How to Stop Stress Eating Without Willpower: Marie’s Story | TMOHP 161

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. And if this is your first time listening, welcome to the podcast. I'm Dr. Melissa McCreery, and I hope if you find what you hear today helpful, you will take the time to hit the plus sign and follow the podcast so that you get notified of all the upcoming episodes. 

Today I want to tell you about Marie. Not her real name, I want to protect her privacy. But Maria is a client of mine and I thought that sharing the story of Marie's journey would be a great way to paint a picture of what it is like to stop stress eating or any kind of overeating or emotional eating really. 

But how does stop stress eating without depriving yourself? I thought you might find it helpful to hear about a real person and how she ended her battle with food without going without. Right? Without telling herself all the things that she couldn't have and without developing this super human perfectionistic amount of willpower or self-restraint that we have been taught. All of us by diet culture and by diet mentality that you have to have to be successful in changing your eating. 

And I also think this story is really helpful because Marie, like many of us, had so much conditioning and education into deprivation thinking and diet mentality, and diet culture. That she really could not believe that there was a way to achieve her goal and to make peace with food. And to get to a goal weight. Without being miserable. She really didn't believe it. 

So when I first talked to Marie, when she first reached out to me, she was very, very frustrated. Typical story- had struggled with overeating had tried to lose weight, had gained more weight. She was 15 pounds heavier than she wanted to be. She's a hardworking, successful professional woman who is used to solving problems. 

She is used to making things happen. She is used to seeing results. she could create this equation in her head of what she was telling herself she needed to do. And if she could just do these things then she could solve this problem with her eating. She could get to a place on the scale and the way that her pants fit, that would make her happy. 

She believed. And to her brain, her problem-solving brain, it all seems so easy. Right? We've all been there. If I just do these things, I will achieve this outcome. And then I can just go on my Merry way. And of course it wasn't working like this. When it came to getting those results, she was going in circles. 

The other thing that is important here is that Marie didn't contact me and say, I would like to be free. I would like to have peace with food. I, I would like to leave these struggles behind. She didn't say that stuff. Because she didn't believe that was possible. Her whole framework in her head about how you get where you want to go with food and with eating and with the scale. Is to beat yourself up and work really hard. And be really strong. And she wanted to win. That's what she wanted. She wanted to win. This is a battle. It's a struggle. And she wanted to get on top of it. 

I think this is really important because. I know Marie has not alone in having been in this place. This is the only picture she had in her mind of what success could look like. It was about taking back control. Right? Making results happen, forcing those results. And her belief a hundred percent was that she needed to get more willpower. She clearly needed to be more motivated. She needed to want it more. Right? 

And she needs to be able to keep that motivation up so that she could keep pushing herself harder and working really hard so that she could make it happen. There is so much emphasis on effort in deprivation thinking and in all the deprivation approaches to changing your eating. And this dovetails really nicely. It can be very seductive to high achievers because Marie who was a high achiever and you high achievers who are listening, right. We're used to doing hard work. 

We're used to doing hard things, and if you want it bad enough, you, you can do the hard thing and you can buckle down and you can pull yourself by your, up by your bootstraps or suck it up buttercup, or however you think about it. And you can make it happen. 

And so that is the mentality that Marie had when she reached out to me. This is the mentality that Marie had had all along with trying to change her eating. And it wasn't working. 

The harder she tried, the more she went back, the more she started over, the more she found the new plan and dove into it. It seemed like over time, the more rapidly the plans were falling apart. The cycle was just going faster and faster. She was getting more frustrated. And feeling more hopeless. 

So what I heard from Marie at this point, and the reason that she reached out to me was that she was feeling more desperate. Right? She felt like overeating was winning. She felt like her weight was climbing and she was getting farther and farther away from what she wanted to do. She was less clear anymore about what she should be eating, because there were so many plans in her head. 

She was less clear about what am I really hungry? Should I, should I in air quotes, be eating right now? What can I do to make things change? Could I, should I be doing this? Should I be doing that? 

And this again, dovetails with something that goes on for all of us when we want something really badly. Our brain tells us jump into action. You need to do something. You need to take action. And usually drastic action. You need to do something big. You need to do something dramatic. You need to be harder on yourself. You need to push yourself more. It needs to be a; a more severe plan and you got to do it right away.

It's reaction mode and it's often driven by panic and anxiety and fear. Everything wasn't working. And so Marie didn't reach out to me for peace and freedom. She reached out to me because she was desperate and I was a drastic next step that she could take. So we had a phone call. It was a phone call. It wasn't a zoom. We had a phone call. And we had a very honest conversation. And, Marie started by saying I'm willing. I'm ready. I'm. I am prepared to do the hard work. I know it's going to be an uphill battle. 

But the more we talked, she admitted and she said it out loud for maybe the first time that she wasn't just tired and frustrated with her lack of results or at least lack of lasting results. She was also really tired of the fight. 

She was really tired of waking up and having her first thoughts be about food. And about how yesterday had gone. And she was really tired of thinking about what she was going to need to do today and what it would take to be quote unquote, good right? To stay on top of her game. 

And even on the good days, even when she could get into her stride with these ideas she had about food and eating and controlling what she ate. It was taking up so much time and energy. And she was tired. And as we talked about these things, that’s when the idea of freedom started to come up. 

She couldn't craft a picture in her mind of what it would be like for her to be free from overeating. But she sure could describe what it would be like for her, because she could imagine it to be free of all the thoughts. And all the emotional baggage. And all the pressure that she felt under to be able to relax around food. She liked that idea a lot. 

So honestly, probably more because she felt desperate and afraid that this thing was running away with her and from her. Probably more that than because she had a belief in the possibility of freedom from overeating that could happen without all that hard work. She agreed to try some things. Right? She was a trier. 

She was here to solve a problem. And so we followed my suggestions. We followed the path that I teach inside Your Missing Peace. 

 Here is what we did differently. Like I said earlier, when you want to see results quickly, and especially if you feel this anxiety and panic that, you know, nothing's working. And you have this strong emotion attached to it. The temptation is to just jump in and do something. React. Your brain says, what do we do? What do we do? We need to do something. And what that leads to for so many women is the quick reaction to jump back into what you have always done. 

Because it is the easiest way to do something quickly. And when you start doing something quickly, your brain starts to feel effective. At least I'm doing something. Right? I'm trying, even if it is. I was going to say, even if it's not likely to bring results, even if you know, it's not going to bring results. Even if you can chart out what is going to happen two days, four days, six weeks down the line. 

So this time with Marie, instead of jumping back into that old familiar approach, which involved a food plan. And a lot of restriction. I challenged Maria to step out of the cycle and to step outside of her comfort zone and to do something completely different. Instead of gritting her teeth and sitting on her hands and pushing herself to work harder. 

We started applying my overeating freedom formula. Which does not start with a food plan or tracking what you're eating It doesn't start with paying attention to what you are eating at all. 

And if you have heard me talk about this before, you're not surprised to hear that. And even if you have heard me say this a hundred times, it is so important to hear because I will bet you that in your own life, your brain still wants to start with the food. We need to change what we're eating. We need to do it right away. We need to do it first thing tomorrow morning. Nope. 

The first step to freedom from overeating is this. It's to do your best. Do what you can to identify why food has the power in your life right now? Why food and overeating are so tempting and maybe even irresistible right now? What is the cause of that? what does fueling the need to eat? 

So, this was a really different question for Marie who had been focused on how can I not eat? How can I stop eating? How can I limit what I eat? No. Why? Why does food have the power right now? Why, why is this idea of getting something to eat so irresistible right now? 

And Marie didn't have to look very far for the answer. Once she gave herself permission to stop beating herself up for the fact that she did want to eat. And she didn't want to stop eating at a certain place. She wanted to overeat. 

Once she gave herself permission to be curious. And, and when she had these different questions in front of her, she could see there was a pattern. And it's a pattern that is one of the most common reasons that women overeat and binge and and eat things. After a long day of working really hard, and then at the end of the day, collapsing and eating all the stuff that they didn't want to eat. And that reason his stress. 

A hidden hunger for stress relief is a huge, very common cause of overeating. You overeat for a reason; you always overeat for a reason. You eat for a reason. And once you address the reason. Then you are free to start creating freedom from overeating because you are free to start addressing the reason. 

So stress eating. Stress and overeating very often go hand in hand for busy women. Right? And here is the thing. If you jump into, what am I going to do? I'm just going to focus on what I eat and I'm going to cut back. And I'm going to do this food plan. And I'm going to monitor this and. And track this and all this stuff with the food. 

If you ignore the complicated relationship between stress and eating. Then all your efforts, all your hard work, all your willpower are not going to get you very far. If you plow ahead and you focus simply on eating less. And you ignore the reason that you're overeating, the reason that food has the power that it does, which was, this is Marie's old pattern. Right? We're just going to ignore that reason. We're just going to focus on discipline. 

When you do that, you hardly ever create the results that you want. And if you do create the results that you want, they don't last. So the first thing you need to do is get as clear as you can about why food has its power. And then when you shine a light on the reason behind your overeating, you can start creating results that are not just dramatic. But they are dramatically transformative. 

So when Marie, which tactics and she stopped asking, why am I eating so much? And she started asking, what am I really craving? Why is food so appealing right now? Her reasons for overeating her reasons for the extra 15 pounds started to become clearer and clearer. In her case and in many of your cases, what she could see very clearly was that she was an overachiever. Although actually I called her an overachiever, she just thought she was doing what needed to be done. 

But she was an overachiever, a really hard worker. And she was so used to performing and taking things on and rising to the occasion and being the one that everybody could depend on. That her life was full of all this stuff. And there wasn't a place or space or permission to pay attention to what she needed. Or to even ask what is going on? What do I know about what I need? And so what that looks like she's got this life with all this stuff going on. Crazy professional life. A lot of responsibility in relationships. She's consistently putting herself at the bottom of the list. 

And when you do that, what, what happens is what happened for Marie that is that food can become the glue that allows you to keep going. Food is instant comfort. Food is a numbing solution. Food gives you pseudo energy and you know, sometimes that sugar high and a little bit of real energy, even though you crash. It's a stress reliever. 

For Marie, getting something to eat was a reward at the end of a very long, stressful day. And it could feel like a reward, but it also left her feeling bad and mad and frustrated with herself. And also like she deserved it all rolled into one. Right? So grabbing the cookie or finishing the ice cream, it was never going to fix the things in her life that weren't working. But it was a temporary band aid that helped her keep going. So when this pattern became clear, it also became clear to Marie who is a smart woman and a problem solver that, okay, there's this whole dynamic going on here. And no diet is going to fix this. A diet is going to be a temporary band aid, too. So here's what we did maria and I. Which is also what we do inside my program Your Missing Peace. We got clear on the reasons. We started to understand how they got tangled up together, how they lead to overeating. And we started to tackle the reasons. 

That shift, making a shift from pushing herself harder, running faster on a hamster wheel. To being strategic. To getting at overeating and emotional eating stress eating by the root. Acknowledging that there's a root cause, acknowledging that there's a reason. And then starting piece by piece to figure out what to do with it. That made all the difference. 

Now sometimes in what was really important in Marie's case was having support in doing this because this is a step-by-step process. This doesn't mean it's a forever process that takes, well, it is a forever process. because what I want for you is for you to always be taking care of your needs and addressing your hidden hungers as best you can. 

But I think sometimes people think, oh my gosh, it's just going to be this long, slow, miserable slog until I see results. Which is why your brain is like, no, the food plan, let's just do something quickly. Right? No. 

It's little steps. It's consistency. And some of those little steps that seem like nothing ended up having surprisingly amazing results. Right? Spending a little more time on yourself. Taking a pause to ask yourself what you're really feeling. Am I really hungry? No, I'm not really hungry. What is it that I really need? These things can make a dramatic difference and they did for Marie. 

And remember, she didn't believe in any of this. It felt like mumbo-jumbo at the very beginning. But once she started to apply this. And she started to see that, okay making these changes and being consistent. 

And as I started to say, sometimes it is so powerful to have support or community around you that is doing these same things because your brain wants to fight with you. Oh, this isn't anything I need to do something bigger. I need to do something more dramatic. I need to take action. And so having kind of a structure that could pull her back in. Wait a minute. Nope. 

This is why we're doing things. We're addressing the reason. We're getting this taken care of from the root. This is the smart approach. That was really helpful. And so as Marie starts addressing the reasons. As Maria starts giving herself other ways to handle stress. And to reward herself and honestly not being so hard on herself all the time. And having that soundtrack in her head that was constantly telling herself she hadn't done enough and was actually a very stressful. This helped a lot. Coming up with tools and strategies that we're addressing what to do instead of eating. Made a huge difference. 

Instead of just slapping her hand and telling herself all the time I can't be eating. What do I do instead? What do I really need? Instead of needing more willpower the food started to lose its power. 

You don't need to be so strong when the food isn't calling to you so strongly. And the food doesn't call to you so strongly when you are addressing the reasons that you want the food in the first place. 

And so what happened for Marie is that over time, and it wasn't a long period of time, she had less cravings. She had less urges to go get something to eat when she wasn't really hungry. She lost the weight without ever going on a diet. 

Have you ever thought about that phrase, lost the weight? That. Lost the weight. Like you misplace it, right. It came off without a struggle because she was giving herself what it was that she was really hungry for. She was feeding her hidden hungers. I really hope this example is helpful to you because I feel so strongly and I feel so strongly because I haven't seen this in my life and in the lives of so many women that I have worked with. If overeating is a struggle. A diet is not the place to start. And a diet will not get you where you want to go.

The place to start is understanding the reason for the struggle. It is the first step. And is the best step that you can take to create lasting freedom from overeating. And yes, you really can be free from overeating. Marie believes it now, too. And you really can have peace with food. 

All right, I'll be back with another episode soon. 

See you later.