Are You Using Food as an Escape?

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Related Episodes:

• Sugar Cravings and Your Brain
• Boredom Eating
• Stress Eating

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Full Episode Transcript:

Are You Using Food as an Escape?

Hi my lovely, intelligent, hard-working career woman, welcome to the podcast. So today I want to talk to you about using food as an escape, what that actually means of course, and really help you to figure out if you’re using it as an escape. Plus, very importantly, what to do if you are.

Before I dive into that though, doors are open to Food Freedom, so if you’ve been battling your bad eating habits for long enough, we’d love to have you as a member inside Food Freedom to help you finally break those eating habits that you’ve had enough of.

I do want to mention a fun new feature inside. It’s called “The Weekly” and it’s a space where you’ll find a weekly word from me, just a bit of inspiration or a tip, or just something to think about. Plus, you’ll find weekly reminders and lots of healthy meal ideas to make your weeks easier if you want to start cooking more simple, quick, but healthy meals.

Every week, I’ll update the meal ideas, so you get fresh new ones each week for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts and snacks. So fun.

I do want to mention though, I’m not about telling you what to eat, but rather how to get control of your eating habits, so you can manage your weight better, improve your overall health, decrease risk of what we call preventable disease in medicine, and just really not have those negative thoughts and feelings around food, your eating habits, or your body any longer.

Because that’s all part of it too. That’s part of the benefit of changing your eating habits. You also change your thought habits along the way. They go hand in hand. It’s like a double-win. That’s why I just think changing your eating habits is so far superior to any form of dieting. Plus, changing your eating habits enables you to lose weight and keep it off, unlike diets which rely solely on willpower and complete restriction, which might work initially, but then they stop working.

That being said, I like to still provide you with easy ways to have healthier eating habits, so I thought meal ideas with recipes would be really helpful for that. Plus, it’s something fun to look forward to each week if you do like to cook or want to get more into cooking, especially over the fall/winter months.

Alright, so for the episode topic today, let me ask you, “are you using food to escape?”

What does this mean exactly?

Using food to escape a negative emotion. I define a negative emotion as just any emotion that doesn’t feel good or is uncomfortable. So, somewhat subjective, right?

Boredom is one of those emotions that’s usually seen as negative, because it doesn’t feel good, but maybe someone with 4 small children who find herself bored for an hour, thinks that is the most amazing feeling in the world in that moment, right?

So, using food to escape a negative emotion just simply means that the food itself provides some pleasure and also avoidance of the discomfort of that negative emotion. The taste of the food can help you to avoid the discomfort of the negative emotion and the action of eating the food can provide a distraction.

It occurs when you don’t really want to sit with or feel that negative emotion because it’s not comfortable to be feeling, so you look to food to provide a way to not sit with or feel that negative emotion. It’s an escape. Other people use the term, “buffer.” You’re buffering the feeling of that negative emotion with the food.

Other things people can use as escapes from negative emotion include not just food, but other substances, such as anything sweet like soda, or alcohol, recreational drugs, prescription drugs.

Also, mindless activities like watching TV, scrolling on social media, playing a word game on your phone.

Even things that are considered “healthy” like exercise, listening to music, can be used as an escape from negative emotion.

I’m not saying that these activities are only being used to escape negative emotion, that’s not the case. And I’m not saying anytime you eat a dessert or half a bag of chips that you’re avoiding negative emotion.

That’s why I really wanted to get into this topic today, to be able to help you understand if you might be using food as an escape for a negative emotion. And part of understanding that, is just really understanding negative emotion, our human tendencies with negative emotion, and what other things can be used similarly to escape from negative emotion.

In Food Freedom, there is an entire section that covers emotions as a trigger for certain eating behaviors and habits. It’s just that important and plays such a large role in your eating behaviors. That’s because behind every action is a feeling or emotion. It may not always be a negative emotion, but oftentimes it is.

So, for example, sometimes you might feel joy and celebrate with a donut, and that’s not a bad thing, you deserve that donut, right?

It’s when you use food in response to a negative emotion that’s not a good habit to have. And once you start doing it a few times, it will start to become a habit.

When you do it a few times in the same context more specifically. Meaning, time, place, circumstance, or emotion. So, you can sort of count the emotion as the circumstance.

You find yourself stressed after a meeting at work, so you grab a donut on your way out of the conference room. Or you find yourself anxious every time you have to present something, so you develop a habit of getting a soda from the vending machine to help escape that anxiety.

Those foods (or beverages) provide a bit of pleasure to counteract the negative emotion. To counteract the unpleasantness. And this is completely normal. Your human brain was developed on purpose to have this desire to avoid pain or discomfort.

And that’s for survival purposes, so it’s really actually an amazing thing, when you think about it that way. Back in the day, humans needed to have an instinct to avoid anything that can cause pain or illness, right?

It wouldn’t have been great for the survival of our species to walk up to the bear and try to pet it. It wouldn’t have been great to keep eating the poisonous plant that was made you sick the first time you ate it without knowing.

So that was a VERY useful behavior to have, to avoid pain or discomfort or illness.

BUT, any virtue overused, can become something that’s perceived as a “problem.” Especially since our human brain already knows a lot of the dangers. It already knows you shouldn’t walk up to a bear or eat that poisonous plant, so now it has moved onto anything that doesn’t make you feel good, and that is now commonly negative emotions in response to all different things.

A negative emotion of irritation at someone. A negative emotion of worry about a family member. Your brain interprets these negative emotions as something to avoid, just like the bear and the poisonous plant.

So, in the case of using food to escape negative emotion, you’re just overusing a primitive survival instinct. That’s it. It’s not a fault. It’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s not something you should be judging yourself on. Please don’t. Those are all useless anyway.

And food is an easy thing to use as an escape because we are always eating food anyway, right? It’s always near us, we need it to survive, and now especially, it tastes delicious! At least a lot more tasty than it probably did thousands of years ago.

Now, you’re going to want to go to a thought like, “well, how do I break that habit that is just human instinct? That must be so strong and tough to break!” Well, luckily, the pre-frontal cortex is a portion of your brain that is much more intelligent than the more primitive brain, and humans have a very large and advanced pre-frontal cortex. You use the pre-frontal cortex to break that habit, which I’ll tell you more about in a bit.

So, it’s fairly easy for you to stop using food as an escape. The hardest part is literally that it doesn’t happen overnight. That’s hard for us because we want everything now, right? We’re so impatient, myself included.

But as far as breaking that habit of using food to escape…is actually pretty easy and simple.

Also, speaking of that, if you have the thought that something will be easy, it will be way easier than if you have the thought something will be hard. That’s because you’ll be less resistant to the actions you need to take if you have the thought something will be easy. You’ll be so resistant to the actions you need to take if you think something is going to be hard, right?

For example, if a friend tells you that skiing is easy, you’re more likely to give it a try, right? If another friend is sort of clumsy and hates the cold, they might have another opinion that skiing is hard. They would probably then tell you it’s hard, and that would most likely make it less likely you’d want to give skiing a try, right?

This all has to do with mindset and the effect your thoughts, collection or thoughts (or mindset) ultimately has on your behaviors or actions. And of course, your behaviors or actions will determine your results. So your thoughts about something will trickle down to your results.

Just wanted to mention that as a side note, because it’s very important. And by the way, I’m hosting a free virtual workshop via Zoom on Tuesday, October 25^th at 7pm ET, where I’m giving you a Mindset Makeover for Better Eating Habits, so come to that. The link is on the episode page to reserve your seat and get the Zoom link for the workshop.

Alright, so how to you stop using food as an escape? I’m going to give you the cliff notes version, because like I said, I have an entire section of classes to help you with this inside Food Freedom, with all the different tools you can choose from to assist you, so you can be pretty much guaranteed to have success.

But in a podcast episode, of course we have limited time, so here are some things to help you out.

First of course, is being able to tell if you are using food to escape a negative emotion. If you already know you do, great! If you aren’t sure, here’s how to tell.

If you have noticed a pattern with eating certain foods, there’s a likely chance there’s a negative emotion driving it. Sometimes it feels like just a craving, but oftentimes, there is a negative emotion behind that craving. And by the way, a craving can be considered a negative emotion too! A craving is a feeling or an emotion and it’s oftentimes uncomfortable. So eating the food to avoid that discomfort of a craving, can make that craving go away temporarily.

But we want to look for any other negative emotions, right?

So what I recommend doing is looking for patterns. Look for patterns not just with eating certain foods, like say Oreo cookies, but also look for patterns with your emotions.

To help with this, write down your top three negative emotions you experience most weeks. And again, a negative emotion doesn’t have to be extreme like anger, it can also just be something considered unpleasant like boredom or worry.

So for me, worry is definitely high on the list, uncertainty also, and probably impatience.

So what are your top three? Really try to think hard about this, because it really is key.

Once you know your top three negative emotions, and once you’ve thought about any specific food patterns like sugary foods or drinks, chips, basically anything really tasty or satisfying, something usually sweet, salty, or fatty, see if you can connect any of those.

Do you notice that you tend to eat Oreos when you’re worried? Do you notice that you tend to eat seconds when you aren’t really hungry, when you’re sad or feeling lonely?

If you can’t notice any patterns, that’s okay….but if you can, that’s really helpful going forward. So, the next thing you’ll do is get really good at understanding how each of those emotions feels in your body and be on the lookout for them. When you know exactly how they feel in your body, it’s so easy to notice when you’re feeling them.

So, does loneliness typically feel like there’s a heaviness to your body, and you stare off into space? Just take note of what each of those top three emotions feels like in your body.

Then, when you recognize that in the future, you’re aware that that negative emotion is present. This is where your pre-frontal cortex really comes into play.

You notice that you’re experiencing that emotion. You’re aware of it and you don’t just automatically act on it. Instead, you just say to yourself (or out loud if you so desire), “oh hello loneliness, I see you and I know I don’t need to run away from you. You’re not a danger to me.” Or if it’s sadness, or boredom, or anger, or guilt, do the same thing.

Recognize it’s there and it’s not a danger. Your more primitive brain is going to want to escape from that “danger,” that discomfort of the negative emotion, but your pre-frontal cortex is going to overpower the more primitive brain, because it’s more intelligent.

This is so important, because your brain is so used to thinking that negative emotion is something you need to run away from, like a bear, so it looks to food as that escape. Because food gives you that dopamine hit, that bit of pleasure, and that feels a lot better than the negative emotion. But you’re stronger than that, you’re smarter than that. Much smarter. You just need to use that pre-frontal cortex to tell yourself the truth, that the negative emotion is not a danger.

Now, just a disclosure here, of course some negative emotions are there because of a true danger, right? Like fear if someone is about to attack you, or hesitancy if something looks dangerous.

But in the case of many of our emotions like irritation, boredom, sadness, there’s not necessarily an inherent danger there, right?

Alright, so give it a try and remember, it really is easy, and if you understand that it is easy and have the thought that it will be easy, it more than likely will be.

If you have the thought that your habits are too strong to break, well, then you probably won’t end up breaking them. Your habits are NOT too strong to break, and like I said, that’s because of our pre-frontal cortex and the fact that we now know so much about human behavior, how habits form, emotions, thoughts, all the things.

So, if you need some further mindset help, come to the free workshop, or if you can’t make that one, sign up anyway and I’ll send you the replay.

Alright my friend, thanks so much for listening, and if you are enjoying the show, please give it a quick rating right in whichever app you’re listening on, to keep it going. Take care and I’ll talk with you soon.