 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. Hi everybody and welcome to today's presentation on emotional eating, making peace with food. During the next hour or so we're going to define emotional eating and differentiate it really from eating when to celebrate and when it's a problem and also differentiate differentiating it from eating disorders. We'll explore emotional eating in terms of its beneficial functions and rewards and discuss why restrictive diets don't resolve emotional eating. A lot of times people will say, you know, I have been on this diet for forever and it doesn't seem to be working or I can't seem to stick to any diet that I try. And we're going to look at different reasons why this might be. What is emotional eating? And it's exactly what it sounds like. It's eating in response to emotions and feelings other than hunger. So if you're eating because you're bored, if you're eating at someone and sometimes, especially if you are angry at someone or disappointed in someone, you may eat and sort of be eating and thinking, you made me do this. So eating at someone, eating to forget or distract yourself, eating to feel better because when you eat, regardless of what you're eating, but especially if you eat high sugar, high fat foods, you're going to release serotonin and dopamine. Eating out of boredom, you know, hand to mouth thing, eating out of habit. And like I said a few minutes ago, not all emotional eaters have an eating disorder. And we want to differentiate that. Does it mean that their eating is not problematic to them? No, not at all. If they're telling you it's a problem, then it's a problem. They may not meet the criteria for binge eating disorder or bulimia. But it's important to address it because they understand that they're eating for a reason other than hunger. And they want to stop because they want to eat for hunger but not otherwise. And for us as clinicians, the first thing we need to do is understand why is it that they're eating? Is it boredom? Is it habit? So they need to keep a food log or a food journal over the course of a week or two weeks. And sometimes when people come in for an assessment, especially if that's one of their main presenting issues, I'll start out by just doing a retrospective of the last three days to get an idea of what may be triggering some of their eating episodes. And then we can look at some of the habits or bad habits maybe that they've gotten into and start talking about ways to address those. Remembering that Rome wasn't built in a day, this isn't going to go away overnight. But a lot of times if you give people some tips, tricks and tools to think about implementing when they walk out of your office after the assessment, before the first official session, it provides them some hope and gets the momentum going. And again, you don't have to binge to be an emotional eater. Some people graze all day long. Some people will eat and it's not what would be considered technically a binge, but it's more than they had anticipated. Maybe they'd go back for second helpings or third helpings when they really weren't hungry, but it was good. So why is eating so soothing? There are a lot of reasons. Now, there's obvious, it tastes good. So that's, you know, the big obvious bonus. But thinking about the function that eating serves, we have to eat in order to survive. When you were an infant, eating involved a closeness with your parental unit, which could release oxytocin. And I say parental unit because even if it was dad feeding the baby a bottle, there was that connection. There was that contact which caused the infant and the parent to release oxytocin. This is our bonding chemical. So eating was associated early on with bonding. Food may also have been associated with sleep. If the infant or child was given a bottle every night to go to sleep, then they may start thinking or they may be in the habit of eating in order to wind down or calm down. And we need to help them figure out different ways to do that. As a toddler, what did eating mean? Think about when you went from, well, we probably don't remember that, but think about when your kids went from eating, you know, food out of a jar to even their first Cheerios. That was huge, figuring out how to pick up that little Cheerio and get it in their mouth. And it involved exploration and mastery. They were discovering all different types of textures and tastes and figuring out what smell went with what taste. And it was a really cool and exciting time for kids. And I mean, think about it. They're like a year old, so it doesn't take much to amuse them. But this was rewarding. Reward equals dopamine equals, let's do that again. It involved power and control. The child at this point was starting to be able to feed him or herself. Was starting to be able to be somewhat independent from the parent when it came to a basic physiological function of eating. So eating itself had its own rewards and it was self-esteem building because the child started learning, you know, how to feed himself, how to ask for what he or she wanted, at least in terms of food. There are formations of memories around foods. Even as early as toddlerhood, you know, we have celebrations, we have birthdays, we have different things and most children have certain foods that they really like. And it could be because the first time they ate that food was a really happy experience or it could be just that's their favorite food and that's all they want to eat. But they remember that food and they remember when they ate it, they felt good. They felt happy. So as an adult, there's a part of their brain going, chicken nuggets, chicken nuggets make me happy. Now that's how the toddler thought. As an adult, we can understand that chicken nuggets themselves aren't making you happy, but you see the connections that we're making here. There's been an association between happiness and chicken nuggets. Unhealthy foods, especially for children when as adults we're still able to control what they eat. Your sugary foods, your unhealthy foods are usually reserved for treats or rewards. So when you're feeling like you need to be rewarded, when you're feeling like you want to feel good, sometimes you'll resort to those things when you were a kid that made you feel good like chocolate chip cookies or Haagen-Dazs or whatever it was for you. We've talked in the past about associations and conditioning and this is all coming back kind of full circle now because we need to understand that our brain has associated pleasure and reward with food for a lot of different reasons, not just because of nourishment. Looking at the reasons why your patient eats is going to help you understand what underlying issues you may need to address in treatment. Culturally, we associate eating with caring and celebration. Think about birthdays, holidays. What do we do? We get together. We have buffets. We have potlucks. When someone passes away, what do you do? You bring food over. When somebody's sick, what do you do? You bring food over. In our culture, there's a lot of emphasis put on eating and nourishing. That's true of a lot of different cultures. Low blood sugar can cause feelings of depression and anxiety which are quelled by food. If somebody typically doesn't eat well during the day, they go long periods without eating or if they have blood sugar issues to begin with and then they eat, they feel better. When they start feeling not so good, what do you think their first reaction is? Let me eat and see if that helps. Evolution predisposes the human body to crave high sugar, high fat, high calorie foods for quick energy and to prepare for a famine. Our bodies are really cool and really frustrating at the same time because your body takes in these foods and it says we're going to secrete the most amount of dopamine and the most amount of reward for these really high calorie foods because we want to make sure we're prepared in case there's a famine. Back in the day, many, many, many years ago, hundreds of years ago, we couldn't guarantee we would have a meal every day, let alone three meals every day. So the body prepared and it said, all right, we need to get whatever we can when we can. So we're going to make this the higher fat, higher, higher calorie foods more rewarding. Now I said it's also can be a blessing and a curse. Today, there's still a little part of our primordial brain that says if it thinks there's a famine, it will slow down your base metabolic rate, which causes people to gain weight. We see this a lot in people with eating disorders who tend to not take in very many calories or if they take them in, they purge them. So the body goes, well, I can't guarantee I'm going to get enough food, I'm going to get enough energy to survive. So I'm just going to turn down the thermostat a little bit, turn down the base metabolic rate, which compounds the problem for the person with the eating disorder. So it's important to understand that the brain is somewhat reactive to what's going on. So I keep saying we need to figure out what's behind or underlying the craving. First, we need to rule out physical causes. For some people, it's as simple as this. If they've got low blood sugar because they're not eating too often and obviously as counselors, we're not going to diagnose this, their doctor or their nutritionist will. But we can start exploring and go, it sounds like you might need to look at having your blood sugar checked or talk to your doctor about how frequently you need to eat. Because some people, and I know I'm very guilty of it. If I get into a groove doing something, I'll eat breakfast and then I'll get into a groove and before I know it, it's three in the afternoon and I haven't eaten for like a whole bunch of hours. I'm not doing math today. And my blood sugar is low and I'm starting to get foggy headed and irritable and tired. So it's a real simple fix there. In our society, we are so driven and we are so we can get so caught up in things because that's such a fast pace that it's easy to forget to eat or it's easy to avoid eating. So that's the first thing we want to rule out. Are you eating in response to low blood sugar, which is making eating seem more rewarding? And when you in response to low blood sugar, a lot of times people who do that end up eating more than they normally would because they start eating really fast. It's like, I'm going to shovel in as much as I can. Your brain doesn't register you're eating for 20 minutes or so. So before their brain even registers what's gone on and gets the blood sugar back up, they've already eaten a whole ton of food. Why is this under emotional eating? Well, because generally when they go into to start eating. Yes, they're hungry, but they're also cranky and irritable. And most of the time they're not thinking about I'm eating for nourishment. It's I'm eating to feel better. Lack of sleep. And this is so true for shift workers, as well as, you know, new parents and college students and anybody who's not getting enough sleep. If we are surviving on sugar and stimulants, we're going peak and lower valley peak and lower valley and you just keep going up and down until you just crash. Because every time you crash, you crash a little bit lower. So if somebody's on that roller coaster, they're going to feel worse between, you know, eating episodes. They're going to feel tired. They're going to feel fluggish, sluggish, irritable, fatigued. And to a certain extent, maybe depressed. And they may be misattributing those feeling those emotional feelings to emotions versus physical causes. And likewise, we also want to make sure that, you know, we're addressing the emotional causes because there's probably stuff there too. But if they're not getting enough sleep, and they're living on sugar and stimulants, their body is kind of in a state of hypervigilance a lot of times. It's exhausted. So they're going to be tired and cranky. So those are, those are a couple of things that we want to look at. Those are relatively easy fixes, or at least relatively easy things to point out and go, let's think about this. One of the things that I suggest for a lot of my clients is just take a week and mindfully, and it is difficult, but try to eat healthfully. You know, try to eat a few times a day, you know, try to eat like three meals a day and get enough water and try to get enough sleep and try not to overdo it on the stimulants. At the beginning, I'm not going to say cut out anything because that's not realistic and it's not fair. And they're probably already struggling if they're coming in to see me. So if I go, hey, let's just turn your world upside down. And guess what? You're not going to drink any caffeine anymore. It's not going to create a happy person. So I ask them to try to make some small changes and see if that starts to help. Dehydration causes fogginess and symptoms of depression. We want to make sure that they rule that out. And too many stimulants also causes dehydration. So, you know, we're looking at some of the physical causes of irritability and fatigue and cravings. Because again, we're going back to when I felt this way before, not looking at why I felt this way, but when I felt irritable, depressed, cranky, what has made me feel better? And generally, it's food. And generally, it's not good food. For me, it's M&Ms. I love my M&Ms, especially the ones with almonds, but I digress. Nutritional causes of cravings, high carbohydrate and high starch foods cause a greater release of serotonin and endorphins. So if you've got somebody who's depressed for whatever reason, they may crave these kinds of foods in order to increase their serotonin level or increase the endorphins, their energy levels. Chocolate. People who crave chocolate may be low in magnesium. The level of magnesium also affects how much serotonin is available. Again, I keep saying this just for legal reasons. We want to make sure their doctor or nutritionist goes in and makes this diagnosis. But if there are particular foods that they do crave, it's important for them to bring that up with their medical provider. If they're craving fatty foods, now again, fatty foods are just good. I love fried foods, but it also could mean that they're not getting enough omega-3s. Americans typically don't. And interestingly, if they crave soda, they may be calcium deficient. Who knew? So these are things to take a look at, to ask people if they're craving soda, maybe cutting back on their soda a little bit. And see what happens, and or getting blood work done. Once we've ruled out the obvious physical causes, they've gone to the doctor, gotten blood work done, everything comes back happy. They're getting enough sleep, but they're still eating when they're not hungry. We need to rule out habits. Is there a particular time or activity that makes you crave this food? When I was growing up, I would go to the grocery store with my mother. And on the way back home from the grocery store, we would always get junk food. And she would get a bag of chips and put them in the front seat. And it was like a 20 minute drive from the grocery store to our house. And by the time we would get back to the house, we would have put a good dent in those potato chips. That being said, I got into the habit of whenever I went to the grocery store, I would get something out of the bag and put it in the front seat and eat on the way home. Now am I paying attention to what I'm eating? No. Likely am I eating because I was hungry? Probably not. So we want to look at habits. A lot of people will eat when they are watching TV. It's a huge one. So we want to not do that. Or if you're going to eat when you're watching TV, make sure you sit at the table. At least that makes you a little bit more mindful. So thinking about are there particular times or activities that you eat and you're just not hungry? Are there particular times that you mindlessly eat? Like I said, when you're driving or when you're watching television, those are both habits and can be mindless because you're not paying attention to how much is going in your mouth. You're not probably paying attention to the taste and you're not paying attention to whether you're full or not. So if you're mindlessly eating, then there's going to be a lot more calorie consumption in addition to the fact that you're not eating because you're hungry. You're just eating to eat. Are you going too long between meals than eating a sugar boost, which leads to a sugar crash? So again, that's a physical cause, but we want to rule out these are bad habits that we can tend to get into. Other things that can be construed as bad habits are eating without putting food on a plate. If you eat straight out of the bag, you're going to eat more than if you put it on a plate. So put it on a plate, sit down, try not to watch TV. All the things that your grandmother would have told you. So what do we do about it? Emotional eating interventions. I talked earlier about the food diary. Do a retrospective during the assessment if they really want to get a jumpstart on things, but have them keep a food diary, preferably for the duration of treatment, but at least for a week. What time did they eat? Were they craving just any old food or something that was salty, something that was sweet, something that was sour? This will give you a general idea and can give their medical provider a general idea if there are any nutritional imbalances or if there are particular associations. What emotion or state were you in? And I say state because being exhausted is not necessarily really an emotion. If you're happy, sad, mad, glad, exhausted, drained, whatever state feels like it would work. And then because of why were you feeling this way? It doesn't have to be a dissertation. It can be really short and sweet. But I encourage clients to write down everything they eat before they eat it. During the first week or, like I said, preferably throughout the entire course of treatment, why before they eat it? Because it's a stop. Remember, we've talked before about how we have an urge, we have a craving, we have an urge, and then we engage in the behavior oftentimes without stopping to mindfully think, is this what we want to do? This provides that stop that says, okay, I've got to write down the time and then I've got to think about why I'm eating. And honestly, a lot of clients notice a reduction in their habit eating when they have to do this just because they don't want to record. Keeping that up for the period of a month or two months helps break some of the habit eating that they might do. Like I said before, when they're eating, I encourage them to use a plate, sit down, don't walk around, don't stand at the counter, eliminate distractions as much as possible, and focus on the food you're eating that goes with mindfully eating. What does it taste like? Is it good? Take small bites. When my son was young, and I think I've shared this before, he had gastric reflux. And we would sit down to the table and I would shovel in food as fast as I could get it in my mouth, because he couldn't be put down for too long. Before he would start to get fussy, at least until we figured out that he had gastric reflux and Zantac was just a lifesaver. I developed that habit when he was little, and I kept it up for a while. It took a while for me to learn to go back to taking reasonable bites and tasting my food. And even today, if I'm not paying attention too much, I'll eat my dinner really fast and then I'll sit there and I'll be like, well, yes, I'll taste that a little bit later because I didn't taste it when I ate it. Encouraging clients to be aware of their eating habits. Try to avoid setting up a binge by restricting certain foods. Now, does that mean you have to have cakes and candy and whatever your trigger foods are in your house all the time and in your face? No. I would encourage people not to do that. But to say, you know, I said for me M&M's is one of my favorite reward foods, if you will. I don't keep them in the house, but I will allow myself occasionally to buy a small snack size pack of M&M's when I'm out. Or I will get a regular size pack and I'll share it with my daughter. So I'm not restricting it. I'm not saying I can never have M&M's again. I'm just not making it available to myself when I might have some unrestricted time. Try to avoid buying a bunch of comfort foods and keeping them around the house. And when you've got kids, when you've got family, it's not entirely possible usually to not have some of that stuff around. But try to avoid having the things that you particularly use for comfort. Because if it's not readily available, then you've got to focus on, guess what, dealing with the emotions instead of stuffing them with food. Try not to go too long without eating. Like I said earlier, if you go too long, then by the time you get to the food, your blood sugar is low and you're just like shoveling in as fast as you can. Initially, distract. If you know that you're eating and you're like, I'm really not hungry, but I want to eat. Take a bath. Take a walk. Call a friend. Heaven forbid, get on Facebook. Whatever it is you can do to distract yourself for 10 or 15 minutes. If after 10 or 15 minutes you're still going, I really want whatever it is, then you can decide what to do about it then. Most of the time, when people stop and go, I'm really not hungry, let me distract myself. They get caught up in that distraction. And before they know it, they've forgotten about the craving. Identify the emotions. If you know that you're not hungry but you want to eat, then say, okay, what's going on? What's going on with me? It doesn't mean that the person is never going to eat when they're upset because a lot of people do. And is it the end of the world? Probably not necessarily. If they can start reducing the frequency of times that they eat in response to emotional distress, that's what we want. We want progress, not perfection. If it's depression, what's causing them to feel hopeless or helpless right now? If it's stress, anxiety, or anger, remember our big lump-together stuff, what are they stressing out about? Do they feel like they're overwhelmed? Are they afraid of failure, rejection, loss of control, the unknown? We've gone through those things. We want them to identify what's going on with them. And then they can make better choices about how to deal with it. So general coping, help them develop alternate ways of coping with distress, distract. We've already kind of gone over that one. I encourage people, and it's one of those DBT things that a lot of therapists encourage their clients, to keep a list of things they can do to distract themselves. Because it's not always practical to get up and go on a walk if you're at work or it's 2 in the morning. So what else can you do to distract yourself? Talk it out with a friend, with yourself, with your dog. Sometimes you just got to get it out. People who are more auditory will prefer talking it out as opposed to journaling it. Now, if they talk it out with themselves, they can record it if they want to. Or sometimes it's just better to have dialogue with themself. If it worked for Freud, it can work for other people. Journaling, if your clients are inclined to journal, encourage them to write it down. Sometimes just getting stuff out of your head and onto paper will help the feelings dissipate a little bit. So you're not mulling them over and obsessing on them and getting stuck in those thoughts and feelings. Additionally, while you're distracting, talking it out or journaling, this is also your break, your stop between the urge and the behavior. Make a pro and con list of the distress, not the eating. Whatever it is that's stressing you out and how can you fix it? Or what are the pros of this situation and what are the downsides to this situation? Encourage them to focus on the positive. If something's stressing you out at work, you've got a big meeting coming up or something you don't want to do or whatever it is, you can get stuck on focusing on that or you can focus on the positive that you do have a job. That meeting only comes around once a month. It's time you don't have to be doing paperwork. Whatever the pros are for that person, encourage them to focus on the positive. If you're distressed because of some kind of a failure or perceived failure, figure out what you learned from it. Whether it was a relationship failure, maybe you learned what not to do in a relationship anymore. Maybe you learned things that you may have ignored. Maybe you learned what you should have done instead. But how can it be a learning opportunity instead of somewhere to stay stuck? And finally, if something's making you upset, if something's causing anxiety, depression, hopelessness, helplessness, whatever the negative feeling, figure out if it's worth your energy to get stuck here. Is it worth the turmoil? Is it worth, you know, having to pacify yourself with food? Whatever it is. A lot of times people say, you know what? No, it's just it's not even worth my effort. It's not worth moving me away from my goals because my goal is to stop emotional eating. My goal is to eat for hunger so I can go to dinner with people and feel comfortable. I can be at a party where there's a buffet and not feel stressed out that I'm going to go and eat half the stuff on the buffet. That's my goal. So is holding on to whatever this distress is getting me closer to being able to do those things. And generally the answer is no. Develop alternate ways of coping with distress. The ABCs. The A is the activating event. What is stressing you out? Causing the distress. C is the emotional reaction. Angry, depressed, stressed, whatever. B are your behaviors. What behaviors or B are your beliefs? I'm sorry. What are the beliefs that are in there that may need to be addressed? What kind of things are you telling yourself? And how can you counter them cognitively? Eliminate your vulnerabilities. You knew we couldn't get through a presentation without talking about vulnerabilities. If someone is well rested, well fed, has a good social support network, not overstretched time wise, then it will be easier to deal with stress or stressors when they come your way. You'll have more energy to deal with it. So there won't be this overwhelming feeling of I just want to bury my head in a jar of peanut butter. Be compassionate with yourself. Some days it's, you know, you're just going to feel anxious. You're going to feel depressed. You're going to get angry. You can beat yourself up over it. And, you know, a lot of people do. Is that the best use of your energy? Or can you be compassionate? Can you learn from it? And you give yourself a break and go, you know what? I'm having a bad day today. And that's okay. I'm not going to unpack and stay here, but I'm not going to fight it either. Help clients learn how to urge surf. Help them understand that just like a panic attack, just like a wave, just like a lot of other things in life, it will come. It will crest and it will go out again. So they can sort of identify where they are on the energy of that urge. Other tools people can use. Close the kitchen. Once I have the kitchen cleaned and, you know, all the dishes are done and it looks pretty. I hate going in there and finding dishes in the sink again. Now I've got teenagers, so we always have dishes in the sink. But, you know, before I had children, you know, at seven o'clock, I'd finish all the dishes, close the kitchen, and that would be enough motivation for me to not go in there and at least not use plates and stuff to eat. So if we're saying that we're going to only eat using utensils and a plate and sitting and all that stuff that we already talked about, then once you close the kitchen, you're not going back in there. Turn off the light. That also helps so you're not being attracted to the pretty lights and, you know, all the goodies that are in the kitchen. Brush your teeth. This is something my grandmother used to do and it actually works. There's some research behind it. Minty flavors reduce our appetite. So if you brush your teeth, you get all the other flavors out of your mouth and it reduces your urges to eat because it, again, is clean and fresh. And do you really want to brush your teeth again? Meditate. Sometimes just getting in a space where you're not obsessing about anything can help people get past that urge to self-soothe with eating. ACT for emotional eating. What am I feeling or thinking? What's going on with me right now? What is important to me? So if I am thinking, I want to eat. I want to, you know, just dive into this jar of peanut butter. And then I think about what's important to me. Is it important to me to get control of this? Is it important to me to, you know, be able to fit in my clothes in six months or not? So what is it in what way is controlling my eating habits and eliminating emotional eating important to me? And how does that get me closer to other things that are important to me? And what other things could I do that would get me closer to my goals? So if the goal is to have improved relationships, be able to feel more comfortable around food, reduce the stress around going out to eat and just around food in general. What else can you do when you're stressed out? Somebody also suggested that adding a blue light in the refrigerator decreases the appeal of foods, which is interesting because yellow, red and orange and browns think Pizza Hut are all foods that increase people's hunger and desire to eat. But blue obviously is just a completely different primary color and adding a blue hue seems like that would actually be really effective. So cool. Thanks for that little tidbit there. Holiday help. And, you know, we're coming into the holidays, so I've got to bring that up at every single class. Choose lower calorie foods. If you tend to get stressed out or caught up or mindlessly eat when you are at family gatherings. Okay, you know, cut yourself a break. Know that that's probably going to happen. Fill up on the lower calorie foods, the carrot sticks, the broccoli, the white meat turkey, anything that's available that's not like sweet potato pie or brownies. Keep a water or low calorie beverage in your hand. If you've got your hand full, you can't eat at the same time. So, you know, if you walk around with a cup in your hand, it helps. Talk to people. Hopefully you don't talk with your mouth open or talk with food in your mouth. So if you're talking to people, you're not going to be as inclined to go get something to eat because you're wanting to stay engaged in that conversation. Stay away from the buffet, especially if you know that it could get stressful. Or maybe, you know, for me, I turn into a pumpkin at like 730 at night. I get up at four, but I turn into a pumpkin at 730. And a lot of times, holiday parties and those sorts of things are at eight, nine o'clock at night. And, you know, I've already done turned into a pumpkin. So I know that if I go to those, I'm going to be more likely to eat just to kind of stay away because I'm tired. And it's a bad habit. It's not because I'm hungry. So I know I need to stay away from the buffet during those times. Rehearse refusal skills. If somebody says, oh, you've got to try a bite of this, figure out how you're going to address that ahead of time. Because there's generally probably a lot of really good foods. And you may really want to taste some, but sometimes people who emotionally eat know if they start eating high fat, high calorie foods, they're going to want to eat everything. So if I start with one bite of a brownie, I'm going to want to eat every sweet that's on the table. If they know that, then they may want to choose to not even go down that road at that juncture. Encourage people to stay mindful of their distress meter. Before they go back for another helping, ask themselves, am I hungry? Am I just wanting to taste what's here and how do I feel about that? Or am I eating just because I don't want to be here and I'm bored and I want to fill the time? Have people keep an index card with their coping mantra and two reasons they don't want to emotionally eat. So I need to be here. I can do this, whatever the mantra is that's going to get them through the night, whatever they're telling themselves that it's going to help them plow through and make the right choices. But also two reasons that they don't want to eat or they're going to get around it. Maybe they've got something at home that they can eat when they get home. Eating before they go to the party may also help prevent some grazing. Holidays bring out a lot of emotions for people. Some people struggle with depression, anxiety, jealousy, grief, anger, you know the whole gamut during this time. And during this time there's food everywhere. I mean starting at Halloween when your kids bring home the Halloween candy, which usually lasts about a week in our house. Anyhow, the Halloween candy followed by getting ready for Thanksgiving, followed by doing all the baking or whatever you do and the holiday parties coming up on the December holiday season. There's just food everywhere. So it's really easy to cope, if you will, with stress, with being overwhelmed, with being tired, by not eating enough healthy food by binging on unhealthy and soothing food, if you will. So it's important to encourage people to stay mindful of why they're eating what they're eating. When constantly bombarded with high fat, high carbohydrate foods, people are tempted to eat to feel calm. I challenge anybody to say that they've never eaten and go, okay, you know, I'm just focused on this right now. I'm not thinking about everything out here and it feels good. I'm good. Now, good's probably not the word I should use, but it does help people distract themselves. Sometimes when you eat, especially those high intensity foods, you feel happier. Serotonin's released, dopamine's released, you're like, oh, that's really good. I want to do that again. Or you just feel numb. You can get into a zone where you're just eating and not caring. It's not that you're feeling calm. You're just not feeling anything. And a lot of times when people get into that zone, they're not tasting the food either. They're just kind of in a autopilot. Emotional eating, like most other escape behaviors, never addresses the underlying emotions and their causes. So we need to look at it. Are you feeling anxious? Are you feeling jittery? Are you feeling depressed? Because your blood sugar is low? Because you're nutritionally deficient? Because you're not getting enough sleep? Or because there's something cognitive going on? Or all of the above? Emotional eating often results in physical issues like weight gain, poor sleep, and reduced energy. Weight gain is, you know, in and of itself a few pounds here and there, not a big deal. But some people can start emotionally eating to feel better. They gain a lot of weight. Then they start feeling less energetic. It starts being harder to move around. They get to the point where they are clinically obese, then they're going, I'm never going to take all this weight off. They feel hopeless and helpless. You see where this is going. So they eat some more. It can cause poor sleep. Sleep apnea. It's also hard to get comfortable sometimes. If you've eaten a whole bunch of food right before you go to bed. You know, your belly's all full and you wake up the next morning and your belly's still awful. Which means you probably didn't sleep very well the night before. And emotional eating often results in reduced energy because the foods we binge on, the foods we eat for self-soothing often end up causing a sugar crash. Some people try to undo emotional eating by restricting other calories, which can lead to nutritional deficits and more cravings. I had a girlfriend when I was in high school and, you know, think back to, I don't know if they still do it, but when we were in high school, there was always some kind of candy sale going on. And she would always forego all other food so she could have two chocolate bars each day. And, you know, we're not going to get into all the other issues surrounding only eating two chocolate bars. But the point I'm making right now is the fact she wasn't getting protein. She wasn't getting, you know, most of her vitamins and minerals and stuff that her body needed to make the neurotransmitter so she could feel happy and she was contributing to a sugar crash. But I also know that it's common around the holidays for people to do this. They'll let go all day without eating because they know they're going to a party tonight and there's going to be a lot of really good food. Doing that once in a while, not a big deal. Doing that 10 or 15 times in a month could start to have problems. Emotional eaters need to first find a way to stop before they eat. So whether it's writing in a journal or adding, there are a lot of apps on your phone that you can put your food in even if you're not writing about your emotions and your cravings and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes it's enough to make people stop before they actually reach for the food. Or, you know, kind of an extreme way to go is to not keep pre-processed or pre-packaged foods in the house. So anything that you're going to eat, you've got to make. Second, identify the underlying reason for your eating. Figure out, do I generally eat in response to? And then address the thoughts and emotions leading to the urges. So if you figure out that the underlying emotions for your eating are depression, then what thoughts are maintaining that depression and how can you address it? Once you address the underlying issues, some of the emotional eating will go away. Some of it's habit. We're going to have to break that habit. And over the course of, you know, past couple of decades of working with people, my experience has been the majority of the time. People don't want to hear, well, once you deal with your emotional issues, the emotional eating will go away. They're there because they want to stop that behavior right now. So yes, we need to work on all the underlying issues, but give them a tip or a trick or a tool, whatever you want to call it, to use before they walk out of your office after every single session. That way they have something else they can put in their toolbox and feel more empowered to have control over what's going on with them and what's coming their way. Having the knowledge of what and why is 80% of helping them get to the recovery point. Now, if there's co-occurring or if the eating issues are more than just emotional eating, there's the person meets the criteria for binge eating disorder, bulimia or anorexia. Obviously, there's a lot of other underlying issues they're going to have to be dealt with. So I don't want to trivialize that. But I do want people to feel like they've got some hope over what's going on. Are there any questions? If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe, either in your podcast player or on YouTube. 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