How Thoughts and Emotions Shape Your Eating Habits

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Read the Transcript:

How Thoughts and Emotions Shape Your Eating Habits

Hi there, welcome to the Eating Habits for Life podcast. Today, you and I are diving into a topic that’s super close to my heart and crucial for you to if you’re looking to transform your eating habits. Even if it’s just one specific eating behavior or habit.

I’m talking about how your thoughts and emotions shape your eating habits. This is such an important area because, believe it or not, the way you think can really shape the way you eat. So let’s get into it.

I’ll also be giving you 5 steps to find and change thoughts that ultimately affect eating behaviors, so that you can get better control of your eating habits.

And I’m sharing some clients stories so you can understand the steps in action and get some examples that you can identify with.

And my apologies for my voice – I’m getting hit hard with allergies and today it’s actually better than it was over the last few days.

So, a lot of people don’t realize just how powerful their thoughts are when it comes to eating habits. It’s not just about what you eat or how much you eat. It’s about why you eat.

Your thoughts, whether conscious or subconscious, play a massive role in your eating behaviors. If you constantly think, ‘I need that snack to feel better,’ or ‘I deserve this treat because I’ve had a hard day,’ those thoughts drive your actions. And over time, they can lead to habits that are hard to break.

I can personally attest to this, because those were the thoughts that I discovered going on in my head when I was emotionally eating and using food as a reward for a challenging day. Now, at the time I didn’t realize it. I only learned this as I learned more about myself and about eating behaviors and thoughts.

So, I want you to be able to pick this up sooner than I did, which is what I plan to help you with in this episode.

First, I want to briefly explain the mind-body connection. Every thought you have creates an emotion in your body. An emotion is just a collection of sensations in your body. Those sensations cause you to do or not do something. Meaning, an emotion causes a behavior. That includes eating behaviors.

So that’s how your thoughts and emotions are connected to your eating behaviors..

Let me give some examples.

When I was super stressed out as a PA in my very first job, I’d think about the snacks I’d have later that night to make me feel better. I’d get a feeling of relief in my body just thinking about it.

Now, I wasn’t aware that I had the thought, “I need snacks to make me feel better.” But, this is what was essentially going on in my brain.

So then my brain started connecting snacks with relief. Without even having to EAT the snack. And then when I did eat snacks, and felt that temporary relief, it just reinforced to my brain that snacks create relief.

So what did my brain decide to do? Keep that as a tool to help relieve my stress. And then it created a habit out of it, so that I was automatically snacking at night to “relieve” my stress. My brain just decided to put that activity on autopilot.

But my brain thought snacks were a fabulous treatment for my stress, because it only thought about the short-term relief, not what it might be doing long-term.

Which is actually quite normal. That’s the primitive part of the brain in action. We all have that part of the brain, even animals. That part of the brain is concerned with increasing pleasure, avoiding discomfort or pain or danger, and saving energy. NOT with the fact that I was creating a bad eating habit or gaining weight or making my stress worse by not truly addressing it.

Okay, are you following so far?

Now luckily, we have another part of our brain that can override that primitive part of the brain, and that’s called the pre-frontal cortex. The PFC is more concerned about long-term health, consequences, goals, etc.

So how do you access the PFC?

You slow things down. And be more intentional, more deliberate. With your thoughts and with your behaviors. Because you’re more intentional with your thoughts, your emotions are more intentional as well. And when your emotions are more intentional, your behaviors are also. Cool huh?

This is all exactly what I help clients with in my 1:1 coaching program. I have a process that is structured, yet highly personalized, because it helps with your specific thoughts, emotions, and eating behaviors and habits. I named it Eat with Intention, Lose Weight Sustainably, because that’s exactly what it’s been helping clients do, instead of eating reactively.

And losing weight in a very sustainable way, because you’ve broken bad eating habits and created healthier ones that work well for you, your desires, your lifestyle. If you’re interested to see if it’s right for you, just book your free consultation with me using the link in the episode description.

That was a bit of a rabbit hole – but I just want you to know there is help for this if you’re really struggling.

Alright, so I’m going to share some steps for finding the thought patterns that shape your eating habits.

Step #1 – Every time you feel an urge to eat something, ask yourself what you’re feeling. Is it hunger or something else?

Step #2 – If it’s something else, what is it? Specifically, what emotion?

Step #3 – Find the thought making you feel the emotion.

Step #4 – Question if that thought is 100% true (hint: it isn’t!)

Step #5 – Decide what you’d like to think instead that will NOT lead to eating in response

Now, I do recognize that thought-work is NOT easy, nor is breaking bad eating habits, which is why I do what I do, to help you with this.

But I really simplified these steps for you, so give them a try. You will at the very least, learn a lot, which is huge.

My client, we’ll call her Sarah just for confidentiality purposes, recently found that she wasn’t actually hungry for the food she was eating about 80-90% of the time! So 80-90% of the time she was eating, she wasn’t actually hungry.

She started discovered why it was. Sometimes it was just because she was used to serving herself a certain amount of food. Sometimes it was due to colleagues offering her food, so she’d eat it.

Sometimes it was due to desire – something just looking good. And sometimes it was due to stress and anxiety. So she really had a lightbulb moment when I had her question herself every time she went to eat.

And now through those first couple of steps plus coaching and tools she’s already learned, she’s already down almost 20 lbs. in just the 4 weeks we’ve been working together.

And more importantly, feeling more in-control and proud of her progress so far with eating habits.

Another client, we’ll call her Michelle, realized that she was getting takeout, mainly fast food, whenever she was feeling down, anxious or stressed that day at work.

She would order it when leaving work and pick it up on the way home. She would eat all of it, then feel not so great physically, and then ashamed emotionally.

Now, she wasn’t having conscious thoughts of “let’s order fast food to try to relieve this stress.” She just knew she felt an urge when she felt badly, to order fast food.

But now she has learned to identify her emotion, tell herself it’s okay to feel it, and then she doesn’t feel a strong urge to order fast food due to stress, therefore she hasn’t in a very long time.

Instead, since she does enjoy takeout, she intentionally plans to get takeout ahead of time and only eats what she is actually hungry for, easily saving the rest for the next day or just throwing it out.

So she uses her pre-frontal cortex to make higher-level decisions and be very deliberate, very intentional, rather than reactive.

See how you can still have the foods you enjoy, but it’s done in a much healthier way. You’re eating it due to hunger and not something else. You’re actually making a future-focused decision and feeling in-control of your actions because you’re overriding that habit part of the brain. The more primitive part.

Alright, so that’s what I have for you on how thoughts and emotions shape your eating habits.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a rating or review. The rating takes about 2 seconds and the review takes about a minute. In the review, I’d love to hear what results you’ve gotten by applying what you’ve learned. Or even if you’ve just discovered more about your eating habits by listening to the show. It’s so fun to hear, and it allows you to share your wins! So fun.

And if you’re ready to take the next step in transforming your eating habits, book a free consultation with me. Let’s discover the underlying causes and create a personalized strategy just for you. The link is to book is below!