Understand Your EVENING COMFORT EATING In 4 Steps

Today, Shelley explores the most common time we overeat; in the evening. Drawing from her expertise in helping people recover from emotional eating, Shelley discusses why we overeat in the evening. She explores hunger, habit, lack of preparation, and emotional responses to daily stress. 

Shelley offers a four-step process for breaking this pattern, encompassing observation of thoughts, habits, emotional states, and the purpose of binge-eating. 

This episode concludes with a recap of the steps and an invitation to embrace a journey of self-discovery and transformation.

• Focus: Recovery from emotional overeating
• Series: Exploring evening eating habits

Announcement: Podcast release schedule: Shifting to Thursdays.

Your next podcast: How to Stop Procrastinating

Transcript

Shelley Treacher Underground Confidence: 0:00

today I'm going to talk about evening comfort eating. Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I help people to recover from the emotional side of overeating. This next series in my podcast is going to be about evening eating because it's so common. But before I start the podcast, I just want to let you know that the podcast is going to be coming out on This gives me one more day to have time to do the editing. If you need help right now with your emotional eating, and you want to go further than this podcast can help you with, I have a good place for you to start in my community. If you download the app, Underground Confidence. you'll find my community in that app. Where you can ask and comment support others or get support for yourself, and you'll also find a little online course about what emotional eating is, if you're not sure how to identify that. But let's get on with talking about evening eating. This is one of the most common things that people come to me with and when I asked in my group recently on social media what time of day or when people eat the most about 99% of the time it's in the evening. So it's going to be helpful for us to start breaking this down a little bit. What do you think causes your comfort eating in the evening? Most commonly, it's a mixture of hunger, habit, lack of preparation, and an emotional response to the stress of the day. So let's look into association and habit first of all. And here I'm going to include a social media post that I did this weekend about how a craving works and how to beat it. Addiction is such a weird thing. I've got a friend coming tonight and, for some reason, thoughts like, oh I'm just gonna eat whatever I want this weekend. Keep coming into my head, and I've got this particular craving for milk, peanut, chocolate. And I know, or I think I know, I'm gonna go and get some. I'm planning it, right? After weeks of not eating, or months even, of not eating milk chocolate. And so I thought, why, with this particular friend coming? And then I suddenly remembered. I associate him with milk and peanut chocolate because we had a holiday once, years ago, where he introduced me to this milk chocolate. But now I know that, I feel like, oh, I don't need to go and get it now. I don't actually need that chocolate. That was just a chemical craving. Now let's talk about hunger. Often my clients say that they've been good all day, as in they've starved themselves and then they make up for it in the evening. This is surprisingly common to evening eating. Is this something that you do? Unfortunately, this sets up a starvation mode in the body, so the body will want you to eat more to compensate. And along with this comes a little bit of brainwashing, so watch the promises that you make to yourself as well. So all of these things are powerful influences on what you eat and how much you eat in the evening. But most commonly, what I find is that it's been caused by a feeling of stress or unhappiness in the day. This may be over productivity or avoidance, or it might be squashing a part of yourself. Or it might even be stress addiction. It might relate to a core wounding, of people pleasing, or feeling that you have to work to prove your worth and to survive. Either way, whatever causes it, it's a brain pattern to observe. So start asking, In what ways do you suppress yourself and the feelings that you have in the day? And what bargains do you make with yourself as a result? I've told you before that one of my habits has been, if I've been stressed in the week and working too hard, back of my mind, I'm always thinking, it's alright, I'm so going to have a drink and some snacks at the weekend, as soon as that weekend hits up, usually on a Friday. But now because I'm aware of that, I work on it during the week to make my week much less stressful, so that I don't need to do that. This makes it a lot easier to resist that chemical association and habit. Which kicks in any time I'm tired or grumpy now. As I'm often saying, it is a work in progress and it takes time and consideration. And that is actually why I'm shifting the podcast to Thursdays. I'm giving myself time not to be so exhausted by Thursday evening. that I need an escape route. So today I'm going to show you the process that I use and a process that can help you if you overeat in the evenings. Just as an aside here Maybe it's not in the evening that you eat. Maybe it's a constant battle for you all day. But this process I'm about to give you can help anyway. Evening overeating is a habit in itself. It may also be surrounded by other little habits or patterns of thought. So get to know what happens around it for you. So step one is observing your thoughts. What reasons do you tell yourself for binge eating after work? Are you telling yourself that it is a reward for a very hard day? Are you saying that there's nothing else that you could possibly do?, or that you need it to relax? Step two, observe your habits and patterns around it. When do you buy the food for the evening? Do you put your PJs on? Do you tidy up first? Do you turn your phone off? Is it straight after dinner that you start binging? Or is it when you're sitting on the sofa watching Netflix? Does it come as a habitual package? Step three, which is actually really step one, but I'm putting it here because you're more likely to be focused on the eating part at this stage. So sometimes we have to work backwards to work out what's going on. But step three, and step one as you're going forward, you're going to want to be observing what's happening in the daytime that gives you a background for evening eating. What state are you in during the time when you're not overeating? And then right before your binge, what state are you in then? Is it that you're absolutely content at work, or seemingly so? And then feel your unhappiness creep in, in the evening? Or do you feel uncomfortable in the day, and then need to relax at night? Often people who overeat in the evening eat very little during the day, convincing themselves that they're less likely to put on weight, knowing that they will binge at night or at the weekend. Unfortunately, if there are periods of fasting, the opposite is true. The body thinks it's starving. So it's desperate for fuel. And it is more likely to store the weight. It's possible that in the time of an absence of food, you're also not receiving the nutrition that your body needs. So that may also be setting you up for a binge. Challenging your habits and rebalancing your metabolism are two very important keys to tackling binge eating in the evening. So ask yourself in the daytime or in the working week, what emotional state are you in? And what physical state? And what energetic state? Step four is learning the purpose of your binge. You're probably also starting to ask right now, what is this? Why do I need to binge? And coming up with ideas of what it does for you. But if you're not, start asking, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? If you're feeling worried or you have low self esteem and you've been running all day long, you're going to need to let go at the end of the day. Maybe you feel you had too much responsibility in the day and now you need to let it go. Or maybe you're afraid of going home and being alone. Binge eating, comfort eating, or any other kind of addiction, actually. Over productivity and worry can also be addictions. Causing overthinking and overanalyzing. Instead, perhaps of feeling your way through life, in any addiction, your purpose is to let go and to feel better. To get some light relief and it kind of works, doesn't it? For a really short period of time. One of the states that you might be in when you come to evening eating is a stress state. Especially with the economy as it is right now. And with everything that we've been through in the last few years. So next time I'm going to be talking about how to recognise a stress state. But today what I've done is take you through a four step process to approach your evening eating. The first step was to understand what thoughts you're having around your evening eating. The second step was to understand the habits that you have around evening eating. The third step was to observe what state you're in all day that might cause you to binge eat. How might the day be related? And then your fourth step was to be curious about what that binge is actually doing for you. That's it for today. As I say, if you need any further help right now, you can access my app, my community, lots of free information, And a specific course if you're not sure about the emotion behind your eating. If you download the app, Underground Confidence. you'll find my community in that app. Where you can ask me anything or say anything to me. And I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening today. This has been Underground Confidence with Shelley Treacher. I will see you next Thursday.