episode 121: why you feel controlled by emotional eating
On Episode 121 of The Diet Diaries I’m diving into the myth of happiness and the connection to emotional eating.
Inspired by a quote I read on my beloved Cup of Jo blog by author Hugh McKay, I’m talking about the idea of wholeness and how that is a much more accurate way to describe what to want for ourselves as humans. If you’ve ever struggled with hard thoughts and feelings because you’re always feeling hungry even after eating and you constantly wonder why do I hate my body, this one is for you.
We’ve gotten to a place in our society where happiness has been put on a pedestal and the only feeling we want to experience…and so by default we’ve been taught to push away and feel bad about the harder emotions.
“Good vibes only” was seemingly everywhere on Instagram for a long time and I think it’s had a such a detrimental impact on our expectations and is a total misrepresentation of what the human experience truly is.
This episode is a great follow up to episode 119 where I talked through 4 key skills to help you navigate negative body image thoughts.
Here’s what you’ll hear in episode 121:
Why its normal and ok to not feel happy all of the time
Why chasing the goal of happiness is a big driver of emotional eating
Why food never actually makes us feel better
What we’re chasing when we use food to cope with feelings
Some of my favorite resources for learning more about emotions including Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown
How to use an emotion wheel to identify and cope with your emotions
A go to skill to help you shift your thoughts
How emotions actually coexist
If happiness isn’t the goal, then what is?
How emotional eating connects to fat loss
When we start to accept that having hard emotions is a normal part of being human then we begin to learn that we don’t have to fix that or escape it. And when we don’t have to fix it, we can redirect that energy to actions that are actually productive and helpful.
I’ll be doing an episode soon on some somatic tools for how to tolerate and move through the hard emotions and this will be a great companion to the tools from episode 119.
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[00:00:27] Hey everyone, it's episode 121 of The Diet Diaries. I always have to look down and make sure that my mute button is not blinking, cuz if it is, let me, it's muted and I have recorded entire podcast episodes. With it muted. Um, I wanna try and keep today's episode short. Um, I'm following up on something that I talked about in an email a couple of weeks ago, um, that has been really top of mind for me.
[00:00:52] Um, but before I do that, I wanna just quickly mention as I've been doing this spring weekend retreat. . Um, this episode is gonna air on Monday, March 27th, so we're less than two months away. It's May 19th, the 21st in Hunter, New York, which is in the Catskill Mountains, about two hours north of New York City.
[00:01:08] And this is a weekend all about giving yourself undivided attention because the power and the impact and the outcome of that is honestly transformational when you strip away all of the stuff that you are responsible for in your day-to-day. that is taking up so much space in your brain, the compounded effect of all these little things.
[00:01:30] When you take that away for a weekend, you are left with so much space to pay attention to yourself and when you were able to pay attention to yourself in that way. You can get really clear, you can get clarity like you've never gotten before around what you've been doing and what you want to be doing around many things.
[00:01:50] But obviously the, the, um, the focus of our weekend is around your relationship to food, how you've been using food, body image, movement, exercise, and self-care. And so the objective of the weekend. , what I hope that you will take away is a very clear action plan on what you want to be doing at home moving forward that is reflective of everything that you've been able to get clear on over the course of the weekend.
[00:02:15] Um, all the details are on my website. I will obviously link to it. If you have questions, reach out. It's $675 all inclusive that includes. , all the food, all the workshops, a goodie bag, the accommodations, um, it's gonna be amazing. So moving. a couple of weeks ago, if you were on my email list a couple of weeks ago, I sent out a link to, um, a blog post from Cup of Joe.
[00:02:41] Cup of Joe is one of my favorite corners of the internet. I highly recommend her and all of her content. I look forward to reading everything that she shares. And she has a, um, you know, a small writing staff as well. She shared a link to, um, an excerpt from a book that she found on Pinterest, but it does have the credit.
[00:02:58] Um, it's a, it's a book written by. Um, I guess this guy named, hang on, clicking over to it. I'm hum. McKay, um, author of the Good Life. And you know what I just realized? Hang on. I forgot to put my computer on silent because the worst thing that can happen is that someone can call me while I'm doing this.
[00:03:21] Okay. Done. I wanna read through this. It's gonna take me just, it's not super long, um, because I want to talk about what he writes. I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that I don't mind people being happy, but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in western society, which is fear of sadness.
[00:03:45] It's a really odd thing that we're now seeing people saying, write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep and cheer up, and happiness is our birthright and so on. We're kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default. , it's rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for, and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure, all of those things which make us who we are.
[00:04:07] Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don't teach us much. Everyone says we go, go through pain, grow through pain, and then as soon as they experience pain, they say, quick move on. Cheer. I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word happiness and to replace it with the word wholeness.
[00:04:27] Ask yourself, is this contributing to my wholeness? And if you're having a bad day, it is. That was one of the most powerful pieces of writing that I have maybe ever read because it was just so true. And. , we are told all of our lives, and we say this, and I've said this a million times, what do you want for Ben?
[00:04:54] I want him to be happy. And I realize like that comes from a good place. Of course, this, this, this goal, this drive, this push towards happiness comes from a well-intentioned place. And also it's way more complex than. , our human brains were designed to feel many, many, many emotions and many emotions at one time.
[00:05:21] Were not designed to just feel a single thing at one time. We are designed to feel many things at once. That is so often why I have, I use both and well. I try not to say, but I really try to say, and because two things can be true, including feeling two emotions, even seemingly opposing emotions at the same time.
[00:05:41] but somehow we have been taught that the default, the only one that really matters above all else is feeling happy. And why is that? And I think part of that is because emotions of pain or anguish or suffering. are by nature uncomfortable. They are harder to deal with. And as you think about this, this gets kind of like meta, andex, existential.
[00:06:03] But as you think about that, are they harder to deal to deal with because there's so much pressure on us to be happy that we're afraid of those things that we haven't been taught the skills to deal with those things that we've been taught, that those things are bad, and to push them aside, and this is gonna mess up the pursuit of my happiness.
[00:06:18] Not to quote that old Will Smith movie, which I happen to love. . It's really interesting. I don't have the answers to any of these things. I'm just talking about it cuz this has really sunk into my brain. You know, on the internet there's been this, the internet, I say that like on the worldwide web, um, there's been years of like good vibes only, right?
[00:06:38] So much of this like inspirational stuff and like, that's bullshit. That is not the human experience that is. Life and when we are constantly surrounded by this messaging of pushing happiness and good vibes. Only then when we feel things, not that when we don't feel those things, we're like, well, what's wrong with me?
[00:06:57] I'm not supposed to be feeling this un allowed to feel this. I have to get rid of this. How do I fix this? How do I find relief from this? Do you know how many of us try to quote, fix it and find relief from it with food?
[00:07:11] and it just like, I don't know, and I read this and I thought about this. I'm like, everything just like snapped into place. I'm like, oh my God. Part of being human is feeling this huge range of emotions. Brene Brown's most recent book, you guys know I love Brene Brown. It's called Atlas of the Heart, and it's basically a book of all the emotions that we feel she.
[00:07:30] Identified, I think it's like 79 distinct emotions and wrote about each one. This book is amazing. Read it, listen to it, watch the special on h b o, get this information into your brain in some way. Whichever one of those three formats is most appealing to you. Um, I have so many pages, tabs, and highlighted notes written, but the way she captures the human experience.
[00:07:53] and it normalizes these emotions. It is normal to feel sad, to feel jealous, to feel angry, um, to feel, uh, I can't even, like they're, the, the names of the, of the feelings are escaping my brain. But if you're a human, you're going to feel all them. And that's normal. It's not bad. We don't need to be happy all the time.
[00:08:15] And when we put that pressure on ourselves, , then it's like, well, something's wrong. If I'm not feeling this, how do I get to that place? How do I not feel this? And food becomes a temporary fix for that. It doesn't make us happy. It might, eating something that we enjoy, that we love might make us happy in the moment.
[00:08:36] But I always say this, that like eating. Try and feel better emotionally is like drinking water. When you're tired, it's like a total mismatch. You, you're super tired, you need to go to sleep. You don't need to drink water, right? So using food to try and feel better from whatever emotional discomfort you're feeling is never going to work.
[00:08:54] It will feel like it works for a short period of time, you'll find that relief. But then a minute, maybe even as little as a minute later, five minutes later, an hour later, That discomfort, that pain, those emotions are still gonna be there and food is not going to fix it. Um, and I, I wanted to talk about this this week cuz it's actually a really nice segue from the episode.
[00:09:15] Um, by the time this airs, it'll be actually be two weeks ago where I talked about these four skills. To respond to a lot of the negative thoughts that come up. And I talked a lot about like acceptance and saying hello to those thoughts. And it's the same thing. We, the way our our brains work is we have an emotion first, and then we have a thought that comes outta that we might not consciously be able to realize that's happening.
[00:09:36] Could happen so fast, but feelings come first, thoughts come second. So we respond to the feelings kind of in, in the, in the, uh, context of the. . Um, and so sometimes it can be really helpful. There's a tool that I use with clients. It's an emotion wheel. I didn't create this as a very commonly used tool in coaching and in therapy, and it just, it, it gives you a choices.
[00:10:00] It's a wheel and it's kind of categorized, right? There's, um, Different people kind of have different schools of thought on this in the number of like core emotions. And then within each of those four to six core emotions, there's like more detailed ones. Um, and so it just gives you a place to identify and point say, yes, I feel that to give a word to it, right, to notice a name, to say, oh, hello, I'm feeling really jealous right now.
[00:10:24] I'm feeling really angry. I'm feeling really pissed off. I'm feeling really sad. And it goes obviously so much deeper than that. , but to pay attention and not just try to push it away or gloss over to allow these feelings to be there and know that they are normal and to not just that in and of itself.
[00:10:51] gives us space to say, okay, well I don't have to use food in this moment to try and fix this. You might still have that urge to use the food cuz you're going to want to fix it because it's a skill to learn how to sit with some of this stuff. But just to know that this is normal is a huge part of it. So if there's one thing I want you to take away from listening to this today, it's to know that feeling feelings other than happiness and joy, contentment are normal and okay.
[00:11:19] And if you didn't feel those things, you wouldn't be human. You would be a robot. Um, and that good vibes only is bullshit. Excuse me. I fucking hate that shit. . Sorry for all the cursing, but I just do. Um, you do not always have to be the best version of yourself. And I may have said that. Look, I'm, you may have been like, I saw you write that in the post.
[00:11:43] That's true. I might have, and I take responsibility for things that. said in the past that I realized were, um, not well as well informed as they could be. You know, I'm always learning and growing as a coach and a person too. Um, we are humans and this idea of wholeness is all inclusive. It encompasses all of these things.
[00:12:08] And when you think about sometimes it's really hard to think about this in the context of our. So I often say if you have a kid or if you don't have your own kid, everyone has some kid in their life, a niece, a nephew, a friend's kid, some kid in your life you care about. We, everyone pretty much has that.
[00:12:24] Um, think about it in the context of that person. Someone's younger, someone who's growing up, someone that you care about, and you think about if they were to go through something difficult, you'd want them to have the skills to deal with it, right? You wouldn't want them to turn to something immediate to find that relief like food like.
[00:12:42] Like drugs, right? No, of course you'd want them to have the tools to work through that, but yet for some reason, like we don't want that for ourselves. We're just like in the moment, oh my God, I'm just gonna eat this cake, right? I'm just gonna have this drink. Um, and sometimes it's like helpful to kind of think about this more separate from ourselves so that we can sort of see, oh my God, that's not how I treat myself at all.
[00:13:06] And then we can kind of take steps in that direction. Um, . If you guys haven't watched the movie Inside Out, highly recommend it. I've actually heard a couple on a couple different podcasts and a couple different places, different coaches and therapists referencing this movie, and I saw it when it first came out.
[00:13:25] Ben was, I think it came out in 2015. It's a Pixar movie, and it's basically about the inner workings of the brains and where feelings come from 'em, and how feelings coexist. And they have, I think, either five or six core emotions. It's like anger, shame, joy, sadness. , um, I forget what the other ones are. And they each have like a little character and they each have a color and they have a personality.
[00:13:48] And it's also about memories and how these feelings connect to memories. But very much what that movie is about, is about the coexistence of these feelings and how these feelings make us human. There isn't only joy, there isn't only happiness, there is sadness. There's anguish. There's jealousy. There's frustration.
[00:14:06] That's part of being human and a lot of emotional eating comes from us not wanting to accept and acknowledge that it comes from feeling a discomfort. So great. And. feeling. I think guilt and shame over feeling that and not feeling something better and more positive instead that we need to find relief from that.
[00:14:28] I was having a conversation with a new client over the weekend and we were talking about this idea that we feel uncomfortable and we try to use food to deal with that. It's about finding relief and it resonated with her so deeply that language. So I wanted to share it here in case it resonates with you as well when we use food to deal with our feelings.
[00:14:50] We are trying to find relief from those feelings that's never going to work. What will a, we can't, we don't always find relief for those feelings. We need to figure out how to move through them. Part of being able to move through them and sit with them is knowing that they're normal. I'm gonna put a little caveat here that if you are dealing with mental illness, depression, that goes beyond some of this, right?
[00:15:16] And hopefully, Please seek out the appropriate medical support and therapeutic support. Um,
[00:15:27] I just wanted to say that separately, , um, there are times when we do need additional support. Food is still not gonna fix that, right? If you're dealing with depression, food is still not going to like, be the thing to help you outta that. But obviously there are situations and there are people in their circumstances where, Medication and specific types of therapy and whatnot to help us move through that.
[00:15:46] And I really speak about, you know, that kind of is all encompassing, but for folks who are not dealing with a mental health struggle in that form, um, and. are, have the day-to-day stresses of life and pressures and body image struggles, um, which obviously do have an impact on our mental health, but we need to have skills to learn how to deal with all the feelings that come up with that.
[00:16:14] And one of those skills, as I talked about this two weeks ago, is accepting, noticing, and naming, saying, hello. Oh, there, I'm like feeling really jealous. . I just, you know, saw an old friend and her body looks like the way that I want my body to look, whatever it is. Or I'm really annoyed because, you know, my best friend can literally eat whatever she wants and not gain weight.
[00:16:39] Um, you know, feelings like that. Um, or, you know, I, oh my God, I overeat this weekend. I'm so disgusting. I feel really gross. And what are the feelings, you know, what's coming up with that? And what are the, what's the reaction that starts to happen? , which is sometimes restriction, sometimes it's like, oh, screw what I already ate.
[00:16:57] All this stuff I'll just keep eating. Um, but just accepting that these thoughts are normal and these emotions are normal and giving them a place to exist and not trying to shut them down. Cause we don't try to shut them down. Then it's like, okay, well I actually don't have to use food to deal with that thing.
[00:17:13] I can realize this is actually an okay thing to feel. And if it's an okay thing to feel, that means I don't have to. That takes work. That's not just gonna happen. You're not just like, oh great, I feel really shitty today about X, Y, or Z, and then you just go about your day. This is gonna take work. But just that acceptance, that acknowledgement that this is normal.
[00:17:32] This is okay, this is not something that has to be fixed. Um, and I will continue to talk about tools. I'm gonna do an episode around like some somatic tools, movement, breathing, getting into your body, because that is a huge skill to deal with some of this stuff, right? So if you're having these really tough feelings and it's like, okay, it's okay to feel this way and I know that food isn't gonna fix it, how do I cope with it?
[00:17:56] These somatic tools, somatic meaning kind of, of the. Are one of the ways to deal with that and it's a great, it's in addition to um, some of the more cognitive tools that I talked about in the episode from two weeks ago. Um, there's a lot of different tools out there, which is awesome cuz we can figure out, you can figure out what works for you.
[00:18:15] So I think this is pretty much everything I wanted to cover today and that's super cool cause we're under 20 minutes. Um, I'm gonna include a link to that post in the show notes. Um, and I just think about this idea of wholeness. instead of happiness, happiness being part of wholeness, but all these other feelings, all these ranges of emotions that you feel part of being alive, part of being human, um, and learning to accept that and know that that's normal.
[00:18:42] And as we start to do that, we think about being whole, then we don't need to fix those things as much. And when we don't need to fix them as much, we're not relying on food and emotional eating to do that. Um, , I'll just kind of like tack on this piece a little bit cause I, I've been talking about this a little bit more lately and that I talk about, you know, if you're someone who wants to or needs to lose body fat for a variety of different reasons, which I'm not getting into here.
[00:19:14] Um, . I use a skills-based approach that this is one of those skills, right? If you are someone who is doing a lot of emotional eating, that's likely impacting your body composition. And so as you learn tools to find other ways to cope with your emotions, aside from only emotional eating, there are times and places where emotional eating is appropriate.
[00:19:35] I can talk about that separately. Um, , not only the first thing that will happen is you will start to feel more comfortable in your own body, in your own skin, in your own brain, and feel more confident in your ability to deal with these feelings and thoughts that come up. Therefore, kind of changing your relationship to food.
[00:19:55] And then as a result, because you're not using food to fill these holes, you're eating less. and your body, you will lose body fat, right? So this is how we talk about losing fat without a diet. Um, if you are kind of at a, at a, at a weight where you want to be, that feels good for you, right? There's obviously still a ton of benefit to this.
[00:20:15] Um, , it may not have obviously that same impact. I just, I like to link this together so that you can see when I talk about like a skills-based approach to eating and a skills-based approach, approach to fat loss. This is one of those things. Um, and obviously if you're someone who emotionally eats a lot, it probably has affected your body weight to a certain extent.
[00:20:35] Um, and so it's about finding, giving you tools, giving you support to deal with that, not just taking away those foods and saying, oh, they're bad. You can't have cookies anymore. Right? That we know that doesn't work. . Um, I hope this is helpful. As always, reach out with questions. Thank you for listening.
[00:20:51] Thank you for being here and more next week.