The 2 Biggest Emotional Eating Mistakes

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Related Episodes:

• 3 Thoughts to Overcome Emotional Eating
• Emotional Eating: Is It Even a Problem?
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Full Episode Transcript:

The 2 Biggest Emotional Eating Mistakes

Hi there, welcome to the Eating Habits for Life podcast. Emotional eating is such a hot topic as far as “bad” eating habits. As far as what I see, it is the biggest eating habit that is a pain point for most career women (and probably for all the humans) who are struggling with food or their weight.

So in this episode, I’m sharing the two biggest emotional eating mistakes, so that you can at least become aware of these when you’re doing them.

Just becoming aware of them is the first most important step. Becoming aware of them will benefit you, because then it’ll allow you to catch yourself before you make those mistakes again next time.

So why is emotional eating such a common eating habit that you might struggle with?

I believe that’s because of many different things, one of which being we just don’t know how to manage our emotions well and that’s not our fault. That is partly because we’re not really taught that as a kid, and we’re certainly not taught that in school or even in adulthood.

So where are we going to learn how to do that? And if you don’t know how to manage your emotions well, that just sets you up for emotional eating.

Another big reason that I believe that emotional eating is such a big pain point for people struggling with food or their weight is because it’s an eating behavior and our behaviors are driven by how we feel, our emotions.

So, with emotional eating, there will be a trigger and that’s the emotion. The emotion drives the eating, the behavior.

Now, knowing what I know about the human brain, it only makes sense that if we’re feeling negative emotion, that that may drive us to eat in response. To try to decrease or take away the discomfort. Especially because humans were actually meant to try to avoid discomfort.

Therefore, it’s really not surprising that our human brains want the discomfort of a negative emotion to go away, and food can be a very quick way to do so. Food is very accessible. Especially tasty food that provides some pleasure to our taste buds and our stomachs.

And humans were meant to try to avoid discomfort for survival purposes. We needed to be able to evade as much pain and discomfort as possible to survive as a species.

But now in modern day, we don’t need this so much, but we still experience emotions that don’t feel good.

So maybe back in the day, way back in the day, the negative emotions that came up for humans often might have been fear. Think wild animals. Humans had to respond to that fear, many times to survive. So that response may have been to run.

In modern day, we may experience an emotion such as stress after a tough workday and then respond by eating a bag of chips. It’s very different as far as the situations and the behaviors, however it’s the same concept.

Alright, so before we dive into the two biggest emotional eating mistakes, just a little housekeeping. I can’t do this episode without genuinely offering my help on a deeper level.

Emotional eating is something that, like I mentioned at the very beginning is such a big pain point and really causes you to feel like you are trapped in this cycle that you can’t get out of.

This is the one eating habit that I really got caught up in in my 20s. It wasn’t even just feeling like I was stuck in that cycle, but it was also the foods I was eating that were just making me feel drained of energy.

And instead of the emotions that I was struggling with, mainly anxiety and stress getting better, they were getting worse. Which I didn’t understand either.

I was also gaining weight and I was not someone who gained weight ever before. And other people might not have thought anything about my weight, but I did. I felt like this was not me. I was disgusted with how my body looked, because it hadn’t looked like that before.

So, I hear you. I see you. I understand that eating habits have a ripple effect on everything else in your life. On how you feel. On how you look at yourself.

But I also want you to know I can help you. I can help you get out of that emotional eating cycle and repair the damage that it causes. We can work together one-on-one and with coaching strategies and tools, I can help you break that emotional eating habit.

Start with a free consult where I will see where you’re struggling currently, and give you an action plan of how to get you from where you are now to where you want to be. And then you decide if that’s something you want for yourself. Something you see yourself doing and succeeding with.

So, sign up for a free consult on the episode page or by visiting katemjohnston.com/consult. Like I said, it’s free, so if this is something that you’ve been struggling with, which I’m guessing it is, do the next step. Get the help that you so deserve.

Because even if you just do the free consult and that’s it, you will get clarity and you will understand what is needed to break the emotional eating habit. Otherwise, your mind might just keep spinning and spinning and you not feeling like you know what to do next or where to go next. And that’s not an enjoyable way to feel.

Okay, so let’s dive in. The first of the 2 biggest emotional eating mistakes is thinking that negative emotion or uncomfortable emotion I should say, is bad. Or that it needs to go away.

We are humans, and to really feel our positive emotions fully, we also must be able to feel our negative emotions fully. Without the negative, there is no positive, right? We wouldn’t know what positive is without negative.

We wouldn’t know just how amazing positive emotion feels if we also didn’t know how negative emotion felt. And just a little side note, emotional eating does not necessarily have to be eating in response to a negative emotion, it’s more of an uncomfortable emotion.

For some people, positive emotion is uncomfortable. This is much less common. Also, for some people they emotionally eat to heighten a positive emotion. More in a celebratory kind of a way. This is a little bit more of using food as a reward or to sort of heighten and experience.

This is different than the type of emotional eating that most of you I know struggle with, and the type of emotional eating that I’m focusing on for this podcast episode, and most of my other podcast episodes on emotional eating.

So why thinking that negative emotion or an uncomfortable emotion is bad is one of the two biggest emotional eating mistakes, is this. When you think that it’s bad or that it needs to go away, that’s when your brain will seek out food, to make it go away or to lessen it.

You may have also heard the term buffer or even escape. Those all mean the same thing when it comes to emotional eating.

The more you think an uncomfortable emotion is terrible and needs to go away, the more likely you’re going to continue this emotional eating habit.

Think about it like this. Think about if you are experiencing some lower back pain and it’s relatively mild. Your thought is “oh I have a little bit of low back pain, not a big deal.” You’re not necessarily going to seek out something to make that back pain go away.

If you’re having back pain and you’re thinking “oh this is horrible, I hate this back pain”, it’s going to make that pain so much worse. And then you’re probably going to be more likely to seek out medication for the pain.

It could be the same amount of back pain in both situations, but your thoughts about it can make it so much worse than it is. And when you feel like it’s so much worse than it is, you’re more likely to feel like you need that pain to go away quickly with medication (or food or alcohol).

So, the same is true for emotional eating. If you experience an emotion like anxiety, and then you start focusing on how terrible the anxiety feels and how terrible it is that you’re constantly feeling anxious, you’re going to be much more likely to run to that kitchen cabinet and grab the bag of chips.

Contrast that with experiencing anxiety and thinking, “OK, I’m feeling some anxiety right now. I can do anxiety.” That’s going to make the anxiety feel a lot less terrible. So, you’re going to be less likely to feel like you need it to go away with food. You might even try some other things to get the anxiety to ease up a little bit, like maybe a few relaxing slow deep breaths.

Make sense? So now, just having that awareness of that first of the two biggest emotional eating mistakes, is super helpful. Because you can just start catching onto your brain when it’s thinking that the uncomfortable emotion is terrible.

Alright, moving on to the second of the two biggest emotional eating mistakes. That is, judging yourself after you’ve emotionally eaten. I know that you do this.

Judging yourself just means that you have a thought about yourself after you’ve emotionally eaten. Either right after or sometime after like later that day or the next day. It might be something like “you can’t control yourself.”

Sometimes it’s in the form of a question like, “why can’t you control yourself?” Same thing really.

And do you know how I know that you’re judging yourself after you’ve emotionally eaten? Because you feel badly after emotionally eating. Otherwise you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast episode on emotional eating.

You feel badly either right after, or later on. And if you’re feeling badly about it, that means that you had a thought about it that then made you feel badly. So, if you’re feeling shame or disappointment or disgust, those are emotions, right?

And you’re experiencing those emotions afterwards, because of thoughts or judgments that you had about the fact that you emotionally ate. Or maybe what you specifically ate when you emotionally ate.

For me, it was more of how I felt about the food I was emotionally eating. I was also judging myself based on the number on the scale going up and how I felt I looked. I wasn’t just judging myself right after emotional eating, but also the results of that emotional eating habit.

So, if you’re doing this, just know you’re not alone. It happens to everyone who emotionally eats.

All right, so the reason why judging yourself after you’ve emotionally eating is the second of the two biggest emotional eating mistakes is because when you judge yourself and then feel badly, or feel a negative emotion, what do you think ends up happening?

You either emotionally eat more to try to make yourself feel better either right then and there, or the emotional eating habit just continues because you just keep feeling crappy about yourself.

Or, sometimes which is common with my career women, there’s some all or nothing thinking going on. That perfectionist thinking.

That’s where it’s the mindset of “oh I messed up, so screw it all, let’s just keep going with the behavior that I don’t really want to be doing right now.” Then there’s guilt and judgment after that of course.

As you can see, it’s this vicious cycle.

So, no wonder it’s been such a pain point for you. I get it. It’s nothing about you or your ability. It’s just you getting stuck in this vortex and not being able to get out because you’re in it.

Not only stuck in the behavior part of it, but also stuck with the thoughts going on in your head that are keeping you in it, and of course the feelings going on, that are keeping you in it. So, I’m going to reach my hand in and pull you out.

For some people it’s a fairly short “fix”, once you have help, and for others it takes a little bit longer, but it’s still something that can be resolved in a relatively short period of time.

Especially when you consider the pain that it’s caused you for so long and the pain that it can continue to cause you if you let it continue going on and getting worse for the rest of your life.

I’m so glad that I got out of my emotional eating cycle, and I have confidence that my emotions are managed well enough that this will not become an issue for me in the future. Which means, all the ripple effect it had on me in a negative way, won’t occur again either.

To find out how exactly you can break your emotional eating habit and repair whatever damage you feel it has caused (because that’s important to do too), sign up for a free consult with the link on the episode page or right on my website katemjohnston.com/consult.

You just pick a date and time right then and there. You will then choose if you want it to be via zoom or phone, and then you’ll be sent a confirmation e-mail. The consult is with me directly, not someone else, and I set aside a full hour for you.

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