Are You An EMOTIONAL EATER? How To Recognise It

Ready to explore the emotional and psychological aspects of comfort eating? 
In this introductory episode, we dive deep into comfort eating, exploring the emotional and psychological aspects behind this behaviour. 
This podcast is for you if you're sick of diets, being told you need to lose weight by doctors and well-meaning relatives, and not being able to stop yourself binge-eating.

Here, I talk honestly about the side of overeating that people don’t usually talk about: the emotional and psychological side. 

Today, we discuss factors that make it hard to stop. Such as ancestry, availability of food, physiology, and psychology. I also share three questions to help you identify the triggers and feelings associated with your overeating habits.

We tackle your questions and comments on dealing with comfort eating, understanding human nature, and coping with emotions as a sensitive individual.

Join me every Wednesday for new episodes, and stay tuned for occasional surprise content in between. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you on the next episode!

In today's episode:

• Uncover the real reasons why you can’t stop overeating
• Receive support for your comfort or binge-eating recovery journey 
• Understand what’s going on for you
• Find a place of knowledge and self-compassion
• Learn new skills

Hating yourself won't help you to give up comfort eating. With genuine self-respect, it is possible to choose to stop.  That's what I talk about here.

Try this podcast episode next: How Do I Stop Self-Criticism?

Citations
Julia Buckroyd - Understanding Your Eating

Chapters

• 0:50 Understanding Comfort Eating

Transcript

0:00:02
Hi. This is Underground Confidence with Shelley Treacher. 
Do you feel compelled to over eight, but wish that you could stop? Or perhaps you know that emotions drive your eating, but you don't know what to do about it. In these podcasts, I talk about the side of overeating that nobody really talks about, the emotional and the psychological side. There are reasons why you can't stop eating, and that's what I talk about here. But this podcast is so much more than just about comfort eating. It's about what makes us human and turn to comfort. So the things I talk about here could apply to any addiction or many emotional difficulties. I help you to find your real inner strength and confidence. I know you've got it inside you, so it's my job to help you find it. You might be someone who nobody really knows how you feel or maybe you feel lonely sometimes. And so maybe you come for e as well. These podcasts can help you. I can help you understand what you're doing what's going on for you and to recover from it. And I can also help you to find other people who feel the same and who are going through the same thing. This podcast is produced weekly, and I am your host, Shelley Treacher. Welcome.

0:01:33
Let's start by asking, what exactly is going on with comfort eating? Over the coming podcast, I'm gonna ask you some questions that will help you start to answer what binge eating, over eating, or comfort eating are for you. I'm also gonna help you to understand that it's hard to stop comfort eating. It's not just a matter of willpower. To be able to stop over eating. In fact, there's quite a lot more to it than that. So today, I'll start to show you what you need to know to get a handle on your overeating. But first, I'm gonna tell you what comfort eating is not. It's not a response to hunger. Biologically, we're supposed to just eat when we're hungry, so the rest of the time we're doing something else. Easing junk food is comforting. It gives you a chemical response in your brain and in your body that makes you feel soothed, blissed out, calm, numb, or gives you a hit or a high.

0:02:36
We've got a social assumption in many of our cultures that people who are overweight could just stop overeating and do some exercise. Lots of people come into my office with frustration and sadness about stories of how their doctors, their personal trainers, or even their friends. Have told them to just cut down on sugar, try this or that diet, and take up running or swimming or any kind of exercise. This is not likely to be a total revelation or a fantastic new idea to someone who overreached. Trust me. The person who overreats knows that this is what it takes and feels a huge amount of shame for not being able to do it.

0:03:21
So I need to explain to you all the reasons why it's so difficult to have the willpower to stop eating. There are so many different reasons why losing weight may not just be a matter of oil power. I'll describe some of the reasons here today, My hope is to explode the myth that just saying no to overeating is enough. I'm also encouraging you to give yourself less of a hard time, to give yourself a break, for not being able to just stop eating. So the first reason is our ancestry. It's only in the last few decades and only in the west, that starvation has become far less of an issue. So we have an inherited predisposition to eat as much as we can when food is available. We are predisposed to put on and to maintain weight rather than to lose it as a way of surviving for longer. I think that's a big enough reason that it's hard to stop. A big enough reason to give yourself a break for not being able to stop eating.

0:04:28
But we also have the availability of food. Food has become available everywhere. From the checkout counter and b and q to the twenty four hour all night grocery store, there are shiny, colorful, attractive packets of salty fried sweet tasting temptations everywhere, and they entice us to over eat. Years ago, food would have cost over fifty percent of your wage packet. Nowadays, we spend less than ten percent of our income on food. I actually worked out once that I spend less than five percent. Those tasty temptations are really cheap.

0:05:07
Since that's two really good reasons why it's hard to stop eating, but then you also have your physiology. A person who eats less than normal is likely to feel hungry again soon and will be prompted to eat again. Falling blood sugar encourages a feeling of needing to eat. Satiety can be overwritten easily. Our bodies register fullness long, long after we're already full. The human stomach and digestive tract have the capacity to expand to deal with larger quantities of food. So until it is filled, you may actually still feel hungry. So that's also a pretty good reason. Don't you think that would make it hard for anybody to stop over eating? But then we also have the reduction in calorie expenditure. Our level of activity has vastly decreased in the last few decades. Due to the increase in driving, the reduction of parks and open spaces, the reduction in physical education at school, the lack of availability of time because we need to get the money in, less active jobs, and times spent looking at screens, especially in the last year and a half. So that's for compelling reasons not to stop eating. Right? But then we also have our psychology, such a huge reason.

0:06:33
Significant events, social occasions, and event times of rest and holiday have become associated with food and drink and overeating. Many times have you said to yourself? I'm on holiday. The diet doesn't count. I think we can all relate to it. But how we eat is habitual? Apparently, immigrants will give up their eating habits last when they change to a different country.

0:06:59
Food spells comfort, familiarity, home, nurture or safety, and fun and excitement for us. And that's just part of our everyday human experience. Very few of us embark on a voluntary change and find it easy. I think I'm actually gonna say that again. We do not embark on change easily or voluntarily. We have to freely think about it and work it out. Food is deliberately made to smell, taste, and look irresistible to us, and it takes quite a push to rise above that seduction. But that's what I'm doing here because the final factor of being unable to stop comfort eating is the use of food for emotional management. Most of us do this at some point, who hasn't seized themselves with chocolate, biscuits, cookies, cake, crisps, pizza, Chinese takeaways when feeling sad or frustrated.

0:08:01
Comfort food is a widely used term. The occasional use of food to comfort won't make much difference. However, if it is frequently used it leads to overriding signs of hunger and fullness and of course to wake game. So what can you actually do about it? Health professionals and diet companies may sometimes touch on the first few of these categories, although rarely do people tackle the emotional side of overeating. The people who come to my groups have tried so many different diets and most ways to approach weight loss, and it hasn't worked. In fact, I think it's made it worse. They know what they should be doing, but they feel powerless to do it because they haven't found another way to manage the day yet. This is not greed. It's not being lazy. It's the need to learn a new skill set that society and biology seem not to advocate.

0:08:58
Whether you call it binge eating, stress eating, emotional eating, food addiction, a compulsion to eat, comfort eating, sugar addiction, or chest pain over eating, it's usually got some kind of comfort or psychological element behind it. One of the things that people often ask me is, isn't it just a habit? Does it have to be something emotional? And of course, the answer is actually yes. It is a really deeply ingrained, very well grooved habit. You'll find that I talk about what a habit actually is in these podcasts as well, but there is also often something uncomfortable behind it. Hence the label comfort eating. Usually over eating is a response to feeling uncomfortable about something. How do you know you're uncomfortable? You feel it. Discomfort is a feeling. What I'm saying is that this is the tip of the iceberg that there is more to the way that you feel that never gets discovered because you eat before you can discover it.

0:10:08
What I've talked about so far today is what this pod cost is all about. I've helped you to identify that there are many reasons other than lack of will power that caused you to comfort eat. I mentioned some reasons that are ancestral, genetic, physiological, circumstantial, cultural, or psychological. And then I talked about emotional reasons being why it's so hard to stop eating. That's what this podcast is all about. The complexity of being human and emotional. That's why this podcast is not only relevant to people who are frustrated with comfort eating. It's relevant to anyone who ever had trouble with being human and emotional. I think that might be all of us at some point, but if you are a comfort eater, this puts you in the category of normal, which is the first thing I wanna educate you in. What you're going through doesn't make you weird, annoying, wrong or shameful. It means you're human.

0:11:13
In the second part of today's podcast, I'm gonna start to show you how there might be emotion behind your comfort eating. How can you start discovering what's emotional about your eat or any state altering habits, which could include anything from alcohol to scrolling, to shopping, or even serial dating. You've got to start asking what is the discomfort behind your comfort eating or comfort habits. It can be obvious. So for example, if someone criticises you and you feel angry and you don't know what to do about it, you might find yourself eating the whole cake. But it can also be more subtle such as in lockdown when we were bored, we might have found ourselves going to the fridge all the time because we just really didn't have anything better to do. My experience is that boredom is a little bit deeper than just being bored. There's something more going on for many of us that hides a whole range of different feelings that are hard to admit or know what to do with. In lockdown, for example, most of us were traumatized. We had to endure massive changes, felt isolated or stuck in with the same people, and lost a great deal. It's been a hell of an adjustment and it still is actually. So there are many different feelings that could be provoked that lie behind general overeating, all the eating many of us did in lockdown. And in this British stiff upper lip culture, We are not particularly good at knowing what to do with our feelings. So we're eating.

0:12:51
My aim is to get you used starting to think about what you're actually doing and why? Because this is the key to change. So here are some questions you can ask to help you to start to understand what's going on for you. When is it that you overrate? Is it late at night when you finish work? Is it when you're alone? When you're bored, stressed, tired, or is it when you visit a certain relative? When is it that you habitually binge or overrate? Spend some time thinking about this.

0:13:27
Number two, think of a recent time when you went more than you wanted to. What was happening just before? What were you actually thinking? How are you feeling? Were you thinking thoughts like this? I don't care. I don't like myself anyway. I'll be fat anyway. I might as late as now because I've got the food, I've got to finish it, and maybe tomorrow won't buy anymore. I'll start the diet tomorrow. Or were you trying to treat yourself? Give yourself some kind of reward for a difficult day. Did you have this thought? I deserve this? Or I'm happy, so I wanna do what I like. Surely, that is treating myself well. Were you thinking? This will make me happy.

0:14:15
Again, spend some time on these questions. Just work out bit by bit what was going on for you that you never notice list. Number three. What would actually happen if you didn't go to the fridge or snack cupboards all day? What kind of feelings would you be left with if you did this? The answer I usually get to this is that you would have an overwhelming, all pervasive Maybe even raging desire to eat. This is the most common thing that I hear, so you're not alone if this is how you feel. But what I want to you to start asking yourself is so what? What's the worst thing that could actually happen? This is where you really start to understand that it's discomfort that causes you to eat. Having answered these questions, can you see that it's possible that your eating might be in response to some emotion. So what I'm asking you to do is to start understanding what your discomfort is. How far back it goes, and then to find other ways to manage that discomfort. That's what this podcast is all about.

0:15:20
I'm now gonna give you a summary of what I've talked about in this second part today. First of all, I talked about hell calling yourself lazy is unhelpful self criticism. I then gave you three ways to start identifying the emotion behind your comfort thing. Firstly, by asking when it is that you come for eat. Then by asking what you were feeling and thinking before you overrate, And lastly, I asked you what you would be left with if you didn't comfort eat. To be able to stop over eating, you need to understand what's going on for You need to find a place of compassion for that. A place of self hatred is a very poor place to give up comfort eating, frankly, it's not gonna happen from there. But from a place of genuine self respect and with education on how to manage feelings differently, It is possible to choose not to overeat. That's what I'll be talking about more in the episodes to come.

0:16:27
Part of this podcast is answering questions and giving you comments from people that sent me messages. So to that end, I would love to hear your comments and questions. Is there something you'd like to know about how to deal with comfort eating? Why do you have any questions about human nature coping with emotion? Being a sensitive human being on this planet? Is there any I can help you with regarding how you feel. And if you wanna go further with me and would like some help mining out your confidence, please check out my latest programs in the notes. This podcast is produced weekly on Wednesdays, and sometimes they give you a little surprise bite of something spontaneous in between weeks. So I'll see you on Wednesday if not before Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you soon.