Ep. 68 How to Stop Stress Eating

Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I am Paula Parker, and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So this topic, how to stop stress eating actually originated from a message that I received from somebody who applied for coaching. So they went on the wait list and I'll just read it to you. She said, I've heard you talk about.

Our desire for food being too high, that when our desire is at a natural level, we can be at our natural weight. She said, this is exactly how I feel. My desire for food is out of control. She asks, how exactly does one get the desire for food to change? Which I just thought was such a good question because That is what it's all about.

So I am going to specifically talk about stress eating today because I think that over desire is often created by the stress that we have and I'm going to go into that a little bit more and kind of explore what I mean by that. 

Our natural state is not, Oh, I'm really stressed.

I have all this overwhelm or I have all this emotional upset and unease. I really want all the food. I don't think that's how it works, but somehow we got there, right? So we want to talk about that so that we can figure out what's really going on and then how to stop it. So in this episode, basically give you an overview of what I'm talking about.

One, I'm going to talk about the strategies that we usually employ when it comes to stress eating, and they sound really good, but they don't actually work in real life. Okay. Secondly, I'm going to, um, talk about a psychological mechanism of desire for food so that we can then go to work on solving the real cause of this over desire for food that I'm talking about.

And then lastly, I'm going to talk about some practical next steps to stop stress related weight gain. Okay, so when we find ourselves stress eating and want to stop, we typically turn to one or both of these strategies. One, we set ourselves up for success. Which is food prep. We make sure that we don't have highly palatable food in the house.

So that means like no cookies, no chips. We don't buy that stuff. We don't keep it in the cupboard. This sounds good, right?  Set ourselves up for success. The next one is we try to become more self disciplined. They both sound really good. I mean who doesn't want more self discipline, but here's what happens.

So say you have a stressful day at work, your boss puts you on the spot, or you weren't quite prepared. So you get home and there's nothing for dinner and you think, you know what, screw it, we're just going to order pizza. And in the meantime, you are rummaging through the cupboards to see what there is to snack on. 

Those chocolate chips are looking really good. So then you think, okay, enough of this. I have to change this bad habit that I, and I need to set myself up for success. So then you decide, okay, I'm going to plan all my healthy meals ahead of time. I'm going to go to the grocery store on Sundays and make sure that I'm all set up for the week.

You do all of that in advance. Maybe you even set aside some time and cut up all of the veggies and set it all up for yourself. But then, guess what happens? You have another super stressful day, and you come home, and you see all of that meal prep in the fridge. And you say, screw it, let's order a pizza.

And you find yourself rummaging through the cupboards to see what there is to snack on again. So, what went wrong here? You did all the right things, right? We solved for the wrong problem. We changed, you know, what was in the fridge, but we didn't change the reason why it was happening. We didn't change anything in our heads.

So then we think, well, surely I just need to be more disciplined. I'm just out of control around food because I just like food so much and I can't resist it and my urge to eat is too powerful. And if only I had more willpower or more self discipline, then I'd be able to stick with it. Not snack, not order the pizza, not overeat.

We're trying to stop ourselves from overeating. But what you're doing here, when you do this, is you're asking the question, why can't I say no to my desires?  Instead, we might want to ask, well, why do you have all of that desire in the first place? 

You can imagine any kind of emotional state, like dread. For example, you know, I know I have this thing on my list, I don't want to do it, and I'm feeling a lot of dread, so I'm just gonna have a snack.

I'll preoccupy myself with food. Or I'm feeling anxious about a meeting, so I'll eat and not think about it for a little while. Or another one that is especially mean is I'm disgusted with myself for gaining the weight back. So screw it. I'm not even going to try today. I'm not going to get on the scale.

I'm not going to pay attention to what I'm eating. I'm not going to do any of the things. We think that we overeat because of stressful emotions like dread, anxiety, contempt. But that's not entirely true. If we can understand what's really going on, then we can stop. blaming ourselves for stress eating due to a lack of any kind of willpower or self discipline and start learning how to change.

Okay, so let's talk about what really is going on here. I'm coining my own term  called desire mechanism. So a mechanism of course is a natural or established process by which something takes place or is brought about. So why the term desire mechanism? Because we don't eat from stress. We eat from the desire that stress causes.

Okay. So you can kind of think of this like a backstory, um, you know, a backstory for the writers out there, you know, or I should say the non writers,  a narrative providing history or background context. So I just watched a movie. Maybe you've seen it on Netflix that I, I was like, this could have been a good movie, but.

It was called Fair Play, if you want to check it out. It was like so close to being a good movie, but one, if you've watched it, she wears heels everywhere to work, downtown in New York, and that's just not realistic. We all know that we wear our flats and then we put our heels on when we get to the office, number one.

Number two, Terrible backstory, we didn't really know why these characters were doing what they were doing and then we just didn't know any of their history, right? Example of a good backstory, by the way, is a book that I'm just finishing up called The Hike by Lucy Clark. So I'm all about the, um, female protagonist in her 30s.

In a thriller. I'm all about those books. And if so, if you like those, check out the hike, I feel like it had a good backstory. You know, what is leading up to the character's behavior. That's what we want to do with you. We want to know what's really going on before you overeat. What's creating all of that over desire.

Because again, for overeating all the time, it's creating those neural pathways in our brain. That's creating all of the over desire.  Okay, so let me just break down the mechanism so you can understand it and then we can talk about what to do with it. So we feel stressed, then our response, oftentimes automatic, is I can't handle this or I need to escape this.

Now depending on our capacity, which is our ability to process emotion, regulate our nervous system, stay present and connect with ourselves in that moment, rather than go on autopilot and disconnect.  That's our capacity, the degree to which we can do that determines what happens next. If we have a low capacity for that, we'll experience intense desire for food, overeat and create a pattern in our brains for more desire and overdesire.

So each time we do this, it creates more and more overdesire and increases the likelihood of this happening again and again. If we have a high capacity, we'll have low. To know desire for food, we won't overeat and we will maintain a natural desire for food rather than building an  overdesire. So what builds this capacity?

So number one is awareness. Awareness is the first step. We need to figure out what the desire backstory is. what your particular one is, right? Your desire mechanism so that you are aware of the specific thoughts, the justifications, the specific emotions in your relationship to your emotional experience that your brain has and that your brain has associated with food.

that says food is the answer. Then we can start to identify them in real time as they're happening and change them in the moment. So in other words, the overdesire is really coming from how you are thinking and feeling. For example, I'm experiencing lots of overwhelm. My relationship to overwhelm is I can't handle this.

You have an urge to escape it, then you get an idea of food, which creates desire, which leads you to eat, which then the whole thing creates an over desire. Okay, so that's awareness, being aware of all those specific steps, what's happening for you internally. And then second to increase our capacity is that we also need to learn how to process emotion and regulate our nervous system.

Okay, so the big secret is. That it's not the stress that's causing you to overeat. It's your capacity to manage the stress. And that's a big difference because you can increase your capacity, right? You can learn the tools, you can practice, you can do it over and over and over again. Every time you do it, you are going to be.

That much closer to being at your natural weight, but we can't eradicate stress from our lives. There's always going to be some degree of stress, no matter how great your life is, you're going to have some degree of stress. And so our, our goal then really is to not to try to wrestle our way through using willpower or self discipline.

It's not to try to set up our lives so that everything is perfect.  No, it's to build that capacity so that when we do experience dread, when we do experience anxiety, then we can really respond in such a way that's going to lead to natural desire instead of over desire. Okay. I hope that helps you. Maybe it was a bit technical today, but for those of you who have been following along on the podcast, I know that you can handle it.

And if you have any questions, of course, reach out to me. Okay. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.