Who here would LOVE to never overeat again? How would your life change if your relationship with food was easy? Where you ate what wanted and put the fork down without effort before overdoing it and feeling too full? Today we’re talking about ending overeating for good.
My overeating patterns were SOOO unconscious for most of my life…and then when it finally started effecting my weight, I did all the things they told me to do (go on a diet…just workout harder, etc.), and that only made it worse.
We’ll dive into all the ways we eat when we’re not actually physically hungry, and then I’ll walk you through my 5-step process we take our clients through to help them unravel conscious and unconscious overeating patterns.
If you desire to feel in control around food and end overeating, be very wary of the person who tells you to “just stop” or “eat 1/2 the food on your plate then throw the rest away” or “you just need more willpower”. That’s BS advice that will likely only make the habits worse! Listen in and let me know what you think!
Resources and Links:
Take the FREE Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge!
I’d love to hear your thoughts…Drop me a DM on Facebook or Insta!
TIMESTAMPS
[00:01:31] Healing from the inside out.
[00:03:36] Different ways we use food.
[00:07:40] Mindless eating and habits.
[00:11:03] Consciousness around using food.
[00:14:23] Physical hunger and self-awareness.
[00:19:09] Food as a pacifier.
[00:23:12] Fixing loneliness and anxiety.
[00:26:26] Finding an alternative to emotional eating.
[00:29:05] Nervous system healing.
[00:32:03] The path to freedom challenge.
Full Episode Transcript:
Hello, my friends. I hope everybody is doing well. I’m just having so much damn fun making this podcast. I don’t even know what to do about it. It’s just, I can’t believe I didn’t start this sooner cause it’s just a blast. So I’m here to give a little intro into what I will be doing every now and then you will hear me give an intro into a old training, not old, like irrelevant, but old in that it’s not on the podcast and it’s very powerful and you’re going to learn a lot.
And that’s what I have for you today. It is a training where I talked about how to end overeating once and for all. And this is an intense topic. it’s one of the bigger reasons why we struggle with our body is that we use food for a whole lot of other reasons besides physical hunger.
And it’s going to be pretty profound. So I’m introducing this to you whenever I recorded this, I recorded it inside of my Facebook group. And sometimes I’ll make references and I’ll like, it’ll sound like I’m talking to somebody which might happen where I’m, communicating back and forth with the people who showed up live.
But it’s worth it because this it’s just great. It’s great. You are going to really feel Oh my gosh, I think I can really get this handled. So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. Also, if you are catching this episode at the beginning of the infancy of Hello Body Freedom podcast, I just want to encourage you to continue to subscribe.
And download those episodes and share them with your friends and even leave a review. That would be so amazing. And we are doing this really big pod squad contest right now where there’s all sorts of schwag that we’re giving away and all sorts of stuff in celebration of the launch of this podcast.
So all you have to do is go to support at Audra baker. com. And you can also get on our email list where you can really find out about it and that you can get to also from hellobodyfreedom.com. All right, my friends without further ado dive in and enjoy.
Hi everybody. Let’s dig in. Okay. First things first, if we’re going to talk about ending overeating once and for all, we’re going to talk about ending the binge eating, the stress eating, the comfort eating.
We have to put some parameters here because at the end of the day or at the beginning of the day or whenever in the day there’s all these different ways that we eat. Okay. There are a whole lot of different ways that we use food when we are not hungry. And at the End of the day. I don’t know why I keep saying that, but I do today.
You are gonna really struggle reaching your goals in terms of weight loss especially but also sometimes with your health goals if they’re connected, right? If if you are continually using food as the main reason to fix. A long day, a stressful day, a bad day when your kids go crazy, when you get in a fight with your partner, when, we have all a good day, right?
How many times do we have like just amazing celebration days and we just use that as a reason to just eat and eat and overeat, right? And so we’re really talking about all the different ways that we use food when we’re not hungry. So what I want to do is break that down. And then once we break down these different ways that we use food or, just a few definitions here, then we’re going to get through five different steps.
And I believe these are the steps that are really imperative. These are the things that we take our clients through. And it is. This is the path to freedom for sure, especially if this is a big one. Now the challenge, the five-day path to freedom, I’m handing you the entire framework.
So you will get to know every single step-by-step, the process we use here inside of Hello Body Freedom that ultimately is so different than anybody else’s approach. It is not just one little piece of the puzzle. It is the whole entire puzzle put together for you. It’s pretty powerful. Let’s go ahead and dive into these different ways that we eat.
And now this is not an exhaustive list, but these are the big ones. Number one, we use the word overeating, so that can mean so many things. So let’s just go ahead and define it for our purposes here. If you are gaining weight. And you don’t want to speak really clear here, then you are overeating compared to the amount of energy that you were expending, right?
If you are keeping your weight balanced if your energy in is equal to your energy out and you are trying to be on a weight loss journey. You are looking for sustainable weight loss and nothing is budging. So in, in full, clear understanding, there is an overeating. So the way weight loss happens is whenever we take in less energy than we are expending.
Taking in less energy than we are expending. It is that simple. There are a lot of factors involved and there’s a lot of bullshit out there as well. So a lot of people saying, Oh your hormones are all messed up. So that’s why you can’t lose weight. Actually, you can’t lose weight because you’re overconsuming energy compared to how much you’re moving.
Granted your hormones, especially, I’m in that, the perimenopausal space for sure. And I plenty of clients perimenopausal menopausal postmenopausal for sure. And so yes, hormones play a factor in making it a little bit more challenging, but at the end of the day, if I’m desiring to be on a weight loss journey and I’m not there regardless of my hormones.
I am taking in more energy than I am expending right on or off, like on a regular basis, like averaging it out if I’m either keeping my weight the same or gaining weight. That’s very important to understand. And yes, it’s connected to hormones.
Stress is connected to hormones, all of these different pieces, but understanding that. So we’re going to use that as the word for overeating. Okay, so overeating doesn’t mean that it can mean so many things, right? We’re not going to get into this. We’re just going to leave that definition for overeating.
And if you have questions about it, reach out to me, drop me a DM. I’m happy to have conversation. I’m happy to send you a different training. I think I have an entire training in here just on overeating, what that means and what that is. But another way that we eat is mindless eating. Where there’s just doesn’t seem like there’s any thoughts at all.
Like you just, maybe it’s habitual. Maybe you’re just used to walking by your friend’s desk at work and you just stick your hand in the candy jar and keep moving. You go shopping at Costco and you’re eating all the samples everywhere. You don’t even think about it. You’re like, Ooh, samples.
This will be fun. Where it’s not connected to the body. It’s just connected to just shoving food. You’re. You have this habit of getting off work and just sitting in front of the TV, and you have a strong habit of just like grabbing a bag of chips and just mindlessly eating them, right?
So that is one way of eating. Another way is emotional eating. So emotional eating is like this big umbrella term. For all the ways that when we feel a feeling in our body, we feel emotions, whatever they are happy, sad, whatever it might be, I’m lonely. I’m tired. I’m stressed. I’m anxious. I’m bored.
I’m sad. I’m really excited and happy, right? Whatever it might be, but we’re feeling something that, and you might not even have the words for it. This is very important because back in the day I am like, first off, hands down. Since I was six years old, an emotional eater, and when I would hear the words, emotional eating, I never connected to that.
When somebody would say that, I’d be like, that’s not me. And so that wasn’t my route into understanding, but I totally understood that I would get really pissed off and angry. And the next thing I knew, I like, just. Find myself like shoving like chips in my face as fast as I could. And it’s one example of a million different things.
I would get really happy and excited and my energy was so frenetic and so just like high, like a bouncing around Labrador puppy dog, and I would just end up in the kitchen. I would just be eating like, that’s so that counts like it’s a, it’s an intensity in my body. There’s emotions happening, whether I’m connected or understand it or not.
But when that intensity happens. Food is the answer. So if you find yourself eating late at night because you’re lonely, because you’re bored, because you’re tired, you find yourself eating when you’re stressed, when you’re anxious, all of these are examples of emotional eating. Okay. And then I think binge eating deserves its rightful place here because binge eating is a kind of different category and it can either be easily solved because you’ve been like lost in diet culture for too long and starving yourself.
That could be a very physiological reason that we have to start to untangle. But it could also be a really big like disordered eating pattern that can lead to eating disorder. But binge eating is this sense of feeling completely out of control. And this can be different for whatever you’re out of control is, might be different than my out of control, right?
It, but it’s this intense and it’s almost insatiable. And it’s almost like something takes over and we just can’t stop and we just can’t stop. And it’s usually consuming an incredible amount of food. In in a small amount of time, so all of these could be handled and would be handled, especially in hello body freedom a little differently.
And we would start to pinpoint these things. But the truth is most of us don’t even have consciousness around. The ways in which we use food when we’re not physically hungry. So the very, very first step in working with and healing and ending overeating and emotional eating is bringing consciousness to the game.
It’s starting to pay more attention to the behaviors that you have so that we can untangle them. Now, One of my most favorite ways to do this with my clients, especially my clients who are just like, God, I’m trying to lose weight. I just am so struggling. I hate this. I’m ready to be on this weight loss journey, right?
Most of us, the biggest reason why we are holding onto extra weight is because we have these situations where whatever the overeating, the mindless eating, the emotional eating, the binge eating, whatever it might be. It’s just, we don’t have patterns to untangle those yet. And in those moments when we’re overeating, mindless eating, emotional eating, binge eating, and all the other ways that we eat when we’re not hungry, we’re just massively overconsuming calories.
So whenever we can start to heal at this level, it becomes a big shift in terms of, wow, now that there’s this common side of me, now that I’m not reaching for food all the time as an answer, there’s like a natural weight loss that can happen, right? There’s more to weight loss than just that, but for most of us, it is the biggest reason why we are struggling.
So, getting conscious is your first step. And like I said, what I love to do with my clients, Wanting to lose weight, right? Is we like, I like to use food as the trigger. So, we look at any time that food comes up to the face. Anytime there’s the, you’re thinking about food or once you think about food, now you’re about to go get the food.
You’re, trolling in the kitchen, looking through the cabinets and the fridge and the freezer and all the things, or you’re driving and you see a Starbucks and you’re about to like, take the exit. Like ultimately it’s in the moments for the food actually goes in the body before the calories, I should say food and things, drinks.
If you’re going to go to Starbucks and get a, a thousand-calorie frappuccino that counts, right? Or a hundred calories something there, it doesn’t matter. Like pause can I pause, can I bring in this consciousness, this very first step, this consciousness, and just pause.
What we try to do in Hello Body Freedom will not try what we, this is a very strong practice that we do for, from now until forever. And you can start to do that today it is connecting that the main and best reason to eat is for physical hunger. Whenever we’ve been eating for a whole lot of other reasons besides physical hunger for a really long time.
The pendulums really swung in one direction. So we want to really go, wait a second, what would it be like to let hunger be the main reason why I eat? And what happens is whenever we have this consciousness of any time, like I had all I have is an orange in front of me. It’s not even I have to like peel it, but it’s wait a second, am I actually hungry?
And I just want everybody to know I’m super in tune to my body. I’m super hungry right now. I have three of these puppies about to enter my mouth. I cannot wait until I’m done with this live. I thought I had time before the live, and I’m like, I’m holding three I don’t know what they are. Tangelos or tangerines.
I don’t know. They’re yummy and sweet and without the seeds. Anyhow, that’s what physical hunger feels like. So what we do is we go, oh, the food is coming to my mouth. Wait, can I pause? Am I hungry? And that level of consciousness starts to unravel. Wait, I’m not hungry. Wait a second. I’m not hungry again.
Oh my God. I’m not hungry again. You start to really recognize and inside of Hello Body Freedom, we use a journal that like is not like food journaling. Write down all your food. It’s to untangle this shit. Cause the ultimate goal here is a normal relationship with food, right? We’re trying to get to the other side and find a normal relationship with food.
I want everybody to be really clear. Counting your macros every day is not a normal relationship with food. Counting your points every day. Until the day you die, not a normal relationship with food, counting your calories every day, not a normal relationship with food. Normal relationship with food is, Ooh, belly hungry.
What do I want to eat? What feels right? This is a sign. I’m going to trust my body. Trust my hunger, learning to trust from the inside out. This is the work, my friends, this is the work. And along the way, we have tools inside of HelloBrityFreedom to help you do that. One of them is this journal that helps you start to untangle.
What was I thinking? Why did I want it? I just wanted it. Was I thinking anything? Was I feeling anything? And all of these other things, right? So the very first step I’m going to wrap this part up is getting conscious. And the number one way that we start to expand our awareness and consciousness is paying attention every time food comes to our mouth so that we know, is this because of hunger or is this not because of hunger?
And from there, we start making choices in that direction. Okay. Now here’s step two. And this one’s very hard because once you start realizing the amount of times you’re reaching for food, when you’re not actually physically hungry, it can feel painful and overwhelming. And immediately, if you’re sitting here trying to learn how to stop emotional eating, and now you’re learning when you’re doing it.
And now you know that emotional eating is wrong. I’m not supposed to do this. You are making yourself wrong. If you end up eating the food. And the problem with this is that you have really strong habit pathways that you have learned. At least for me, I was six years old when I started to learn these habits of I’m feeling something weird in my body.
It doesn’t feel good. And boy, howdy those little Debbie oatmeal cream pies were like, they really fixed the problem. That and a big giant like jug of chocolate milk and not just a oatmeal cream pie. If you guys know what I’m talking about, it’s like a single package double cookie with icing in the middle, but it was like the whole box and it worked.
I don’t remember feeling stuffed. I don’t remember feeling like, Oh, I overate. I was like six or seven. I just ate and ate. And I tell you what, I felt a lot better than whatever icky stuff was going on inside my body. Okay. And remember that icky stuff doesn’t have to be so deep. You might just not be able to tolerate being bored.
You might be sitting at home and you’re just so used to always eating every time you’re bored. You haven’t broke that pattern yet. And so understand that you have strong neuronal patterns, strong habit pathways in your brain, in your bodies, in your emotion, all of the things. And it’s just strong. Okay.
So even once you become really conscious of, Oh shit, I’m not going to eat this thing. I said, I’m not going to eat. Am I going to eat it? I know I’m not hungry. You might eat the thing anyways. And step two is, in the process of untangling all of these reasons and learning how to use food, mainly for the reason for physical hunger, in this process of learning this, we need to keep food always on the table.
Meaning that we don’t just take it away. We don’t just take it off the table. We keep it on the table as an option. We do not make it wrong that you decided to eat even though you were not physically hungry. This is very important.
If you keep beating the shit out of yourself, every time you’re binge eating or overeating or stress eating or anxious eating or comfort eating or lonely eating or whatever the hell you’re doing with food. You keep beating yourself up. This internal beatdown is part of the problem. Okay. So when we learn to not make it wrong, we just know that it’s a part of the process.
And, the goal is not to take food off the table. I want you to think about a toddler who has a, one of those little sucky things that have pacifier thing. And this is what it uses. When it needs to be soothed when it makes it feel better, right? It calms and soothes. That’s what food does for you.
It’s what food does for me. It doesn’t like it did it for a long time when I would eat because of emotions. Now it does it because when I eat, I’m physically hungry and it soothes and calms me then. So Food serves a purpose here, my friends. So what we want to do though, is we don’t want to rip the little binky, the pacifier out of the baby’s mouth.
That’s like traumatizing. It’s rude. It’s not okay. You were hurting that baby when you do that, right? That’s not, it’s, Hey, do you want the pacifier or do you want this? Or do you want that? Or right? You put all the different things. And eventually the baby will outgrow the pacifier because they will have multiple other things that they could do instead of suck the pacifier, right?
Okay. So that is step two. We keep food as the option and we don’t make ourselves wrong because of it. Now, in this process, I already gave a hint to it during step two there, but step three is you gotta figure out how to be nice to yourself. This is the absolute ultimate, I can’t even tell you how important this is.
I will flat out tell clients, and there’s processes with coaching where you help people really find that inner softness, but I’ve worked with some clients where it’s just, they’re the level of just Stubbornness is not the right word, but like the intensity of the mean girl that’s been around forever.
She doesn’t like want to let go. By the way, we talked about this in my self-sabotaging solution workshop we did a couple of weeks ago. So reach out, ping me if you want access to that. I can give you all the information you need for that for sure. But ultimately what I will finally tell some clients around this, I’ll be like, Nothing is going to change until you figure out how to be kind to yourself.
It really is like the foundational piece. And it’s a big piece to why clients come to me. They know that it matters. They hear me talk about this over and over again. And the cool thing is it happens faster than you would imagine. Once you really understand That the only way out is through. And the only way through is to start being nice to yourself and stop beating yourself up.
Like that inner bitch dialogue. We got to stop that and really learn new ways to talk to ourselves in a nicer, kinder, more respectful way. Things start to really change. So this is very important at this phase when now you’re conscious step one, holy shit, I’m eating for all these other reasons besides physical hunger and then step two.
Oh my God. I keep doing this, right? Wait, how do I make it not wrong? Okay. I’m not making it wrong. I’m going to go and eat the food anyways. Okay. Audra, whatever. How’s this going to work? With step three, you’ve got to be nice to yourself. Okay. Step four is when you’re not so this is the process.
This is the process for step four, because ultimately in the moment you realize you’re about to eat, right? You’re being nice to yourself. You’re trying to make a decision. You realize you’re not physically hungry. Okay. When you’re not hungry, food is ultimately, it’s just not the best answer. It’s just not, especially if we’ve been using food as for all the answers when we’re trying to learn different ways when you’re not physically hungry, it’s just not the best answer, especially if we’re working on a weight loss journey.
Right? And so we need to figure out what is the best answer. And this is where sometimes the fun is either can start. It’s I don’t know. Fun is the right word, but it can be. It can be explorative. You can bring out your curiosity because at the end of the day, you just didn’t learn how to give yourself what you need in multiple different ways.
Because when you’re lonely, food won’t fix that. We need to figure out what is going to, what do I need in this moment to fix this loneliness? And the hard part is it’s going to be different for everybody. So somebody needs to call a friend. Somebody needs to call their coach.
Somebody might need to call their mom. Somebody might just need to like get on Facebook and talk to some of their Facebook friends, right? There’s a quadrillion different ways. Some people you just grab your pet and you love on your pet. Give them loving and give them, hug them and snuggle them and let them purr and all the stuff or whatever.
That might make you feel less lonely. There’s so many answers that we can start to give ourselves. I’m anxious. If I’m feeling like really frenetic and anxious and I’m not physically hungry, food is not going to fix my anxiety. It’s just not. Now, if I’m hungry food, like the lack of food and the hunger, the actual physicality of being hungry in my body can make me feel a little jittery, can make me feel the same sensations as anxiety, right?
And in that case, guess what fixes it? Food, right? But if I’m really cleared, I’m not physically hungry and like food is not going to fix how I’m feeling in my body. So what else can I do? For me, it’s go for a walk, go for a bike ride, get out in the sun, shake it out, put on a song, dance a little bit, breathe, like being my body is usually a good answer.
But again, we have to figure this out. And this is step four. And ultimately we spend a lot of time on step four. We spend a lot of time working on what are these cool, awesome things. And if you want 82 hacks to stopping emotional eating dead in its tracks, I have given you my most favorite 82 hacks, but you have to send me a dmm if you want it.
It’s totally free. I will send you the link if you don’t already have it. 82 hacks to stop. I think it’s called 82 x to stop overeating dead in its tracks or to stop emotional eating Dead in its tracks. Basically, it’s 82 other things to do. Besides eat when you’re not physically hungry, when you’re not physically hungry.
Okay. So if you’re watching this, you’re watching the replay anytime, whether you’re live watching the replay, drop me a DM and I will send this to you. It’s very powerful PDF. And it’s big, it’s almost like a little mini ebook, like just saying like it’s super packed. All right. So now we understand that we need to be conscious.
This part is hard to do on our own. This is why hello body freedom exists. We have to remember to not make what we’re doing wrong. And how do we do that? We’ve got to be nice to ourselves. Again, when we have these strong neuronal pathways of beating ourselves up and making eating wrong and all these things, right?
Throwing on the shame and the guilt every time we have some ice cream or an extra helping or something like that, whatever it might be like, this takes. In my opinion, and in my own personal experience with my clients and with myself, it really required help. I needed outside help. So this is step one, two, and three.
And then step four, what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, right? How, take, like gathering up the courage and the curiosity to be able to go what else could work? What else could I try right now? Just as an example, I had one client when she first joined, she was having a really rough day.
Her emotions were really big, but she knew that working out probably make her feel better. And so she did a workout. And if on a scale of one to 10, the intensity of how crappy she felt was like at a nine. She said the workout brought her down to a six or a seven, right? So it did help her. It didn’t like totally solve it, but Hey, she’s learning, she’s figuring out and then she’s giving herself what she needs instead of going into the kitchen and eating.
It was a huge win. The very next day, the story she told me. She realized I just needed it. And it’s very confusing when you’re so used to just going and reaching for food. It’s a lot of confusion. You’re trying to change this. You’re in the middle of feeling a lot of shit. And she was like, I’m just going to go lay down.
And it was the middle of her work day. She works from home. She wouldn’t lay down. And she ended up taking like a little nap. And it literally cured her in the moment. She woke up and felt freaking amazing. And I’m telling you, this is that you just don’t know until you start this process until you start going, okay, I’m going to pause the food and I’m going to try these other things, right?
I can eat the food. I’m not going to make it wrong when I do eat the food. But what are these other things that I can do for myself, right? And so that is the number four of what you need to give yourself instead of food when you’re not physically hungry. And finally, the big bonus, number five, step five.
And this part is… Unless you’re working with a trauma resolution practitioner, a somatic practitioner who understands that what we’re dealing with is nervous system overwhelm. What we’re dealing with is an inner overwhelm of a nervous system that is frazzled, and the only answers that we’ve learned, that you’ve learned, that I learned, Is that food fixes it?
And so that’s where the unconscious part comes from, right? When our nervous system is so overwhelmed, we lose access to our conscious part of our brain. The more overwhelmed and stressed out that nervous system is, it’s like this part of our brain, our smart brain, it just starts going down and down.
And then the primal part of our brain, the part that’s Got to stay safe and alive. Got to stay safe and alive. What do I do? What do I do? And if you learned, most of us learn this shit as kids, right? We learn that food fixes things. Then it’s real hard to not go eat in those moments, right? So of course we’re going to go eat, which brings us back to step two, not making it wrong.
And step three being nice, right? Because the bonus step five is the deeper somatic nervous system healing. It is working with the body to expand your window of tolerance. And also learn how to regulate a nervous system. This is where the body-based practices come into play. This is what I have been teaching since 2017.
This is the missing link in every single person’s work I’ve ever seen on ending emotional eating. This is it. And whenever we package all of this together with the right kind of support, the right kind of accountability to get over that hump. Holy guacamole. Everything changes, my friends. So I hope you enjoyed today’s episode.
I had a blast. I love teaching this work. These are, this is the ending overeating once and for all. So again, I’m just going to do a little quick recount. The very first thing we did was we talked about different ways that we eat. We talked about overeating. mindless eating, emotional eating and binge eating, right?
We could probably come up with a gazillion different categories. I find that a lot of the ways we eat fit into emotional eating because ultimately most of us are, we struggle with our emotions. We struggle with knowing what they are, how to feel them, what to do with them, how to process them, which is directly connected to our nervous system, right?
So first we named the ways we do it. And then we went through our five steps that It is how we do it. It’s how we work. And it’s, it’s not a magic pill, but I think what makes it a magic pill is when you have the right kind of support and the right kind of accountability. I think that’s what makes it really powerful.
And with that said, join our free challenge y’all. It’s HelloBodyFreedom. com forward slash five day path. It’s five dash, Day dash, path, the five-day path.
I’m super excited to see you there and if you have any questions, reach out, DM me, and if you want that 82 hacks that I talked about again. You just have to DM me. That’s like what you have to do.
And that is it. If you have questions, reach out. And if you need to help at all I’m here, my team is here.
And especially if you were in that place, really ready to take the next steps, then join my free challenge. It is the path to freedom challenge. This is how we rock this out. And thank you, Kathy Jo. I love having you in my group. Love your information. So good. Totally appreciate you. And I and I do appreciate that.
I love the work that I do. It’s just, I don’t have some quick weekend certification. This has been my whole damn career. So I’m really excited to be here. I can’t believe that Texas Twain just came out, but what are you going to do? Y’all have a beautiful day. I’ll see you next week. Bye, everybody.
Important Links
