Why Willpower and GLP-1s Won’t Fix Emotional Eating | TMOHP Episode 178

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I want to cover a lot of ground, actually, I want to go back to basics. I want to take you back to some foundational things that every smart woman needs to know about emotional eating.

But I don't think describing them as basic is really the best way to do this, because when you understand them, especially the parts that maybe you aren't seeing right now, these foundational understandings, that's a lot of understandings in this sentence, but these, these foundational things can change your relationship with food. Emotional eating can sabotage you faster than just about anything. And you know, self-control isn't the answer.

And did you know you can be an emotional eater and not even know it? You can be emotionally eating and not be aware of it? I want to tell you five things that every smart woman needs to know about emotional eating.

Spoiler alert, we're going to cover how you can be an emotional eater and not even know it. You don't have to be overweight to be stuck or unhappy with emotional eating. Willpower doesn't fix emotional eating and using it might be making things worse. I want to talk about why diets and probably even drugs or medications won't solve emotional eating. And what you need instead. And what you think is the cause of your emotional eating probably isn't.

This is a lot of ground to cover, so let's see if I can do this in one episode or if this ends up being part one of a two-parter.

All right. The first thing that every smart woman needs to understand about emotional eating is that you can be an emotional eater and not even know it, or you may know you're an emotional eater and not realize some of the emotional eating that's happening, or you could be an emotional eater, but paying attention to your emotions is not what you need to stop overeating. All of these things can be especially true if you have learned to use eating as a way to avoid your feelings.

If you associate food with comfort or as a way to get numb or to stuff your feelings distract yourself from your feelings, your brain is going to start to make this connection automatically.

What this means is that over time you might even stop consciously being aware of, or noticing the feelings, or the situations that trigger your hunger. Because you're using food to distance yourself from your feelings. You might just start believing that what you have is a problem with food and not with the reasons that you're wanting the food.

By the way, little side note here. Taking my Hidden Hungers Quiz is always a helpful thing, but this place right here is where it can be super useful because sometimes you're eating emotionally, but paying more attention to your feelings isn't going to be the answer. Because more often than you might think, emotional eating is what you do when you have a different hidden hunger that is running the show.

For instance, say you are really, really busy. Say that you have been neglecting your own needs and you're also cutting corners on sleep. And then you have this angry confrontation with a colleague that everybody finds difficult to deal with. You come home and you stress eat, but learning how to deal with emotions. Or learning how to deal with confrontations might not have been the thing that would've helped in this moment. It might be probably, is that your primary hidden hunger is something different. The hidden hunger, driving the stress eating might've been a hunger for rest.

If you had just had more rest, you would've had the bandwidth to respond differently. You wouldn't have ended up stress eating in the pantry.

When you take the quiz, you can start to get clear on where to start and what hidden hunger to pay attention to. Anyway, that's a whole other podcast episode, but if you haven't taken the quiz lately, you should.

And if you know you don't need food, but you can't stop eating, start building a different habit. Start paying attention to what you feel. Practice checking in before or during or after eating, or all three, ask yourself how you're feeling and if you're really hungry for food.

It is simple to say this. This is a more complicated habit to put in place. It is the start of building new habits around emotional eating, but practice builds the muscle, and this is a habit that will pay off in ways that might really surprise you. The second thing that smart women need to know about emotional eating is that you don't have to be overweight to be stuck and unhappy with emotional eating.

There are plenty of women who are at a weight they are comfortable with, who rely on food to cope with feelings or who feel out of control with their eating in certain situations, or feel like their relationship with food and their eating is taking up way too much time in their lives. You don't have to binge eat or eat constantly to be an emotional eater.

Most people eat emotionally sometimes, and there's nothing wrong with emotional eating.

Emotional eating becomes a problem even for women who are perfectly satisfied with their weight, when their relationship with food takes up time or energy that they'd rather spend on other things. When it is affecting your health, or your happiness, or when you feel dependent on this eating, or you feel trapped, or at a loss for how you might do things differently, that's when emotional eating is a problem.

Emotional eating is not a weight problem, although it definitely is a contributor to weight gain and yo-yo habits with your weight. Right? Okay. The third thing all smart women need to know about emotional eating, and you've heard this before on this podcast, is that willpower does not fix emotional eating and pushing yourself to have more willpower might probably will make things worse.

Busy women and high performers love their willpower. I love my willpower. We tend to have quite a bit of it. The problem is that relying on willpower is a little bit like holding your breath to get through a painful experience. You can do it for a while, but if the painful experience lasts too long, you are going to run out of air.

You're going to run out of willpower reserves. No matter how great you are at willpower, you're going to run out of breath no matter how much you have built up your lung capacity. Not only is willpower a limited resource that is eventually going to run out, but overeating tends to show up in those stressful emotional moments where we are already on the edge of running out of bandwidth, if you haven't done so already. And living on willpower is not fun, it is not easy. It takes constant focus. It is energy draining. It is antithetical to my definition of peace with food or freedom.

Willpower might be something that gets you through some tough moments. Willpower might be something that you rely on in some instances, but it's not the answer to losing your emotional eating habit.

What works better? Well keep listening to this podcast. I'm going to be talking about this more in this episode, but it's not willpower, and it's also not a diet or a specific food plan.

In fact, that brings me to number four. The fourth thing I think that all smart women need to know about emotional eating. This one's really important, especially right now. The truth is that diets, food plans, and even drastic measures like weight loss surgery, or medication, don't give you the tools to stop emotional eating.

Yep. Even those GLP-1s. Let me be clear, everybody's experience is their own, and I'm not telling you what you should do or what you shouldn't do. This is absolutely not medical advice. I am not telling you whether a GLP-1 is for you or not, but diets don't work for the long term. They can make things worse. So can strict and rigid food plans, which are actually diets. GLP-1s and other medication, they can affect you physically and they can change your physical relationship and your response to food.

And again, everyone is different, but I'm hearing the stories from women who have found their emotional cravings and urges to overeat weren't impacted in the way they had hoped for by medicine. As one client told me, she said, you know, the hunger went away, but the other hunger didn't. I didn't want to eat, but I did want to eat.

Emotional eating happens for a reason. Whether you are eating for comfort, or stress eating, or eating to numb your feelings, or eating to fill a void, or using food as a distraction, emotional eating is an attempt to cope with something. There's a psychological component to this. To break free from emotional eating, you need to address the reasons you overeat. This definitely doesn't mean ignoring the physical reasons or dynamics behind your eating. It also doesn't mean that you have to figure out how to solve the emotional reasons or the life reasons, or the relationship reasons that you're overeating. It sometimes means approaching these reasons differently. Treating them differently, and sometimes treating yourself differently in these situations.

Success with emotional eating requires separating the eating from the reasons, and knowing what to do instead of eating. When you know how to take care of what's triggering your hunger without turning to food. That's when the whole game changes. That bag of chips, it starts to lose its power. When you know how to feed the Hidden Hungers, when you know how to take care of yourself, when the Hidden Hungers are triggering emotional eating, you feel differently about what's sitting there on the shelf in your pantry.

Food plans don't help you with what to do instead of eating and even something as drastic as surgery or medication. These things don't affect many of the reasons that food is so powerful in your life. If you haven't addressed the reasons, if you are not addressing the reasons along with maybe whatever else you're trying, food is going to still call to you.

It's going to still be that siren, right? That is reaching out to you.

Tackling these emotions, tackling these things from a psychological perspective is not as difficult as you might think, but you might want support with that. Taking the time and getting the help to gather better tools, and strategies, and habits for coping with tough times, it absolutely pays off.

Okay, here is the last thing I want to cover today. This is the fifth thing that smart women need to know about emotional eating and. I think it's a great place to end, but it would've also been a really good place to start. If you haven't figured out how to end your struggles with overeating or emotional eating, it is not because you're lazy. It is not because what you really need to do is be harder on yourself.

I get it. You're a smart woman and you're somebody who's used to creating results in your life. You're probably somebody who's talented at making things happen. You're probably somebody who other people expect will always make things happen. You're used to being effective except in this one area, and odds are you're pretty frustrated about it, and odds are you might be blaming yourself.

That's what we do. That's what the diet industry teaches us to do. Smart, busy, high achievers often make the mistake of blaming their overeating on laziness, or not trying hard enough.

You all, emotional eating is an attempt to cope. Emotional eating is a way to cope. You aren't lazy. You don't need more willpower to take control of emotional eating.

What works? What helps you uproot emotional eating from its very foundation? That is taking care of the reasons that you overeat.

The keys to ending emotional eating are having a set of strategies that work for you that don't rely on being perfect all the time, or having endless willpower. The keys to ending emotional eating include having a mindset that doesn't rely on being perfect all the time, or having endless willpower.

There is a smart path to doing this stuff differently. There is a smart path to creating freedom from emotional eating and freeing up that energy and that brain space, so that food and how you eat and how you ate yesterday isn't taking up so much space in your head. There's a smart path to doing this, and I'm going to keep covering it on this podcast.

So I hope this episode was helpful. I got through all five points in one episode. Let me know what you think. If you like this episode and find it helpful, please take the time to follow the podcast, rate it, leave a review, and even better share it with a friend. I'll talk to you soon.