My Emotional Eating Habit

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Related Episodes:

• The 2 Biggest Emotional Eating Mistakes
• 3 Thoughts to Overcome Emotional Eating
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Full Episode Transcript:

My Emotional Eating Habit

Hi there, welcome to the Eating Habits for Life podcast. I’m recording this podcast episode way in advance of it being published, because the week that it comes out, my brother Jake is visiting from Las Vegas, so it’ll be a little busier than normal, and it’s my 40th birthday on July 11th.

So that means, as my own boss, I’m giving myself the day off from work on my birthday and my husband, Paul and I, are going to either Newport or Narragansett, Rhode Island for the afternoon.

If you’ve never been to either, both are gorgeous coastal towns that have everything you could ever want in a New England coastal experience.

Newport is famous for its mansions that are along the cliffs. Narragansett is smaller than Newport, and probably my favorite place in the whole world. So far at least. It has enough to do, but is still very peaceful.

So, in my podcasts I typically don’t talk a whole lot about myself, because I want it to be centered around helping you. But sometimes, an experience that I had, or maybe a personal story will be very helpful to you as you may relate very closely.

This is one of those cases and today I’m going to talk about my emotional eating habit, or I should say, my former emotional eating habit. I’ll share my story and I’m also sharing the two major things that broke my emotional eating habit.

As you probably already know, I was a Physician Assistant for 15 years full time, and I had chosen this career path when I was a child. I had wanted to be a surgeon ever since I was old enough to know what a surgeon was, so my very early years.

At that time of course I knew nothing about what life would actually be like as a physician or as a surgeon, but I had committed to that career as a kid. And once I commit to something, I’m all in and not backing out. That’s not necessarily a great thing all the time. Many times it is, but not 100% of the time.

Then when I was in high school, I changed this a little bit and went from wanting to be a surgeon to wanting to be a Physician Assistant. I credit my mom for finding this career, because I had no idea what a PA was.

But it sounded like a really good balance of being able to do what I wanted to do and be in the OR, but also having time for family, maybe a little bit less responsibility, and less schooling. That was a big one for me. So a few other factors sort of played apart and I ultimately became a Physician Assistant.

I was pretty miserable in my first job, Purely because of the job, but also because of some other things going on in my life at the time, and also a lot of anxiety. I had developed a significant amount of stress and anxiety during PA school, that just carried over into my first job.

And I didn’t feel miserable all the time, but much of the time. I was regretting my choice, and was super grateful that I had not gone down the path of becoming a surgeon. Because if I became a surgeon and then regretted that, I think I would have felt way worse.

So, to get through my days, I would find any comfort I could, and that was typically food. Specifically, carbohydrates. Bread, pasta, cereal, pretzels, crackers. This was an easy way for me to feel some temporary comfort from the stress, anxiety, and also some regret in there.

Are you a substantial amount of it, but I would still gravitate toward it. It was like a magnet for me. As soon as I thought about a box of crackers, I instantly felt hungry and looked forward to that box of crackers when I got home from work. I would then tell myself, well that’s your reward for getting through this day. So of course then when I went home after work, you betcha I was getting a bowl of those crackers.

And in college, I was never really a big drinker, however once I was a physician assistant and making money, I was able to afford wine. I liked wine. So, I would start to just look forward to going home after a long day and going for a quick run to get some stress out, eating my carbs for dinner, and having a glass of wine.

And it was pretty much never more than one glass. Maybe I’d have a second glass, but that certainly wasn’t every day. I usually reserved the wine for the really bad days at work. Which sometimes was most of the days during the week.

Pretty soon, I found that the wine also helped ease my anxiety very temporarily. But even that temporary ease in the discomfort of the anxiety, was enough for my brain to want it the next time I experienced anxiety. And the carbs, they were more of a “treatment” for the stress. It was something that I could look forward to as far as a quick pleasurable thing.

I also used my busy schedule and lack of time as a very good excuse to just have a few bowls of cereal or a big plate of pasta for dinner, instead of a more well-rounded dinner of a protein, vegetables, and maybe a little bit of carbs. Because quick and easy is very enticing when you feel like you have limited time.

And if you already want to eat the pasta, your brain is going to validate that very easily with thinking, “well I don’t have time to cook something else”. That’s what mine was doing for sure. Do you ever find your brain doing that? It most likely is, and that’s completely normal.

So back then, in my mind, I had the treatment for how crummy I was feeling, and also I was trying to treat the underlying things of stress and anxiety with other means. I was reading lots of books on stress and anxiety relief, I was running and cycling to try to relieve some of this. I was trying to do some deep breathing, using aromatherapy, spending as much time laughing with friends, doing other relaxing activities like reading or playing my flute, or painting.

I was doing all of these things, and feeling better to some extent, but I was still emotionally eating. And I didn’t like the outcome of emotionally eating. I noticed that my clothes were getting tighter. I had always been very thin and fit my entire life up until that point and I was starting to notice that I wasn’t looking like that anymore. No one would have looked at me and said I was overweight, but when I looked at me, I felt overweight and I didn’t feel like myself.

I also started worrying that I would continue in that direction and keep gaining weight. Especially since metabolism starts slowing down over the years.

So the first thing I tried was cutting calories, specifically for lunch. I would purposefully bring something for lunch that was only like 200-300 calories, and then bring a snack. I expected this to last me all day, and all day at that job at the time, could have been up to 12 or 14 hours if I was on call.

I did lose weight, but I couldn’t keep it off, because I got tired of trying to just eat a total of like 400-600 calories while at work.

So, I gained it back, plus another 10 lbs. or so, because the emotional eating just got worse. I hadn’t solved anything. And, little did I know that the wine, the alcohol, was just making my anxiety worse.

The whole time I was thinking that it was helping temporarily, but in fact the alcohol was making it worse. And I didn’t really understand this until I started reading articles and research on it over the years.

So at this point, I was not liking the effects of my emotional eating habit and I was realizing that wine was not really making it better and I was nervous that the wine would turn into a bit of a habit (which maybe it already had because I was using like I was using the food with emotional eating).

I was also realizing that all of the other things like exercise, relaxation techniques, all those things were helping, but not quite enough. So, it prompted a change. I hated not feeling like myself. I hated feeling like my stress and anxiety was just getting worse. I was fearful of going downhill, health-wise.

And this whole time, I changed my circumstances thinking that that would help. What I mean by this is that I told my now ex-husband Ricky at the time that I wanted to look for a new job.

We both had talked about moving closer to the ocean, and so we ended up moving to Connecticut, where I accepted a job that I considered to be a lot less stressful. It was more of a normal job as far as number of hours during the week. At my job prior, I was working anywhere from like 50 to 80 hours a week.

I was now living in an area that I wanted to be living in. I had just gotten married to Ricky. Life was good. But not really, because my anxiety was terrible and I was still looking to those same comforts, the carbs and the wine. I found new things to be stressed about, so that really wasn’t all that improved.

We ended up buying a house in Rhode Island, went through the stress of the move, and then went through the stress of a divorce. So my point is here that you can change your circumstance as far as a job that you feel is causing you stress, but there’s always going to be things coming up in your life where stress or another emotion will come up for you. You can’t escape that.

I also learned that I could do all the running and exercising I wanted to, but I was not escaping the anxiety. I would tire myself out so much in hopes that that would get my anxiety to go away, and it felt good while i was doing the activity and even afterwards, but that anxiety was still always there.

It wasn’t until a little bit later that two massive things changed my life. They ended my emotional eating habit and just changed my life in many other ways than just the emotional eating aspect. Those two things were learning how to really address my emotions and manage them until I broke the emotional eating habit AND also felt so much more at peace.

The other was placing more value on my body and my life than I had been. This meant learning some self-love and body-love. I had been just beating myself up and berating myself over the years with my thoughts. I wasn’t filling my head with healthy thoughts, so of course I wasn’t filling my body with healthy foods.

Once I started valuing what my body enabled me to do, which included enabling me to do the activities I loved to do like running and cycling and playing soccer and volleyball. It included enabling me to have experiences with my husband Paul and my stepson Ryan, family, friends.

I started appreciating my brain even, because it enabled me to have deep conversations, which I so love to have. I started appreciating all the body parts and organs that will keep me living a long time so that I can continue helping people through my career, whether that be as a Physician Assistant back then, or as an eating habit and weight loss coach now.

And then as far as learning how to address and manage my emotions, that was absolute key. And that has all to do with how our thoughts create our emotions, plus learning the skill to actually feel your emotions rather than trying to escape them or not feel them. All the emotions.

Because without the negative emotions, we don’t feel those positive emotions as much. And once you realize that you have the power to change how you feel in your body, to change your emotion, you feel so much more in control, you feel so powerful. You feel like you can do anything. And that’s seriously one of the best feelings in the world I think.

And what helped me with processing and managing emotions was life coaching. Which is why I incorporate this into my coaching now.

So, I’m no longer someone who is anxious. Whereas prior, I was diagnosed as having generalized anxiety disorder and placed on medicine for this for years period I don’t take medicine, in fact I don’t take any medications at all. I don’t feel anxious on a daily basis like I used to. This alone not only means that I feel so much better every day, but also, I do not look at food the same way as I used to when I was feeling anxious. I don’t see it as a treatment or a comfort.

I’m also no longer someone who is constantly stressed out, irritated, or on edge. Now of course, there are going to be some things that will cause stress, but I know that really what’s causing the stress in my body is my thoughts about the thing. My thoughts about the circumstance.

And I know how to go about managing this. I can either keep the thought and allow the stress, or I can look at the situation or circumstance in a different way if I choose to, and feel another emotion in my body besides stress.

How this all helps with emotional eating is that when you know how to manage your emotions, you don’t need food to take away or buffer the emotion. You don’t need food to escape the emotion. The negative emotion is no longer something that you need to run from. It’s no longer something that you feel out of control with. Your brain is no longer linking emotion with a need for food.

And a common emotion with emotional eating that I see often is boredom eating. This is the same. You could certainly do things so that you’re not bored, but you can also manage the emotion of boredom, so that it’s not seen by your brain as being something that you need to escape from with food.

I think managing the emotions is a skill that is well worth learning, because like I said emotions will come up. Negative emotions will come up. Boredom will come up. So, you can’t escape them or distract yourself from them all the time.

You can try changing your circumstances thinking that they will change how you feel, but it’s really your thoughts that create how you feel. So if you change your circumstance but not your thoughts, your thoughts will just come right along with you to the next circumstance.

So, for example, if you feel that your job is causing you stress, if you’re not managing your thoughts about the job, and you switch jobs, you’re just going to take those same thoughts with you that were causing the stress. And maybe not right away, but eventually you’ll start feeling that stress again after that honeymoon period.

 So different job, but same thoughts and same feeling of stress. Different thoughts, means different feelings. So you can have the same job, but think about it differently, or think about the people you work with differently, and you can have a different feeling and experience of the job. The one that you used to feel really stressed with. Pretty awesome right?

So for me, I went from a job where I was working 50 to 80 hours a week and it was very intense and I didn’t enjoy some of the people I was working with, to one that felt much better to me. However, I still ended up carrying over the anxiety and stress anyway and still ended up emotionally eating anyway, because I didn’t do any of the work on my thoughts or mindset.

Then when I eventually did, because I discovered coaching, that’s when the stress and anxiety decreased substantially. That’s when I overcame my emotional eating habit easily. It wasn’t a lot of work either, which was surprising to me at the time.

And it’s interesting because when I think about what I had to do to stop my emotional eating habit, it was more of what I had to think to stop my emotional eating habit. So that means that anyone can break their emotional eating habit, because if you’re able to think, meaning if you have a human brain, then you can break your emotional eating habit.

It’s not a matter of willpower. It’s not a matter of something genetic. It doesn’t matter if you have been diagnosed with something emotional or a mental health disorder.

If you have a human brain, and are capable of thinking, which I know you are, and that means you can break your emotional eating habit. Trust me, I thought I was trying everything to manage my anxiety and stress and that if I was failing, then that meant it was just going to get worse for the rest of my life. I couldn’t even think about if my anxiety got worse.

So basically, life coaching sort of saved my life. Learning the skills of managing my emotions and increasing my self-love and appreciation for my body, saved my life.

So, moral of the story is, you CAN conquer your emotional eating habit. Just a little side not, it’s not always a negative emotion. It can also be a positive emotion, but that’s less common.

It doesn’t take a ton of time either. You actually start feeling better and more in control of your emotions and your actions relatively soon. Such good news, because when we want relief from something that pains us, we want relief as quickly as possible, right?

If you are in the same boat as I was or a similar boat as I was and you might help getting out of the emotional eating and getting help with whatever emotions were causing you to eat in response, I can help you. I’ve done it and I’m currently helping other career women do it.

Let’s talk about your specific situation via a free consult. By the way, a free consult is just where you and I get to talk. We talk about what you’re struggling with, what your goals are, and I give you a sort of road map or action plan if you will, of what would get you from where you are to where you want to be. See you at the very least, you feel a little bit better talking to me about it, more clarity, and hope, because you find out that there is a solution for you.

So feel free to schedule a free consult with me. You can do so right on my website https://katemjohnston.com. Where you can just go directly to https://katemjohnston.com/consult. You’ll also see where you can book it on the episode page.

For the consult, you have a full hour if you need it, so that you don’t feel rushed. If you’re a little bit nervous, that’s okay, I have lots of questions that I will ask you, so you don’t have to have anything prepared ahead of time if you don’t feel like you know where to start.

Alright, take care, thanks for listening and I’ll talk with you soon.