The Real Reason You Lose Control Around Food (It’s Not Discipline) | TMOHP Episode 195

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. You have heard me say this before, more than once, but it's something I want you to hear again today. Your struggle with food, with emotional eating, with overeating, these are not willpower problems. You know it intellectually or maybe you don't. Maybe you don't really believe it.

Maybe you have nodded along when I've said this in past episodes. But if you're honest, there's that little voice in your head that whispers- yeah sure, but if I would just stick with it, or maybe I just need to try harder. So many women have this voice. If that voice sounds familiar, you are not alone. It is one of the most common and one of the most exhausting traps that women fall into when they're trying to make peace with food. And when they're trying to really end overeating patterns for good.

So today I want to revisit this idea about willpower, about it not being about willpower from a slightly different angle. I want to talk about why that thought of, I should be able to do this. I want to talk about why that feels so believable and what's actually happening when you feel like you've lost control around food. Even when you know better. Even when you are telling yourself the entire protocol of what you think you should be doing.

You are not alone in this. Smart women get stuck in overeating patterns and overeating cycles all the time. I see this pattern over and over. Smart, high achieving, capable women who do amazing things, who run businesses and lead families and hold everybody else together, hit a wall when it comes to food. They know what to do. They tell me they know what they should be eating. But when life gets full, when life goes sideways, when they're tired or stressed or just running on empty, that knowledge disappears. The ideas about what they should do or the energy to do it goes away.

So let me give you a real example. Let's talk about somebody, I will call her Sarah. Sarah is a great composite of so many women that I've worked with. Sarah is a manager, a doer, a mom. She wakes up every morning, determined. She eats well most of the day, powers through her to-do list and by nine at night she's in the kitchen scanning the pantry for something. Something that will fill a need. Salty or sweet or both.

And she stands there and tells herself, what is wrong with me? What is my problem? I'm not even hungry. And then the next morning she wakes up and again, she promises Today I'm just going to try harder. Today I will get it right.

I know this sounds familiar. What's really happening for Sarah and for so many of us, isn't a lack of willpower. It is not a problem with discipline. It's that her brain has learned a very reliable shortcut. Food brings relief. And that relief is different things for different people in different situations. But the shortcut is food brings relief. Food is quick, it's certain, and it works. At least for a moment or for some minutes. But that momentary relief, it doesn't meet what the real need is underneath.

That's why it's so important to look beyond this whole willpower myth. And this whole idea that you have lost control. Let's talk about what's actually happening when you quote lose control. When you find yourself reaching for food automatically, your brain is trying to help you. It is trying to bring you back into some kind of, some kind of balance.

Maybe you've been just going all day and you haven't stopped to feel or process anything. Sometimes food becomes the pause button, your way of hitting pause. Your brain's way of saying, you know, please, can we just take a moment? Can things just stop for a moment? Or maybe it's comfort. Maybe that reaching for food is a way to fill a kind of emptiness that has nothing to do with physical hunger.

This is really important; it is not that you don't care. It is not that you can't change this overeating or emotional eating habit. It starts with the reality that you are using eating to respond to a system that is overloaded. That is looking for something that works fast.

The big problem is that diet plans and try harder plans they skip over this part entirely. They tell you to fight the urge. They tell you to be strong. They tell you to wake up, to determined, to resist, to distract yourself. When what you really need to make lasting change to end the pattern is to understand the urge. To understand what's happening. Not fight it, understand it.

And that is what awareness gives you. It gives you the ability to step out of autopilot and see what is actually driving your overeating habit. What is actually propelling that pattern with food that you so wish would go away.

 I want you to try something if it is safe to do this. If you're not driving, if you're not needing to focus on something else right now. Take a breath, take a moment, lean back, take a breath right now. And think back to the last time that you found yourself eating when you knew you weren't hungry.

Take another breath. Let go of the judgment. And I want you to ask yourself what you know about what was happening before that moment. What do you know about what you were feeling? What were you really feeling underneath, beneath that desire for something to eat? What do you know about that? You don't have to analyze it. Just notice.

This is where awareness starts; with this practice of asking questions and getting curious. There are ways to start to put a habit of awareness into action in your life. One of the simplest, most powerful ways to start building that awareness is a tool I use with my clients called the ME Log. It is not a food tracker. It is not a calorie log. It is a tool designed to help build the habit of you noticing yourself.

And whether you have the ME Log or not here's one small facet of the ME Log that I think you'll find really helpful and that you can do on your own. The power behind the ME Log is that using this tool, you learn to be curious. You learn to build a habit of being curious about so much more than what you ate or how much you ate.

So what you can do on your own is to try playing with writing down noticing and writing down when the urge to eat hits. When did it hit? And what were you needing right before that moment? What do you know about those things? It boils down to this question, what was I needing right before I ate? What was I needing when that urge to overeat hit?

That question can be a game changer. Because, instead of judging yourself for what you ate or how much you ate. Or when you ate, when you were telling yourself you shouldn't eat. Instead of judging yourself, when you ask that question, what was I needing right before this? You start uncovering what's actually driving the habit of eating.

What you'll discover that is individual to you, but it can be powerful. Maybe you'll see that the urge to snack always shows up after a long zoom meeting. Or when you're alone in the car after a stressful day. Or maybe it happens when the house finally goes quiet and you realize how depleted you feel or how disconnected you feel.

When you start connecting these dots, you stop feeling out of control because you begin to see patterns. You begin to see patterns that make a sort of sense out of your eating. And that is so powerful. That's one piece of what I guide you through inside Peace With Food, the Emotional Eating Toolbox. It's a 30-day self-guided plan for taking your power back from overeating and emotional eating.

In that 30-day program, you learn to retrain your brain and use tools like the ME Log. Not as chores or checklists, but as pathways to understanding yourself with curiosity and compassion. As tools that you can use to know more about yourself so that you can solve the real reasons that food has too much power in your life. And so that you can break the overeating habits instead of continuing to fight with them.

Okay, so I know what you are thinking. Awareness only goes so far. Asking these questions, being curious, where does that leave me? Awareness is powerful, but it's just the beginning. Once you start noticing your patterns, the next step is learning how to respond differently in your real life. In those messy emotional moments when your brain is saying, I just need to eat something, food will make me feel better.

And this is where a lot of programs and a lot of approaches fall short. They tell you to stop eating. Don't eat. Or distract yourself or drink water. But you can't outsmart a feeling. You have to address the real need underneath, eventually.

You can ignore it for a while, but it will always come back and addressing the real root cause of overeating. That is the work that you learn how to do in Peace with Food. It's about building what I call instead strategies. Real doable ways that you can take care of yourself, that actually match your need. But that also actually match your energy and your situation and what's going on in your life at the moment.

You cannot replace emotional eating with a to-do list or with willpower. Not permanently anyway, it won't work. You replace emotional eating and the urge to overeat by finding what your brain is really looking for. Whether it's comfort or relief or connection or rest. And giving it to yourself in a way that truly works.

And when you do, you start to see a shift. There's a shift that happens, which is so much different from a really hard thing you do with willpower. You start to see a shift, fewer binges, less autopilot eating, less urges to eat, less guilt, more peace.

And I hope you can hear in the way I am explaining this, that this shift happens not because you are trying harder. Not because you are pushing for it. But because you are aligning what you really need with what you're really giving yourself. And when you do that, the power that food has had in your life and the power of these overeating habits they begin to deflate.

So take a second right now, and I'd like you to think about a time this week when you felt the urge to eat, even though you weren't hungry.

If you could go back to that moment, what do you think you were needing? And if you're not sure, that's okay. The goal is not to get it right. The goal is to start building that curiosity, to start growing that muscle. What do you think about what you are needing? There are no right answers there. This is a process.

So much of what I see in this work is women trying to get there. Trying to arrive, living for the goal to finally have the perfect plan or the perfect day. But peace with food is not a destination. Peace with food is a relationship that you build with yourself. And a relationship that you build with food, because the truth is, and diets and food plans don't acknowledge this. You're going to keep relating with food for the rest of your life. Nothing magically ends with food. Once you reach, whatever your goal is.

Every moment of awareness, every pause you decide to take. Every small decision you make to get curious instead of critical with yourself. These are the moments that rewire your brain. And each of these small things is so much more powerful than your brain will ever allow you to believe. Every moment like this, every small move is how you create a new way of relating to food.

It's how you create new lasting habits of eating that actually fit you. That fit you in a way that they're comfortable and that there's an ease about them. And that they don't leave you worrying about how you're going to maintain them or maintenance once you've reached your goal. These things are so powerful, and if you're at the point where you're ready for a little more guidance.

Where, where you want to take what you're learning and turn it into a real structured practice, I'm really thrilled to share that. I've created something to help you do that with a series of simple daily steps over 30 days.

This program is called Peace With Food, the Emotional Eating Toolbox, and it's a 30-day self-guided experience that gives you the core tools to understand your patterns. To meet your real needs. And to start feeling calm and confident around food.

It's not another diet. It's not a be good plan. It is not founded on willpower. It is actually all about building a real lasting foundation that makes all the difference. So if that is of interest to you, you can learn more about it or you can join the program at TooMuchOnHerPlate.com/PeaceWithFood and peace with food is all one word. I'll put the link in the show notes.

Now, before we wrap up, I want you to imagine something. I want you to take a moment and picture yourself. At the end of a long day. You go into the kitchen, you open the refrigerator, and instead of automatically reaching for something, you pause.

You pause naturally because it's what you and your brain have learned how to do. You stand there. You take a breath. You notice what's going on inside you. Maybe you realize you're tired or lonely. Or you just need a break. Or you just want a change of scenery. You stand there, you take a breath, you close the door.

You pour a glass of water or you step outside or you take a minute to breathe and you feel calm and clear and in control. And it was easy and it didn't take willpower.

That's not a fantasy. That's what's waiting. When you stop trying to create change by controlling yourself and you start creating change by understanding yourself. You don't have to earn peace with food. You can start creating it. One curious pause at a time.

Thanks for listening.

I hope this was helpful and I'll talk to you soon.