3 Ways To Uncover What Triggers Your EMOTIONAL EATING

Have you ever wondered what triggers your binge or comfort eating? 

In this podcast

• 3 powerful questions to help you identify what's behind your eating.
• How you might be feeling now that we are almost 3 years on from the start of Covid-19. These potential feelings illustrate one experience that might be behind your comfort eating.

Another podcast you might like: 10 Ways to Overcome Anxiety

Citations
Links to exercises that will reset your nervous system: TikTok or Facebook

Transcript

 Today I'm going to show you how you can uncover what comfort eating might be all about for you.  We're going to take a look at what the emotion behind your comfort eating might be.  Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I help people to cope with being human and emotional. Comfort eating recovery has a lot to do with recovering that humanity. 

So that's what I'm going to talk about today. 

But first, I want to start to address pandemic fallout,  because a lot of my clients are experiencing difficulty as a result of COVID. So I just wanted to come on here and say that you're in good company if you're still feeling its effects. That is to be expected and pretty normal.  The things I'm hearing most about are grief, depression, and different forms of anxiety.

So I just wanted to Having suffered loss of loved ones during the pandemic, it really hasn't been that long, it would be normal to still be experiencing grief, particularly as we face anniversaries of different kinds in a troubled world.  Loss, of course, can also include loss of relationship, loss of health, or loss of money, to name a few, I'm sure. 

There have been so many challenges and changes, you might be reeling from the effects. I know of at least one dear listener who still struggles to maintain health and energy with post Covid fatigue, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people in this boat too.  In fact, I'm not sure if I know anyone who isn't still suffering the effects of one of these losses, at least. 

Depression and hopelessness often follow with prolonged periods of illness and loss. I'm hearing a lot of existential what's the point kind of questions and feelings.  My advice, simply, is to find someone to talk to. I believe connection and self confidence may be the cure here. So secondly, I'm working a lot with health anxiety, and thirdly, with social anxiety. 

The pandemic was potentially traumatising for most of us, but for people who struggle with feeling loved, or who had already experienced any kind of trauma, it is likely that the pandemic was also re triggering. If this is you, during the pandemic, you would have had to find ways to cope. Some of those may have been healthy, and some perhaps were not.

Maybe that's even what you're doing here.  I've seen a lot of people struggling with low self esteem, and some with disturbing flashbacks.  The isolation and fear went on for a really long time.  Most commonly, I would expect many people to have had to close down to the pleasures of community, to have to have withdrawn,  which means you might now be finding it difficult to open up again. 

This has a lot to do with the nervous system.  Trauma is something that we experience when we're going along in one direction, expecting a certain outcome, and then we suddenly experience a dramatic, sudden change.  I don't think anyone can deny that this is how most of us experienced COVID.  As I've explained in lots of my previous episodes, when we feel under threat, our innate, unconscious physiology takes over. 

In the shock, fear and confusion, our bodies shut down. All but the survival functions in response to a threat.  The functions that kick in and help us are the ones that help us to run, defend ourselves, dissociate or please the persecutor.  After a trauma has passed, we might get stuck in that trauma response. 

And just like before the trauma happened, our bodies expect to carry on in that same direction, so it keeps going.  But, some of the threat is over for many of us. So it is certainly going to help to calm our nervous systems down.  That's a place to make good decisions from and to find sanity, expansiveness, and love and connection. 

So this is going to be helpful even if the threat is still there for you. If you're still having money troubles or something else is going on for you.  A couple of weeks ago on social media, I produced some great exercises that help you to reset your nervous system. They're all in here somewhere too. So if you want whole podcasts on anxiety or self esteem, you can find them here, but below I'll, or in the show notes, I'll post a couple of links so that you can find them.

Comfort eating is of course often done in that same state. I will talk about that again in another podcast soon, but the exercises are there for you if you need to try them for that as well.  But now let's turn to the emotional side of comfort eating.  For regular listeners, this will be a gentle reminder and a valuable revisit with a little bit extra new material.

For new listeners, you're going to start or carry on working out what comfort eating is doing for you emotionally.  Often people who comfort eat do it in response to something they don't want to feel or don't know how to cope with.  Food is an incredibly good down regulator for that triggering of the nervous system that I just mentioned,  so it helps us to feel something easier to bear other than stress or emotional pain or physical pain. 

Sometimes the triggering is an in the moment response, like if you feel rejected at home or you feel criticized at work.  And sometimes it's become a habitual response to something emotional that happened a long time ago.  Today I'm going to share with you some questions that will help you start to answer what binge eating, overeating, comfort eating, sugar addiction, food compulsion are for you. 

The first question to start asking and to continue asking is what is the discomfort behind your comfort eating?  It can be something really obvious to you. So, for example, like I mentioned, if your boss keeps telling you what you've done wrong at work,  you might feel criticised, unappreciated and demotivated. 

If you don't know what to do with those feelings, say if you're someone who doesn't like conflict, which most of us are, especially in England,  you might find yourself eating a whole packet of biscuits or cookies for my American visitors.  But it can also be more subtle,  such as in isolation when we were bored, you know, you might have found yourself going to the fridge or the cupboard all the time because you felt like you had nothing better to do. 

My understanding of boredom though is that it's a little bit deeper than just being bored. There's often something going on for most of us underneath it that hides a whole range of different feelings that are hard to admit or hard to know what to do with.  In lockdown, most of us were traumatised. We had to endure massive change, felt isolated or stuck in with the same people, and lost so much all at once. 

Such a huge adjustment.  So there are lots of different feelings that could have laid below that lockdown eating.  In British stiff upper lip culture, and of course with many of our cultures,  we find it really difficult to know what to do with our feelings. We're not really taught how to cope with them.  So we eat or we rely on something outside of ourselves to make us feel better. 

My aim here is to get you used to starting to think about what you're actually doing and why.  Because this is the key to change.  So here are some questions. You can start asking these questions to understand what's going on for you, but you can keep these questions for the rest of your life, actually.  

1. So the first question.

When is it that you habitually overeat?  Are there some patterns that you can start to identify?  Maybe you eat late at night, or maybe you eat when you finish work.  Or perhaps you do it when you're alone, when you're bored, when you're stressed, when you're tired.  Or maybe you do it when you see a certain relative, or have to do a certain task. 

So just start asking yourself, how do you habitually respond to certain things, and when is it that you usually have a binge?  

2. My second question.  Think of a recent time when you ate more than you wanted to.  What was happening just before? What were you thinking and how were you feeling?  You may have been thinking thoughts like this.

These are thoughts that I hear so often. I don't care. I just do not care. I don't like myself. So what does it matter?  And this one, I'm going to be fat anyway.  
Or you may have been thinking something like this.  I'm going to eat this now because otherwise it's going to be on my mind, it's in the cupboard, I, I'm just going to keep thinking about it, so it's got to be finished, so I might as well just eat it all now, then there'll be nothing left, then I can start again tomorrow.

Yes, I'll do a diet tomorrow.  Or maybe you were trying to treat yourself and give yourself some kind of reward for a difficult day. You may have had the thought of, I deserve this, or I'm happy right now so I can do whatever I like. Surely that is treating myself well.  Very confusing.  Or you might even have been thinking, it will make me happy.

So why wouldn't I do it? Sometimes it's something in the present that's just happened, or sometimes you can trace it back to a long time ago.  So you might have to spend a while tracing back the thoughts and the feelings.  

3. And then the third question I have for you, you may think it's a bit more provocative.

It's definitely more disruptive. What would happen if you didn't go to the fridge or the snack cupboard  whenever you feel like it?  There's not any judgment in this. In fact, that's important not to do, to not judge yourself and to not think that I'm judging you.  Really what you're interested in here is what kind of feelings would you be left with?

What kind of experience would you have in your body if you just didn't give in to that urge and that craving? And I'm not telling you to resist cravings at this point. I would never tell anyone to resist anything because that usually makes it worse.  But it's interesting the response that you might have and it's going to tell you a lot about yourself. 

The answer I usually get is that you would feel a raging desire to eat and it wouldn't go away no matter how much you tried to do something else. It would just keep going until you gave in to it.  But what I have to respond to that with is, so what?  So what? If that happens, so what?  How long would you actually go for like that?

I suspect the craving wouldn't last forever. In fact, I know that research says it doesn't, but there'll be more on that in podcasts later.  But for you personally, what is the worst that could happen?  What kind of thoughts would you have? What kind of experience would you have? And how would you feel?  This is where you really start to understand that discomfort causes you to eat, whether that's physical or emotional. 

But, having answered these questions, can you start to see that your eating might be in response to some emotion, some discomfort of emotion,  What I'm asking you to do is to start understanding what your discomfort is, how far back it goes, and then to find other ways to manage that discomfort,  which is also what I'll be showing you in later podcasts. 

What I've done today is normalize post pandemic trauma and start to talk about all the different things that we might now be experiencing and having to cope with, all of which of course might cause us to comfort eat.  And then I went into talking about the feelings that you might have behind your eating. 

First, I asked you to look at when it is that you habitually overeat.  Then, I asked you to ask yourself what feelings you might have been having before your most recent binge episode.  And then finally, I asked you to start exploring what might happen if you sat with your craving.  To be able to stop overeating, you need to understand what's going on for you. 

Then you need to find a place of compassion for that, which is what I'll be talking about in the next episode.  I'll be talking about the self critic, because this is the biggest cause of emotional eating.  Feeling down on yourself and criticising yourself is a really unproductive place to start trying to give up comfort eating. 

So you need to understand what's inside you first.  Being genuinely self respectful and with education on how to manage feelings differently, it is possible to choose not to overeat.  And that is how I've seen this work hundreds of times.  So I'll end with a quote from one of my clients.  She says, Recovery is not about getting control of your eating.

It's about growing differently. It's about disrupting something in a gentle and freeing way.  And that's what I'll be talking about in the episodes to come.  I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence.  Please follow or subscribe for help taking back the control. And also please share if you think someone else might be helped by this. 

Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week.