Decoding Eating Habits for Career Women

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Full Episode Transcript:

Decoding Eating Habits of Career Women

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. Although I help career women with eating habits, this entire podcast show can help anyone who wants to change their eating habits. So if you’re a career woman, great, if not, that’s great too. I just appreciate you all.

Today I’m focusing on decoding eating habits of career women, because it’s really important to understand why you have certain eating habits as a busy or maybe not-so-busy career woman. That way, you can then actually find solutions to those particular eating habits.

So, for me, when I used to do a lot of emotional eating in my 20s, I had to figure out why I was doing so before I could find a real solution that would provide long term results. So, I discovered that I was emotionally eating when I was feeling stressed, worried, anxious, and I was also using food as a reward for a difficult day. It was something that I found that I was looking forward to at the end of a workday.

In fact, sometimes when we had a surgery that would go pretty late at night, I would actually think about what I was going to treat myself with when I got home from work because I felt like I deserved it after that long day. So, I will be diving into eating habits such as these, but so many more in addition to emotional eating and using food as a reward of course.

I will also be decoding these eating habits of career women for you, so that you can get an idea of why you might be engaging in these particular eating habits. And these are just some common reasons. These aren’t all the reasons. However, after you listen to this podcast episode, you will have a much better idea of why you are engaging in some or maybe all these eating habits.

My hope is that once you understand, in addition to making it easier for you to break out of the cycle of eating habits that you would like to stop, that you understand that you’re perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong with you if you have any or all of these eating habits.

When I decode these eating habits for you, it’ll make sense to you why you may have been doing some of these things. It’ll sort of be like that “aha” moment for you. And I’m sure if you’ve had moments like that before, there is a feeling of relief or another emotion like that.

Before I dive in, if you’re not receiving my weekly eating habits and mindset tips via e-mail every Sunday morning, you’re going to want to get on the list for that. If you’re on that list and receiving the Sunday morning tips, you’ll also receive invitations for free written coaching, where you can submit something that you need help with and I will provide some written coaching in response to help you.

This is especially helpful if you feel like you’re stuck with changing your eating habits or you feel like you’re getting frustrated or that your mindset is getting in the way. This is very common.

So, sign up for weekly tips with the link in the episode description if you’re listening from a podcast listening app like apple or Spotify, and you will receive the free written coaching invitations once or twice a month. You can also just visit my website https://kate-johnston-coaching.myflodesk.com/weekly-tips to sign up.

Also, I am currently working on a new free course that you’re definitely going to want, because it very much relates to this podcast episode. If you are already on the on the list or you get on the list before the new free course comes out, I will send you the course without you having to do anything in addition.

The free course is actually going to be a Private Podcast and comes with a printable workbook to make it super easy for you to create a simple plan to help you with common eating habits of career women. So get on the list for weekly tips, so that you can automatically receive that in the coming weeks when it is released. To get on the list for weekly tips, again, you’ll see on the episode description a link for that, or you can also go to https://kate-johnston-coaching.myflodesk.com/weekly-tips

Alright, so the first eating habit of career women that I want to talk about is skipping breakfast. I’m going to be more specific and say skipping breakfast when you’re actually hungry. Why career women tend to skip breakfast is because they’re often in a rush to get to work. Whether that be to get on a zoom meeting if you’re working from home or get to an actual office.

Career women typically try to pack their mornings with way too many things and then find themselves in a rush. Or maybe, all of these things do need to get done, but you’re just not allowing yourself enough time to realistically accomplish all of these before you start your workday. And instead of taking the 5 to 10 minutes to sit down and eat a breakfast, when you’re feeling hungry, you end up ignoring those hunger signals.

Hunger signals are just your brain communicating with your body that it might be time to eat something. The more you ignore hunger signals, the more your brain starts to get a little bit urgent and then the hunger signals intensify and then it really feels urgent. This could lead to stopping some place that you didn’t really intend to stop at, or eating the doughnuts that someone brought into work, that you really didn’t want to eat.

I mean maybe you wanted to because Donuts are delicious, but you didn’t really want to because it wasn’t in line with how you want your eating habits to be or your weight loss or health goals.

So, there’re two big reasons why career women tend to skip breakfast when they’re hungry in the morning and the first reason is because like I said, they’ve packed too much into the morning. The second is because of the false belief that they don’t have time to eat breakfast. Of course, you have time to eat breakfast. Set your alarm for 5 minutes earlier and eat a piece of fruit or a yogurt.

Breakfast doesn’t have to include eggs and toast and all the things, right? It can just be a little bit of something. This will help to energize you and get you going for the rest of the day. It will also decrease the likelihood that you’ll get overly hungry in a couple of hours and eat something or an amount of something that you are going to regret later.

Okay, so the next eating habit of career women is emotional eating which includes stress eating. It also includes boredom eating. Anytime you eat in response to an emotion rather than in response to true hunger, is emotional eating. We all emotionally eat, so don’t feel like there’s something wrong with you, because there’s not.

At some point years ago, you experienced an emotion that didn’t feel great, and were either given food by a parent or guardian or you sought out food and ate it. You then experienced a very temporary bit of pleasure from dopamine and also simultaneously a little bit of relief from that uncomfortable emotion.

Your brain noticed all of this and thought hey, that’s a quick and easy “treatment” that I can remember for next time. And then each time that this happens again, this just gets strengthened. Then an emotional eating habit can form, if this is done frequently enough.

Sometimes you can just emotionally eat episodically, but if done often enough, and especially with the same emotion or same emotions, can definitely become a habit pretty quickly. Meaning it becomes automatic and you’re not even really thinking about it.

So, decoding that one is easy. The food is just utilized as a “quick and easy” treatment of uncomfortable emotions. What makes stress an emotion that career women commonly react to with eating something is because stress can also increase your hunger signals, because it increases the release of grehlin which is the hunger hormone. So that combined with wanting to avoid the discomfort and increase pleasure quickly, is a recipe for emotional eating.

Boredom eating is also a very common eating habit, and you might think that this might not be common with career women, because you’re often busy, but that’s the reason why boredom eating occurs. When you’re finally not busy, such as late at night when you sit down to relax, this is a big difference from your normal day. Because it’s a big difference, it can feel uncomfortable period it can feel like you need to fill that time with doing something.

Eating is a quick and easy thing to do. It serves as an activity to decrease boredom and it also serves as the thing that helps to temporarily decrease the discomfort of the feeling of boredom. So it sort of kills two birds with one stone. So that’s why you might be boredom eating.

When I work with clients on emotional eating, which of course includes all the emotions, but very commonly stress eating and boredom eating, we work on the thoughts behind those feelings, because thoughts always create those feelings. We also work on the feelings themselves. And putting a pause between feeling the feeling and the activity or the reaction of eating in response.

I help my clients with processing the emotions, rather than just trying to get them to go away as quickly as possible with the food. Processing the emotions enables you to actually be able to experience the emotion without it feeling like a terrible horrible thing. It also helps you to feel positive emotions more fully, which is such a great benefit.

The reason why you are going to want to stop emotionally eating, is because of several reasons. Because you’re essentially using the food to avoid the discomfort of the emotion, that means that you’re not fully feeling your emotions and you start getting a little bit numb to them.

When you get used to not feeling those emotions, because you’re trying to get them to go away quickly with food as soon as they come, you start feeling positive emotions less intensely as well. We all want to feel better, right? Well if you want to feel better you definitely don’t want to be decreasing those positive emotions.

Also, if you decrease those negative emotions or avoid those negative emotions with food, you’re never really addressing why you’re experiencing those emotions, so you’re never actually getting to the root cause. When you are actually able to feel an uncomfortable emotion, you can actually explore to see where it’s coming from. What thoughts are you having that are leading to this uncomfortable emotion?

You’re really only able to problem solve for different areas of your life and improve your life, if you’re able to investigate your thoughts and feelings. And you can’t investigate these, when you’re just trying to tamp down those feelings and make them go away.

The other reason why you don’t really want to be emotionally eating, is because if you’re eating due to an emotion and not because you’re truly hungry or, this is going to lead to overeating. This can lead to weight gain, or if you’re overeating things like refined sugars, it can lead to some medical issues.

So if emotional eating is something that you feel like you do, you’re definitely going to want that free course that’s going to be coming out soon, because I address this and give you some simple steps to really start breaking this emotional eating habit.

The next eating habit of career women I want to decode is one that is related to emotional eating and that is using food as a reward.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I used to use food as a reward, mainly as something to look forward to at the end of a tough or long day. And the reason why career women use food as a reward, is because it can help motivate to continue to get through a tough day, and this is just because of dopamine that is released due to the anticipation of the reward. It can also just really increase the pleasure of accomplishment by releasing that dopamine due to the anticipation of the reward and actually getting the reward, eating the food.

So really food as a reward has a very high link to dopamine. Dopamine makes you feel good temporarily. As humans, we seek out pleasure, so no wonder this eating habit can occur, especially for career women who can have difficult or challenging days or who can have days where they really accomplish a lot and therefore a reward seems very fitting.

Food is often chosen as a reward because it’s quick and easy and our brains like quick and easy. Also, sweet, salty, and savory foods tend to be put on a pedestal, because these were the foods that tend to be higher calorie and were therefore valued more back in the primitive days when food was scarce.

So usually, when you’re choosing food as a reward, it’s not going to be the carrots, but rather the chocolate or the ice cream or the chips. And these types of food causes that release of dopamine when they’re actually eaten, but also even just with the anticipation of eating them. And a lot of this really goes back to the survival days, so again, there’s nothing wrong with you, this is just a human thing.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t solutions though. There certainly are. And in that new free course that’s coming out, I’m showing you some easy simple ways to start breaking this habit.

Okay, next up is mindless eating, particularly at your work desk or workspace. Now certainly you can also mindlessly eat at home for very similar reasons. This eating habit has to do with time. Sometimes, you have so much on your work schedule that you don’t get a lunch break and you eat at your desk. As you just feel like there’s a lack of time, your perception of time is that there’s not enough, and then therefore you end up eating while you’re working or doing something else.

So mindless eating is just not paying attention to eating because you’re doing something else. And you may think that you’re able to pay attention to eating and work at the same time, because you feel that you’re a good multitasker, however studies show that there’s only a teeny tiny percentage of people in the world that can truly multitask.

A lot of us just think we’re multitasking. We’re mainly doing one thing and sort of mindlessly doing the other thing or only partially doing the other thing, or doing the other things, but not doing it well. Interestingly, I used to think that I was a good multitasker, but then when I heard the statistics, I started realizing that I was not a good multitasker. My husband, Paul, can attest to this. He likes to lovingly tease me about this.

So, trust me, if you think that you are paying attention to your food and paying attention to your work, you’re not. Since your work is going to require more attention, what ends up happening is you’re not paying attention to the food and the action of eating. Your brain is going to focus on the thing that it needs more of its energy for.

Again, the reason why career women tend to have this eating habit of mindless eating, is because of time, but mainly because of the perception of lack of time period because really, you have 10 minutes to sit and eat your lunch without doing something else. Even if that means that you get to work 10 minutes earlier, so that you can get a little bit of work done in that 10 minutes, so that can free you up for a 10-minute lunch break.

And if your boss is not giving you a lunch break, even if that boss is you, maybe it’s time to talk to your boss, or talk to yourself about a true lunch break. The advantages of taking that time to nourish yourself and re-energize, and get your mind focused on your food and the act of eating is going to help you be more productive for the afternoon, but also help you to pay much more attention to your hunger and fullness signals.

That way, you don’t end up overeating. Overeating can oftentimes cause you to feel fatigued for the rest of the day.

Next up is snacking. When you have to work the full day, you look forward to little breaks, right? And work does not necessarily mean doing tasks that you want to do or love to do. So sometimes, career women seek out snacks as an avoidance thing or a distraction thing or even to help them get a little bit of boost in energy to get through the rest of the day. The challenge with this is keeping track of the snacking and making sure that you’re only snacking when you’re truly hungry.

Otherwise, you can end up consuming way more calories than you needed for the day. Consuming more calories than you needed for the day repeatedly will cause weight gain. Now if you’re trying to gain weight intentionally, that’s totally fine, but that’s usually not the case for most career women or most people in general.

So again, a lot of the underlying reasons for snacking throughout the day, is avoidance of a task that doesn’t seem so appealing. Using it as a distraction to provide a little tiny bit of pleasure during your workday. Also thinking that it will boost your energy, and it may, but a lot of times simply just drinking water will boost your energy.

Also, sometimes people pleasing is a reason for snacking at work as well. If a colleague brought in something and offered it to you, sometimes you’ll find yourself accepting it because you want to please this person. So, you’ll end up snacking on something you didn’t intend to or you weren’t even hungry for. All because you were afraid of saying no, because of what you might think the person would think if you said no.

Particularly, what you think they might think about you as a person for declining the cookies that they made, or the doughnuts that they so kindly brought in for everyone. And that just comes down to a fear of being judged. There are several reasons why we as humans don’t want to be judged by other people, however I won’t dive into that today.

This podcast episode is already getting long enough, so I will wrap it up. Be sure to get on the list for weekly tips, so you can receive tips to help you stay on track with eating habits, weight loss and mindset every Sunday morning. You’ll also receive invitations for free written coaching from me.

You will also receive the free Private Podcast course when it comes out in a couple of weeks. It’s called Crushing Bad Eating Habits: Simple Solutions for Career Women. I think at least. But you need to be on the list now in order to receive that e-mail with the free course in it along with the printable workbook.

Otherwise, you can always get the free course and workbook after it comes out, but you’ll have to go onto my website and just plug in your first name and e-mail to get the course.

And if you want to skip through the DIY stuff and start breaking bad eating habits immediately, I can help you with 1:1 coaching. I invite you to book a free consultation (there’s a button at the bottom to book the free consult) to get insight and clarity as far as what will actually help you with your specific eating habits. And from there, if you like my approach (which I’m confident you will) and if you’re curious about how we can work together to reach your specific goals, I can tell you all about that.

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