 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 everyone, I'd like to welcome you to today's presentation, Emotional Eating, Making Peace with Food. During this presentation, we're going to define emotional eating, explore emotional eating in terms of its beneficial functions and rewards. So often we focus on why you wouldn't want to do it or why does somebody want to get rid of it or what are the negative sides to this. And yes, in order to motivate people to change their own behavior, it is certainly important to help them identify all of the reasons they don't want to do it. But it's also just as important to identify why do you do it. We know that we only do things when there's a reward. So we want to look at what are the rewards because we need to find alternate ways to help people achieve those same rewards. We'll also discuss why restrictive diets don't resolve emotional eating. Mainly, and you know, here's a little spoiler alert, because emotional eating has nothing to do with dieting. Emotional eating is about emotions. And we'll identify some interventions to help emotional eaters. So emotional eating is eating in response to emotions and feelings other than hunger. So you can eat at someone. If you get angry and you start breaking your diet or eating something unhealthy for you, just because you made me do it, you're making me eat. You can eat at someone. We have, is a common theme, if you will, when we work with people in substance use treatment, that they will drink at someone. They will get angry and they'll go out to the bar. They'll have a beer. They'll have a drink and they'll think in their mind, well, this person made me do this. So one of the things we're going to talk about in making peace with food is mindfulness in response to eating. Choosing the response to whatever feeling you're having that's going to help you achieve your goals and recognizing that eating at someone or drinking at someone really has no effect on them. So basically you're putting blame out there and you're giving someone else control. People eat to forget or distract. If you've had a bad day and you just want to bury yourself in a bubble bath and a pintful of Hock and Doss. We've all been there sometimes. Emotional eating is there. Why does it help us forget and distract? Well, because it's pleasurable. And we'll talk about some of the reasons that it produces the pleasurable reaction and the relaxation in later slides. Eating to feel better. Well, it releases serotonin and dopamine. When we eat high sugar, high fat foods, our body goes, yeah, we want to do that again. Partly because it tastes good, but partly because our body has been conditioned over hundreds of years, thousands of years that we need to have energy. And back before energy was just everywhere, before you could constantly eat, it was definitely rewarding when somebody actually got to have a good meal. So our brains still kind of remember that back in their primitive part of our brain. Eating out of boredom. Nothing else to do, that hand to mouth thing, your hands are bored. So people will eat. And eating out of habit. I think I've shared with you before when I was younger. Every Friday, my mother used to take me to the movies. And we would go out to dinner first, and then we would go to the movies. So we went to dinner and we got full. But we would go to the movies and we would get popcorn because it was the movies. And you had to have popcorn at the movies, of course. So it was just a habit. We weren't eating because we were hungry. We were eating because it seems like that's what you do. It's like putting jelly with peanut butter. So we'll talk about different habits people have that they may need to attenuate. Habits obviously are easier to deal with than eating for coping. If you're eating because you're watching TV, then it's easier to put in a behavioral intervention. If you're talking about eating as a method of self soothing because you're hurting for some reason, there's going to be a little bit more to it than that. Not to say it's impossible to overcome. It's very possible. But there are going to be more steps. Please remember that not all emotional eaters have an eating disorder. Some people who emotionally eat are just emotionally eating. They may be overweight. They may not be. But they don't have that critical fear of fat that goes along with anorexia and bulimia. Emotional eaters tend to not binge eat as much. They tend to be more grazers, eating a lot, eating in response to emotions, but not necessarily binging as much. You don't have to binge to be an emotional eater or to be considered as having difficulty or having problems with your relationship with food. Most of us at some point in our lives develop some unhealthy habits in relationship to food. That is part of American society, unfortunately. And we've talked before about thinking about the messages we get from our family, from the media, from wherever we get our messages, taking it in and going, is this something that I want to hold on to? Is this important to me or is it not? As an infant, let's think about why eating works for us. As an infant, eating often involves closeness and parental attention. When there is that physical contact, there's a release of oxytocin. So when the infant eats, there's common chemicals that are kind of released into the system. The infant can kind of calm down. So not to say that we want to pacify infants with food, but I do see a lot of parents responding every time a child cries with poppin' something in their mouth, whether it's a pacifier or actual food. The response is if there's distress, there's an oral component to it. Food can also be associated with sleep. So if somebody was always given a nighttime bottle before they went to bed, if somebody was always given a snack right before bed, then it may be habitual for this person and their body may be accustomed to getting that food, which kind of signals for the release of melatonin and all that other stuff. Think for a minute about when we're training kids or helping children learn how to go to sleep. They come home from school. They have their little freak out because they've been on their best behavior all day long. They eat dinner. After dinner, there may be some playtime, then there's bath time. After bath time, there's generally storytime or some kind of calming, quiet thing, and then they go to bed. There's a routine. That routine triggers the person's brain that, oh, it's about time to go to bed, so I need to start winding down. And the brain prepares that way. If food is part of that routine, then food is also going to cue in the brain that, hey, it's time to start releasing melatonin so we can get sleepy. We can decondition that, if you will, but it's important to remember and to look at all the functions that food is serving and what cues it's giving the body. As a toddler, food often meant exploration and mastery because they were able to start eating solid foods and you're able to explore different tastes and different textures. A lot of times toddlers are very hand-to-mouth. Think about a child crawling across the floor. I know my children were this way, which is, I became obsessive about floors, I think when my children were little, because everything they could get their hands on went into their mouth. It was just to explore, see what it tasted like, what did it feel like. It wasn't necessarily an eating problem, it was just exploration. But when they would taste something that tasted good, there was a reward to it. So they're like, oh, let's put more stuff in our mouth and so if we can do that again. Eating as a toddler gave them power and control when they first started being able to feed themselves. When my son was little, bless his heart, he was in the NICU, and so he was tube-fed for the first three months where he would have a nasogastric tube and we would pour the food literally down the tube into his stomach so there was like immediate gratification. Well, he kind of grew to expect that. So as he got older, I remember vividly him sitting in his car seat before he was able to fully sit up in a high chair and I would be shoveling food into his mouth as fast as I could and he would say more, more, more, more, more. He'd have his hands up like this the whole time. I'm like, I can't bring it in any faster, buddy. You've got to swallow. Let's not get into gestion when we're doing this. But he was able to control, to a certain extent, the rate at which food was provided to him and what he ate. He was able to spit out stuff he didn't like and not much I could do about it. There are formations of memories around foods, even as young as toddlerhood that can include when you would go, I remember when we would go to the doctor or the dentist and we would always go out to eat afterwards. So that was my reward, I guess, for going to a medical appointment. But we also have formation around foods, around celebrations, around birthdays, around different things. So some people think of certain foods and have a happy memory. It could be chicken, it could be pizza, it could be chocolate birthday cake. But when you think of certain foods, there are certain foods that you go, yeah, I remember those are the things that are reinforcing current choices of those foods for self-soothing behavior. So if somebody knows that they tend to focus on certain foods when they're emotionally eating, then we want to say, in what ways does that remind you of a happier time and what can you do to make it a happier time for you now? Unhealthy foods are usually reserved for treats or rewards when people are younger. So when they get older and they move out of mom and dad's house or, you know, they're more self-sufficient, then they start sneaking these foods. Or when they're on their own, they don't have to sneak them. They can eat pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they want to. So there is a certain amount of self-satisfaction in being able to eat special foods anytime they want to, which gives a person a sense of calming. It can also bring back memories of, again, times when that food was consumed in the past that were pleasurable that can help people feel calmer or feel less lonely. Maybe a food is particularly associated with family dinners. Culturally, we associate eating with caring and celebration. So let's think about an American society. When do we eat? Birthdays. Yep, everybody eats Christmas, Christmas dinner. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving. And guess what? I've already started baking. So yep, we're eating on Thanksgiving. And we're giving thanks. We're celebrating what we have, our gratitudes, all that kind of stuff. But we also eat when things are not going so well. In order to help someone feel better, you know, at funerals, people bring foods. They bring casserole dishes. You don't have to cook. Let me help you make sure that you've got food to eat. We associate caring with food. On Valentine's Day, you get roses, which, you know, may have prickles in them and whatever. I'm not a big rose person, obviously, but chocolates. People associate chocolate with Valentine's Day and Halloween and Easter. Just about any holiday you can think of, there is food associated with it. Low blood sugar can also cause feelings of depression and anxiety that obviously are quelled by food. If you are feeling stressed out, depressed, anxious, shaky, and it's because of low blood sugar, then when you eat, guess what? You're going to feel better. So the next time you're feeling depressed or anxious or shaky, you may eat and expect to feel better. Unfortunately, if it's because, if the next time you're feeling that way is not because of low blood sugar, it's not going to have the same impact. And then you're going to be like, oh, what happened? Last time I ate, I felt better. So let me try eating something else. Maybe I just chose the wrong food. Some of you are probably going, yeah, I've been there. You know, I just keep searching for something to eat that's going to make me feel better. Evolution, as I mentioned earlier, predisposes us to crave high sugar, high fat, high calorie foods for quick energy and to prepare for famine. Our brain remembers that. Our brain is kind of really smart and really stupid at the same time because they find that when you go on restrictive calorie diets, the brain turns down your base metabolic rate because it goes, oh, there's a famine out there. I'm not getting enough to eat. Now you can look around and see there's food everywhere. But the brain knows that it's not getting enough in the particular body that it's in. So the brain turns down the base metabolic rate. For whatever reason, there's a famine. It's a famine. So we want to make sure that people understand that. And then, you know, if somebody's metabolic rate's been turned down, if their brain thinks there's a famine, then they get this high fat, high sugar food, what do you think's going to happen? It's going to secrete a lot of rewarding hormones, dopamine and serotonin, going do that again. We need more food. We don't want to be stuck in a famine because we'll die. So what's behind the craving? When you're working with clients who have food issues and I'm trying to stay away from pathologizing it too much, bad food habits, eating to self-sooth, whatever you want to call it, food issues, first rule out physical causes. Do they have low blood sugar? If they tend to have some anxiety issues, irritability issues or fatigue, we want to look at are you keeping your blood sugar kind of stable or are you not eating breakfast and not eating until two in the afternoon or eating breakfast and then not eating again until dinner. You need a stable supply of food coming in throughout the day and it doesn't have to be necessarily every three hours, but for people who have issues with their blood sugar, eating every three to four hours definitely helps maintain that level of blood sugar. The other thing to think about is if somebody's under a lot of stress, high levels of cortisol affect the body's ability to regulate blood sugar. So it's important to understand that they're going to use more of that. Why? Cortisol revs up the body. If the body is revved up, it's like sitting at a stoplight with your foot on the gas. So you're burning a lot more energy just sitting still. You're not doing anything, you're just waiting for that light to turn. We need to pay attention to that and look at the reasons for low blood sugar. Obviously the physician, the medical doctor is going to be the one that makes these physical diagnoses, but we can help point people in the right direction so they can educate themselves. Lack of sleep, how many of us are guilty of eating when we are sleepy? Eating to stay awake and eating to get sleepy. When my husband was on midnight shift, that was kind of pretty much the basis of everything. His body didn't know when it was supposed to eat because his circadian rhythms were so out of whack. So he would eat to stay awake at the end of his shift and then when he would get up in the morning, he would eat some more and he was pretty much just trying to convince his body it was time to be awake. Use of sugar and stimulants also will kind of throw the circadian rhythms out of whack if you're not getting enough quality sleep, if there's never a time where that alertness system can turn down. So we need to look at the quality of sleep people are getting and it can be because they're choosing not to go to bed, but it also can be they're not getting enough quality sleep because they've got sleep apnea, because they've got a partner who has sleep apnea, because they're letting the dog sleep in the bed. Guilty of that. So it's not just the number of hours in bed. It's how well are you sleeping during those six, eight, ten hours? Wouldn't you love to sleep for ten hours? Wow. Dehydration. Our body wants to make us drink. We were like 80% water. So if we're dehydrated, the body is going to go, hello, we need some water. And if the person doesn't respond, because a lot of us go, well, I don't like water, which is so self-defeating, then the body will start craving other things. For me, it's iceberg lettuce. If I start craving salad, I know that I am dehydrated on a big level. I tend to pay attention to my hydration levels just because I work out, but it is important to understand what you crave. Interestingly, though, your body doesn't always crave water. If it learned, you know, the brain learns these things that it was not effective to make you crave high-water content foods, then it might make you crave salty or sugary foods. Why? Well, if you eat something salty, what do you want to do? Drink. For me, when I eat something sugary, and for a lot of people, when they eat something sugary, they also want to drink in order to sort of dilute that sugariness or that saltiness. So that's the body's kind of backwards way of going, you need to drink some water, so let's figure out how we can make this happen. Nutritional causes behind the craving. If you're craving high carbohydrate or starchy foods, there may be, and none of these are 100%. We've got to look at each individual. There may be a serotonin deficit and or a deficit of endorphins. We know that carbohydrates are required in order to produce serotonin, so if the person is not getting the building blocks to make the serotonin, they're probably going to crave it. If they need endorphins, they're just not getting enough of an endorphin rush, they're not feeling happy. High carbohydrate foods, those high sugar foods, are going to cause the body to secrete more endorphins, so there may be a sort of a nutritional reason for it. If somebody craves chocolate, it's really good, but if they really crave chocolate, it could be, again, because of a serotonin deficiency, but also because of a magnesium deficiency. Chocolate is really high in magnesium. I use cocoa powder, unsweetened cocoa powder, like 10 calories per tablespoon, in my coffee, because I crave chocolate a lot, and that seems to help with my cravings. Now, that doesn't work for everybody, but just being aware of the reason you're craving something, and if it's an emotional reason, if it's just something that's really yummy and you want to have it, that is a valid reason to eat it in some circumstances, just not necessarily in huge quantities all the time. If you're craving fatty foods, you may be low in omega-3s. A lot of Americans are very low in omega-3 fatty acids, so have clients talk with their doctors about whether they need an omega-3 supplement if they're not willing to add fish into their diet multiple times a week and other natural sources of omega-3s. Interestingly, if you're craving soda, you may be deficient in calcium, and in American society, you're like, well, how could somebody be deficient in calcium? If you don't eat a lot of breakfast cereal, which is enriched with calcium, and you don't drink a lot of milk, you may not be getting enough calcium. One thing that my doctor told me about 15 years ago is a lot of adult women don't get enough calcium, so taking a look at that, you don't necessarily have to have a blood test. You don't necessarily have to go through some huge thing to figure it out. Use a food tracker app and look at your basic macros on your food tracker app to make sure that your magnesium, calcium, the basic things you see on the multivitamin list are within normal limits. And if they're low, then you can look at ways to improve that, to reduce cravings. Because if we're craving, even physical or emotional, it's hard to just kind of ignore it. If it's a physical craving, we generally have to address it that way. If it's an emotional craving, then we're going to have to figure out what's causing that and address it that way. Rule out habits. Is there a particular time or activity that makes you crave this food? Like I said, going to the movies took me a long while to break that habit of, I'm watching a movie, I need to have popcorn. Don't need to do that. It's not something you have to have, it's just habit. I've mentioned before that I am super guilty of walking in, putting down my bag in the foyer, and walking directly into the kitchen and getting a snack without even thinking about whether or not I'm hungry. And then it would usually progresses to mindlessly grazing until dinner time. So being more conscious about mindful eating and when you're eating, breaking those habits. So now I come in, I set my bag down in the foyer, and I go downstairs and get changed. It breaks the habit, and by the time I finish that, you know, I'm engaged in something else. So putting some sort of stop gap between the habitual behavior or time and actually going into the kitchen can help distract someone's attention. Are there particular times that you mindlessly eat, like while driving? How many times have you stopped at a fast food place to get lunch when you're on the way from one meeting to the next? Or when you're on the way to pick up a child or whatever it is. And you stop, you go through the drive-thru, you get the food, and before you get to your destination, you've already wolfed down everything that's in the bag. Mindlessly eating, you're full, you've satisfied the caloric requirements. But most of the time you're like, yeah, maybe I'll remember what that tasted like later. That's kind of a joke around our house. I'm in a hurry. I eat quickly. And, you know, I'll be like, well, you know, whatever I got the calories, I'll remember what it tasted like later. If you mindlessly eat when you're watching television or doing something else, figure out other things that you can do to occupy your hands. Because a lot of times it's more of a hand thing. You want to be doing something with your hands. You want to be fidgeting. You want to be doing something. So figure out something else. And this is true with people who are trying to quit smoking as well. If they have that habit of hand-to-mouth, we need to give them something else to do with that hand. I crochet. Or I'll play, there's an app on my phone called Unblock Me. And it can be somewhat addicting, but that's a whole different issue. Finding something to occupy your hands and your mind so you're not going, Yeah, there's one more piece of chocolate cake in the kitchen. Are you going too long between meals and then needing a sugar boost? Sometimes when I was in college, I would eat breakfast and then, you know, I'd have classes all day long, so I wouldn't eat. But I would need a boost in the middle of the day. I would need some calories, so I'd get M&Ms. Well, we know that when somebody gets a sugar boost, they spike, but then they crash even lower than before. And when you crash even lower, what's your natural inclination? Well, let's spike again. So people end up with kind of this yo-yo thing on their blood sugar if they're going too long between meals and then looking for that really fast pick-me-up as opposed to something healthy. Rule out eating for comfort or escape. If you're eating for comfort, what else can you do? Make a list of other things that you can do to comfort yourself, to self-soothe. Identify other things you can do to escape. Particular movies, particular activities that you enjoy doing. I'll go out and pull weeds in my garden. My kids know that if I go outside, my level of stress is proportional to the size of the power tool I'm using. So if I'm out there with a chainsaw, leave mommy alone for a while. She needs to be in a zone. So when we're working with clients, we need to help them increase their motivation. Like I said, there is a benefit to emotional eating. There's a benefit to what they've been doing or they wouldn't still be doing it. So we need to figure out what's that benefit and how can we help them meet that another way. So eating whenever I want, the emotional benefits, comfort, boredom relief, all the things that we've talked about. Mental, if you're eating whenever you want, you don't have to plan meals ahead of time. You don't have to think about it. Physical benefits of eating whenever I want. Well, I'm never hungry and if I have a craving, I'm able to satisfy it. Social benefits of eating whenever I want would possibly be being able to go out with a group of people and eat. Maybe you already ate lunch, but you get invited to go out to lunch with somebody else. Maybe they want to go somewhere that has foods that you wouldn't normally eat, but you don't care. You know, you're able to eat whatever whenever you want. So we want to go back and look at the alternatives. Emotionally, if it's helping you escape, what else can you do? And what is it that you're trying to escape from? You know, let's take instead of dealing with the surface issue of the eating, let's look at the underlying issue as well. Now, I don't want to say, well, let's just wait. You keep doing whatever you're doing and let's deal with this underlying issue because people come to us and they want a behavior to stop generally. So let's look at solutions. What else can you do when you're feeling distressed, when you're feeling anxious, whatever feeling it is they're trying to deal with with food? But then we also concurrently need to deal with the undercurrent. What is causing you to feel this way? Mentally, yeah, it takes a little while to get used to planning out what you're going to eat, but you can. Physically, eating whatever you want, yeah, you're not going to get hungry. But if you're eating well and you're eating healthfully, you're probably not going to get hungry either. So let's look at what you want to eat. And one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they start trying to deal with their food issues is they start just slashing different foods out of their diet and saying, I can't eat that, I can't eat that. My response to them, I mean, obviously if they can't eat it for a health reason because of an allergy or an intolerance, that's one thing. But as soon as you start slashing out things that you potentially could eat that you really enjoy, you set yourself up to crave those. So figuring out how you can eat them in moderation occasionally. And that's what it comes down to, you know, a chocolate chip cookie here and there's not a big deal. A whole pack of chocolate chip cookies in one evening, that's a different story. So let's look at how can we avoid eating the whole bag of chocolate chip cookies. Buying snack packs is one way. Not keeping them at the house, maybe restricting yourself to only getting whatever your favorite food is for me, like I've said, M&M's vending machine. You know, I usually only have enough change on me to get go to the vending machine once. So that is my fix for the day. You get used to it. You learn to portion it out if you will. So there are alternatives instead of just slashing stuff completely. The drawbacks to eating whenever I want. Now people can usually list these because they've thought about these, which is why they're in our office. You know, emotionally, they get frustrated with themselves. They feel guilty. They feel like they've got a lack of self-control. Mentally, they beat themselves up. Physically, they may be gaining weight or they may eat. When they eat those foods, they don't feel so well. And socially, they may be embarrassed to eat in front of other people. You know, I'm just kind of spitballing here. So we want to look at those and go, okay, we need to deal with the issues. When you overeat, if you feel guilty, then what happens? Because most people they've found, it's called disinhibition. Once they break their diet or eat something they're not supposed to, all bets are off. It's just like the rest of the day is a free-for-all. So encouraging them to look at eating, you know, especially if they eat something in moderation, but either way, okay, fine. You ate, you know, three servings of baked Alaska. What do you do now? I mean, does that mean you should have a free-for-all? And how can you stop yourself from going on that free-for-all? If somebody's eating for hunger, they choose not to eat whenever they want, but to eat for hunger. There's a concept. Emotionally, they may feel better that they have control over food instead of food having control over them. So score. Let's highlight that. Mentally, benefits of eating for hunger are that it'll help you have a clearer head if you keep your blood sugar stable and if you're not always thinking about food. Physically, obviously you're probably going to pay more attention to what your body needs if you're eating for hunger. And once people start living a healthier lifestyle, they actually tend to start craving healthier foods. Interesting little quirk, I guess we have. And socially, if you're eating for hunger, how does that affect your relationships if you're eating when you're hungry? A lot of times, if you've been grazing all day and then you're supposed to go out to eat with someone, there may be some guilt associated with it, not wanting to go over your calorie allotment. But if you've been eating for hunger, then you likely haven't been eating all day. So socially, it may be easier to engage in food-related social functions. If you start looking at food as fuel and looking at food less as an enemy, it becomes less of a battle about am I going to eat, what am I going to eat? First step is becoming mindful, figuring out why you're eating or why you want to eat when you have that craving. And then doing something about it in a way that's going to help address that want. This is not eating. Eating for hunger, the drawbacks, emotionally you may feel deprived, which goes back to what I was saying, figure out ways that people can have the foods that they love, but they're not totally accessible. Buying small snack packs, only keeping it in the house certain times, not always having a cabinet filled with junk food. And we don't always binge on junk food. Some people binge on bread. So if bread is one of the things that you binge on, then figuring out how you can portion that out. And that's going to be different for each individual person. Maybe they prefer white breads, gooey breads, bagel-type breads. So keeping whole wheat sliced bread in the house. It's still bread, but it's not nearly as appealing to them. That's an alternative. And then they can occasionally treat themselves to a more gooey, decadent bread. Mental drawbacks to eating for hunger. You may think about the foods you want to eat. The really cool thing is, this goes away after a while. If your body is kind of like the four-year-old in the grocery store that's screaming, they want cocoa pops and mom and dad is saying, no, you're not going to get cocoa pops. And they get a little louder and mom and dad still says, no. If mom and dad give into it, then the child is learned, I just have to throw enough of a tantrum and I'll get my way. If mom and dad don't give in, eventually the child goes, you know what? This isn't worth the effort. Our brain is the same way. Our brain's kind of like a four-year-old child. It's going to throw a tantrum and say, I really want this. But if we don't give into it, eventually it's not even going to cross our mind. It's like, well, it's not even worth the effort. Helping people keep a mindful eating diary. So just starting treatment without trying to change anything. Let's get a lay of the land and figure out what's going on. When people start to do this, they will start to eat less just naturally. Which is really interesting, unless there's some underlying physiological reason. But a lot of times when people start keeping a food diary, it forces them to become a little bit more mindful, which automatically changes their behavior. So you're not getting a true baseline. Anyhow, we want to know what time did you eat? What were you craving as far as taste? Salty, sweet, a particular food? What was your emotion or state? Now emotion, happy, mad, sad, glad, angry, scared, obviously. But state could also be tired, exhausted, drained. Not everybody associates those words with feeling words and vice versa. So I want to put state. What were you feeling like? And why were you feeling that way? As people start to complete this, they will see how frequently they eat. And a lot of times they'll look at it and they'll get ready to start writing in the diary. And they'll be like, you know what, I just ate 30 minutes ago. I'm going to go do something else. Some things that I put out there early on when people are even just starting to do the food diary, to give them tips to help them when they're eating, use a plate. You're going to eat a lot less if you put it on a plate and have to go back for seconds and thirds than you are if you take the whole bag to the couch or wherever you're sitting and just eat from the bag. Sit down at the table, preferably. If you are sitting down or if you're walking around and you're eating and you're talking and you're not paying attention to what you're eating, you're going to eat a lot more. It takes your brain 20 to 30 minutes to register, oh, hey, I've got food because it's got to get out of the stomach. So we need to give our brains a chance to queue in. If you're walking around, if you're talking, if you're paying attention to something else, you're probably eating faster. And then when your brain registers, oh, there's food, it's going to register overfall. And then the person doesn't feel so hot. Eliminate distractions. Don't watch TV while you're eating because then you're not paying attention. And again, you're going to eat faster. You're not going to savor the food. Your brain may not even register that you're eating as quickly. Eventually it'll register. And focus on the food. Taste it. If you are eating, let's figure out what you're tasting. Another thing I encourage people to do is see how small of a bite you can take and still get the full taste of the food. Instead of taking this big heaping spoonful and shoving it into your mouth so your mouth's like totally full, try taking a little tiny spoonful. Or if you're eating macaroni and cheese, two noodles. And see what that tastes like. And see if it tastes any different with two noodles versus a whole heaping spoonful. How much more satisfying is it to have the multiple bites, but also by taking smaller bites, it takes longer to eat, which gives your brain longer to kick in. If someone is eating for self-soothing, it doesn't really matter how much they eat. It's more the act of eating. Even if they're still eating a food that they think is comforting, if we can help them slow down how much they're eating and register it, then they're going to be starting to feel like they're making progress. Try to avoid setting up a binge by restricting certain foods. As soon as you say you can't have this, guess what you're going to think about a lot? Try to avoid buying a bunch of comfort foods and having them in the house just randomly available. Now at this time of year, Thanksgiving, Christmas, we're getting presents that have cookies and baked goods and their stuff all around. So how do you deal with it? One way we deal with it at our house is freeze it. Frozen zucchini bread is a lot harder to eat than zucchini bread sitting out on the counter. And if it's sitting out on the counter, I'm like, we need to eat that before it goes bad. They've done research studies and they found there's a direct correlation between the caloric content of the foods that are left out on the counter and the weight of the people in the house. Because many of us, the majority, according to that study, will tend to randomly eat. If we walk in the kitchen and we see something there, we're going to take a bite. We're going to take a handful. We're going to get a bowl just because it's there. And our brain goes, hmm, that would be yummy. And we're not going, do I really need it right now? Think about when you go to the grocery store, not to the grocery store, to any store and you're shopping and you see something and you're like, ooh, I'd love to have that. But then a part of your brain goes, you don't really need it right now. You just got a whole new set of bath towels. You don't need to get more bath towels. It's pretty, but you don't need it. Going too long without eating, we've talked about. So making sure that the person is eating frequently enough for them. And there is a trend right now that's called intermittent fasting where some people try to go 8, 12, 16 hours without eating and then have the small window within which they eat. If someone is having difficulty with emotional eating, it's probably not the best idea for them to try intermittent fasting while they're trying to deal with whatever emotional issues they're dealing with. But I want to throw that term out there so you can Google it and be more aware of it because there are some benefits of it for some people. Not everybody. If somebody has high anxiety, high stress, adrenal fatigue, then going too long without food may actually cause additional stress on the body. Initially, distract. If you start thinking, you know, I really want chocolate chip cookies. But you know you just finished dinner or you know you probably don't need it. Take a bath. Go on a walk. Call a friend. Heaven forbid, get on Facebook. Do something that is going to occupy your time. My rule is generally do 15. Do 15 minutes of a task you don't want to do. If you still don't want to do it, then you can stop. But in this case, do 15. Do some sort of distracting activity for at least 15 minutes. And then after 15 minutes, you're still checking that watch every 30 seconds. Then you may need to look for a different intervention or agree to let yourself have a little bit. Identify the emotions that are going on. If it's depression, someone may feel hopeless and helpless. So what can they do to deal with that? What interventions work for that person to help them find hope and a sense of empowerment? And over what or about what are they feeling hopeless and helpless? Is it about food? Is it about relationships? Is it about their life? Maybe they're in the middle of a midlife crisis. It's going to be different for every person. But if they can recognize when that issue is starting to poke out again, then they can use different interventions instead of just stuffing it. Because when people self-soothe with food, it's not fixing anything. It's just pushing it down a little bit. If it's stress, anxiety or anger, that's the alert system going. There's a threat. There's a threat of some sort. People fear failure, rejection, loss of control, and the unknown. During this time of year when people are getting together for holidays, there can be a lot of that that rears its ugly head where people are seeing relatives they haven't seen in a while and they feel a need to manage impressions. They need to try to prove that they've done something. Or maybe they're having to go to a family reunion and they don't get along with their family. So there's a lot of stress involved with that because they don't know what's going to happen and they're not going to have as much control. So helping clients identify when you go to this family gathering or when you go to this holiday party, what do you have control over? Do you have control over who you talk to? Do you have control over how long you stay? What is it that you have control over? So helping them focus on those things they can change. You know, maybe they have this hypercritical relative who's at every family gathering. Well, how are you going to deal with it? What parts of this do you have control over to try helping you not let this person get under your skin and antagonize that internal critical voice thinking back to yesterday's class. So general alternate ways of coping. These aren't going to fix everything, but it can help people get through the moment while they're working on the underlying issues in therapy. Distract, don't react. Something starts driving you absolutely bonkers and you're like, well, just give me a brownie or give me a drink or whatever their knee jerk reaction is. Okay, identify it as distress and then distract with something. Lots of mindfulness exercises we can encourage people to do. A lot of times I just encourage people to remove themselves from the situation and go on a walk. If they can't remove themselves, you know, maybe they're sitting down to a family dinner. And it would be obvious if they got up and went to the bathroom. How can they deal with that? They may have a battle buddy. Hopefully that's with them at the reunion or at the family gathering or the party that can just kind of kick them on the shins or whatever. And they can let each other know that they're there. They got this. Talk it out. Maybe you need to remove yourself from the situation and with your battle buddy if you will or call your best friend or whatever. Talk it out. When I worked in residential and we had clients that would go home for the holidays, they would go on furlough. We had an emergency line that the counselor on duty always kept their phone, always kept this phone with them. If somebody was at in a situation when they were on furlough and they felt triggered, they could always call the center and talk to someone. If you're in private practice, that's not real practical. So what can people do and who can they talk it out with? Who are their support people? Maybe they have to talk it out with themselves. Unfortunately, sometimes it's that way where people don't have someone they can call and go, you know, this is just driving me crazy right now. So encourage them to figure out how to write it down or talk it out with themselves or converse with their higher power. Ask for strength. I know when my children were little, I would regularly be pushing a cart through the grocery store or through some other store going, God grant me patience. And, you know, that's as far as I would get, but, you know, I just kept repeating that mantra. Encourage them to journal. Write down maybe before they go to the event what they're feeling, what they're feeling about the event, what they anticipate happening at the event. And writing the rest of the story so there is a positive ending. So when Uncle Bob starts acting out, I will da da da da da. So they can complete the narrative before they go so they feel empowered that they know what they're going to do. They have a plan. Make a pro and con list. If something's bothering them, what are the pros to it? What are the cons to it? Focus on the positive. Yes, there are negatives. And I'm not invalidating the negatives, but if you're at a family reunion and you're just looking around and focusing on every negative thing there, guess how you're going to feel? So encourage people, at least in the moment, to take a deep breath and try to focus on the positive things that are going on. You know, they're not drinking, they're not binge eating, they're, you know, maintaining a good relationship with people. View failures as learning opportunities. And it's not just at family reunions. You know, things happen, maybe you apply for a promotion at work and you don't get it. So you want to go home and eat an entire large pizza. What does pizza have to do with a promotion? Nothing. It's self soothing. It's high fat and produces endorphins. It tastes good. No doubt. So how can you turn this into a learning opportunity? I encourage my clients to journal ahead of time. Five reasons that this failure is a learning opportunity or five things they can learn from the situation before they dive into the pizza. And then if they're still insistent on doing that, you know, maybe going somewhere and ordering a slice of pizza instead of having home delivery, three whole large pies and identify whether it's worth your energy. Sometimes you're in a situation and something irritates you and you're, you're like, ah, is this worth your energy to hold on to? Too often little stressors build up throughout the day. So when people get home, they just want to self soothe with eating. It's been a stressful day. Oh my gosh, you don't know. I need a drink. I need, you know, something and they walk in and start looking for something to self soothe. Encouraging people to throughout the day when something irritates them, nip it in the bud, identify whether it's worth their energy. The ABCs, A is the activating event and C is the emotional reaction. Have them identify their beliefs and address any irrational thoughts or what I call unhelpful thoughts that may be contributing to a negative emotional reaction. Eliminate vulnerabilities. You know, we can't get through a presentation without talking about them. If you are malnourished, if you are exhausted, if you are feeling sick or in pain, guess what? Your level of tolerance for distress is going to be way lower. So encourage people to make sure that they've got the reserves they need. Encourage people to be compassionate with themselves. This time of year, but you know, any time of year can really be stressful depending on what people have going on. I have a friend right now who's working two jobs, two full-time jobs and still struggling to make ends meet and then gets frustrated because he's not going to the gym and he's not doing this and he's not doing that. And I'm like, dude, how many people actually can pull off working two full-time jobs for an extended period of time? You know, he's been doing this for over a year. So encouraging him to be compassionate with himself and not take for granted the things that he is doing. Teach people how to urge surf. When you have that urge for whatever it is, identify where you are on the wave. Is it a really intense urge? Well, cool, because guess what? It's probably going to go down from there. Kind of like the tides come in and go out. Have them envision that urge going out and remember that most urges only last for 10 or 15 minutes. Other tools for emotional eating. Close the kitchen. I know for me, once I have the kitchen all cleaned and tidy or my daughter does, she's my little kitchen minion now. I don't want to go in there and put dirty dishes in the sink. I don't like waking up to dirty dishes. So once the kitchen is closed and clean, it's less likely that I will go in there. That doesn't necessarily hold true for the rest of the household. But you can encourage people to take a look at maybe doing that. Brush your teeth. They found that the taste of mint, not only does it get out the taste of all the other foods that are potentially really yummy, but the taste of mint has an appetite-suppressant effect. My grandmother has done this for 60-some odd years and squares by it. Meditate. Whatever form of meditation works for you. Meditate. Practice mindfulness. Remember the one that I always fall back on because it's easiest to remember is the 4-3-2-1. Four things that you see. Three things that you smell. Two things that you hear and one thing that you taste. And you can mix up the senses if you prefer to smell three and hear two or whatever. But encourage them to do the 4-3-2-1 because by the time they're finished going through that, a lot of people will get distracted and move on to something else and be past that initial flush of emotion saying, I really want to eat. I really want to drink. I really want to do something to deal with this distress. The other thing to remind them, jumping back up to urge surfing, is the urge to stick with eating for this one. The urge to eat is in response to emotional distress. So let's identify what emotion you're feeling and where is it on the wave because anger will dissipate. Anxiety can dissipate. However, if we're holding on to it and we're nurturing that negative emotion, it's not going to dissipate as easily for emotional eating. Acceptance and commitment therapy. Love the book. Love the workbooks. Encourage you to Google it. The person asked himself, what am I feeling or thinking right now? What's important to me at this very moment? Will eating right now get me closer to what's important to me? So if I'm stressed out and I'm thinking, well, what's important to me? I'm stressed out over a promotion I didn't get. It's important to me to advance in my career. Will eating get me closer to advancing in my career? No. No, figuring out why I didn't get the promotion and working on that will get me closer to advancing in my career. So what other things could I do that would get me closer to those goals? Choose to let it go. Maybe it's a promotion that, you know, you tried, but, you know, you knew that you were under-qualified for it and you can choose to let it go and go, you know what? To get to that CEO position or whatever it is, it's going to take more than I really want to give to it right now because I've got all these other things that are important to me. So I'm going to let that go for now. It doesn't have to be forever. Can't just be for now or solve the problem. All right. I really wanted that promotion and whatever I've got to do to get it, it's worth it to me. So let me figure out what steps I need to take and change the way you feel or think about the problem. If you didn't get the promotion, I mean, initially it's hurt. It's devastation. It's, you know, a sense of failure. There's all kinds of dysphoric emotions that go along with that. But we can take that and go, okay, well, I can look at it as a failure or I can look at it as a challenge. What can I do to basically prove them wrong and get the promotion the next time? Same thing is true with holidays that are coming up. If somebody, if it's difficult to go to these family reunions. So people may have anxiety before they're going to them going, this never happens. This never goes well. What's important to me? Well, I'm going to this reunion because family is important to me. Will eating get me any closer to making family kind of get along? Probably not. Will it help me get through this reunion? Maybe, maybe not. What other things could I do to help me get through this reunion and, you know, not end up freaking out on Uncle Tom? Those are the things we want to encourage people to develop a plan. Holiday help, choose lower calorie foods. Turkey is definitely lower calorie than sweet potato pie. Keep a water or low calorie that beverage in your hand. If you got that hand to mouth thing going on, if you have something low calorie, you can still do that, but you're not consuming excessive calories and then feeling guilty later. Talk. Most of us in proper society don't talk with our mouth full. So if you're going around and talking to people in a positive situation, you're less likely to be eating. You're using your mouth doing something different. Obviously, if you're in a situation where every person you talk to makes you want to eat more than talking may not be the best thing. You may want to kind of be a wallflower. Stay away from the buffet. It's really tempting to hang out by the buffet because that's where everybody is. People come to get seconds and thirds and everybody comes by the buffet. So if you're a social person, it's tempting to hang out there, but it's also really easy to just mindlessly overeat, which can lead to feeling guilty later. Rehearse refusal skills. Oh, come on. You want another piece of pie? Oh, you've got to try some of this. So how do you do that? Do you try a bite or is that going to kind of set you off on a bad path? What do you do? Pay attention to your distress meter, whether you're at work or at a family reunion or wherever you are, pay attention to your distress meter. If you start feeling dysphoric, depressed, anxious, angry, any of those feelings, at a certain point you probably need to do something to sort of disengage or your meter's just going to continue to rise like a pressure cooker. So how do you let some of the steam off? Go to the bathroom, take a walk, breathe, say a mantra. Keep an index card with your coping mantra and two reasons that you don't want to eat. Because oftentimes these events are stressful for people for a variety of reasons. Maybe the family is wonderful and you love being around them, but someone in the family passed away in the past year or two. And every time you get together in these family reunions, it just reminds you of that person and it's devastating. That can be another reason to eat. Not everybody has a dysfunctional family. So if that's another reason, you know, remind yourself that eating is not going to bring grandpa back. So what can you do instead? And sometimes it's a matter of talking about positive memories about grandpa. Sometimes it's a matter of distracting completely. It will depend entirely on your client and how they're dealing with whatever is causing the dysphoria. So holidays bring out a lot of emotions in people. Happiness, giddiness, need for approval. Some people will fall back to feeling like they're six again. Other people will, you know, just thrive in the holidays. But every person's experience is a little bit different. Many people struggle with depression, anxiety, jealousy, grief, and anger during this time. Encourage people to think ahead of time. Going into this, I can see your stress is building. Most of us can see that in our clients as the holidays come up. They're like, oh, it's almost time for the holidays. And then you have happy, hollow, thanks, happy, hollow, thanks, miss. That's what it is. Hollow, thanks, miss. And people start getting a little bit snarky. So encourage people to say, okay, which of these emotions are do you struggle with during the holidays? What causes them and what's your plan to deal with them? When constantly bombarded with high fat, high carbohydrate foods, people are tempted to eat to feel calm, happier, or just numb. If you're focused on how good that pumpkin pie is, you're not thinking about the fact that grandpa died two years ago, or Uncle Bob is, you know, three sheets to the wind or, you know, great granny so-and-so is being hypercritical of everybody. You're just focused on pumpkin pie. And that is a nice quiet space. There's no noise in the head. It's just pure pumpkin spice. So encourage people to understand why they're eating. And help them find alternative ways, or at least help them understand it. And sometimes at this point, that may be the best that they can do. So what is it that they hope for? Let's not go for perfection. Let's go for progress. Instead of eating a whole pumpkin pie, maybe they have a slice. And they eat small bites to make that slice really last, but they eat a slice. So let's look for progress, because, you know, it takes a while to develop healthier coping skills. Emotional eating, like most other escape behaviors, never addresses the underlying emotions and their causes. That's up to us to help with. It often results in physical issues such as weight gain, poor sleep, and reduced energy from the sugar ups and downs. Some people will try to undo emotional eating by restricting other calories, which could lead to a nutritional deficit and more cravings. One of my friends posted on Facebook that in order to get ready for Thanksgiving, he just doesn't eat for the three days prior. And inside I was going, oh, you didn't really just say that. But, you know, he's a big boy, he'll do what he wants. Emotional eaters need to first find a way to stop before they eat and figure out why am I eating. And then make a conscious choice about whether they want to eat. Identify the underlying reason for eating and address the thoughts and emotions leading to the urges. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe, either in your podcast player or on YouTube. If you want to attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes, you can subscribe at hgtbs.com. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceus.com, providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists, and nurses since 2006. You can use coupon code, Counselor Toolbox, to get 20% off of your current order. 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