a reason you overeat. There is always a reason, even if it's an autopilot reaction, that you didn't consciously give a lot of thought to. There's a reason this is happening. And you are not going to get any closer to understanding, let alone addressing the reason if your default response is to blame yourself.

When you tell yourself things like, I'm just lazy, or I just didn't try hard enough, I'm just undisciplined. I just don't care enough. What you're actually doing is cutting yourself off from your ability to effectively solve your stress eating problem.

When you settle on self-blame, which is by the way, what nearly all the traditional approaches are actually telling you to do in a roundabout way. When you settle on the idea that it is your fault that what you were trying didn't work. What you are doing is cutting off curiosity.

You are cutting off your ability to be curious. Because once you settle on blaming yourself, there's no longer anything to be curious about because you've already decided what the problem is or what the answer or what the solution is. You've already decided that the reason you're eating in the way you don't want to is that you failed. And that there's something wrong with you, or there was something wrong with how you approached it.

And that usually means that the only solution to this problem of stress eating is that you need to stop failing. And that usually means that you need to start over and this time you need to try harder. You need to apply yourself more. You need to be better. You need to be different.

Okay? Take a deep breath. How does this feel to hear me say this? Am I resonating with the voice in your head? Do you feel the impact? Do you hear how hard on you this sounds? You need to be different. You need to be better. You need to try harder. Let that sink in for a minute.

And now I want to ask you about your answers to that second question I asked you. When I asked you to imagine yourself in one of these stressful situations where you are primed to stress eat, and to think about what you know about what you absolutely don't need in these moments.

I don't know what you wrote down, but I'm betting you don't need more stress. I am betting you don't need more overwhelm. Or more bad feelings or more hard things to do, or more projects that require more discipline and more focus. I'm betting you don't need more deprivation or lists of things that you aren't supposed to do. Am I on the right track?

So let's talk about how the traditional advice about what to do about stress eating sets you up. And let's also talk about why I really hope you will abandon that approach once and for all. After listening to this episode.

Over the years here is what I've heard degreed credentialed professionals who call themselves experts on overeating or weight loss or health and wellness. Here's some things I've heard them say about stress eating.

It's important to recognize that you aren't really hungry. It is effective to label the behavior as stress eating. Recognize that your body doesn't really need food or sugar or whatever, and then just not do it. Don't eat it. Eliminate it. When you feel the urge, you should just go work out instead. The time when you stress eat. That's the time when you need to be more disciplined and vigilant.

Be prepared for those times. Instead of stress eating, just immerse yourself in something else. Find something to distract yourself with. Find something else to do so that you won't do it. When it comes to stress eating, think about how bad you'll feel tomorrow if you do it. Think about your goals or that picture you have posted on your refrigerator, and just stay strong. Because tomorrow's going to be a better day, and you're going to feel great about your choices when you stay strong.

These are just a few. I mean, if we work together, I know we could collect an entire season of episodes of advice like this. And honestly, if you take these one by one, they kind of sound reasonable or sort of reasonable. I mean, you could easily convince yourself that they make sense. And that you should be able to do these things. Especially when you combine it with that belief that you should be different. You should be better; you should be trying harder. Right?

And there's the rub right there. It is easy to believe that you should be able to do these things. But you're listening to this episode so we can probably agree that this doesn't happen. You aren't able to do these things or they don't work. But if you should be able to do these simple things, then it's your fault if you can't. Right? 

So now let's go back to your stressed out situation where you got some "common sense advice end", and you couldn't or didn't follow it. Right?

So you got this simple advice. Simple is in quotes, you couldn't or didn't follow it, so now it's your fault. And now on top of a stressed out situation, you overate because you couldn't or wouldn't follow the advice. You're judging yourself for it. You're telling yourself you should be doing more hard things. And we just talked about the fact that when anyone is stressed, the last thing they want or need is more hard stuff to do, or more deprivation or more self-blame or more negativity. Do you see what starts to happen here?

And then there's another piece because not only does this advice make everything worse, it gets all your limited time and attention focused in the completely wrong direction. An ineffective direction. The direction of try harder, be stricter, be more focused, do a better job, eat less.

All of this advice keeps your stressed out stress eating brain focused on controlling food. Instead of helping you start to address or respond to or take care of the reason that you are reaching for food in the first place.

These models ignore and they tell you to ignore the hidden hungers. The reasons that you're having cravings or the reasons that you're having urges to binge, or that you're reaching for something to eat on autopilot. And when you ignore the cause of your overeating, you will never be able to cure it.

Sometimes members of my group coaching program are confused at first that the program does not begin with a food plan. In fact, I never give my clients a food plan because controlling your food doesn't help you change the reasons that you want the food. It doesn't help you change the reasons that you crave the food. Or the reasons that you keep ditching food plans or going on autopilot to stress eat, and then feeling frustrated with yourself.

So let's make this very concrete, and I realize this is a little bit challenging because this is a podcast and I can't hold a picture up for you. But I want you to play along with me. You can draw this out for yourself if you want to. I think it will be helpful. I want to share with you what the traditional approach looks like.

I want you to picture a Venn diagram that's three overlapping circles, three circles that overlap like a triangle, and they all connect in the middle. A triangle made out of three overlapping circles. I will put the actual diagram in the show notes on my website at TooMuchOnHerPlate.com if you want to go there and see it.

And I'm going to tell you that this framework isn't actually a model to end stress eating at all. It actually has a very different name, and we'll get to that in a minute. So picture these three overlapping circles or draw them out the first you can label control or control your habit, control your stress eating. This is the don't give into stress eating advice that is so prevalent.

Label the second overlapping circle. Deny your hunger. The traditional advice might sound more like, realize that you don't physically need to eat and don't give into the urge to stress eat. But honestly, that's another way of saying deny your hidden hungers. Deny the reason you want to eat in the first place. Labeling the urge to stress eat as not real. Hunger keeps you from addressing the reasons that you want to stress eat and keeps you from curing it. Control versus cure.

Now label the third overlapping circle stay vigilant and get it right. And then underneath that, if you want to, you can write falling off track and starting over and over and over. How does that look? Tell me, does this begin to accurately depict your efforts, your personal experience, trying to stop stress eating?

Now see that place in the middle where all three circles overlap? You may have been taught to believe that the label that goes there is something like How to end stress eating. This isn't true.

I want you to label this spot the stress eating hamster wheel or the overeating hamster wheel. Because that is what you get when you are focused on controlling your habits, denying your hunger, demanding vigilance, and getting it right that always leads to falling off track and starting over.

You get a stress eating hamster wheel. That's what it is. And that's how most of us get caught up in cycles with stress eating cycles. That also include blaming ourselves for the stress eating habit.

Again, I'm going to share a picture of this diagram in the show notes on my website at TooMuchOnHerPlate.com if you want to see it. This diagram, what I have talked to you about today is why stress eating doesn't go away. It's the wrong model. It's why being tough on yourself only keeps you caught in this pattern.

In the next episode, I am going to share a very different framework, a very different model. One that has freedom from stress eating in the center. Very different.

I hope you'll tune in for part two of How to Lose Your Stress Eating Habit because that's when we get into the really good stuff.

I'll talk with you soon.