To Feel… Or to Not Feel (stuff feelings down w/ food)

Full Episode Transcript:

To Feel… Or to Not Feel (stuff feelings down w/ food)

Hello everybody. I’m super excited to be here. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to another episode. Welcome. Hello Body Freedom podcast. Very stoked to be here. I am finally feeling good.

I was going to use this episode for an update on the quantum leap year. Cause there’s some updating the news to happen for sure around self-sabotage around having to start over around when you fall off the wagon and how to get back on again and all the juicy stuff.   But I decided  We might save that for the next episode.

I am really excited to talk about to feel or not to feel. That is the question. So one is, do we learn how to feel what we’re feeling or do we not learn how to work with, feel, deal with, heal, whatever that inner experience might be. And whenever we choose, and often it’s not really a choice, we’ll get into that in terms of nervous system dysregulation. But whenever the unconscious choice or sometimes conscious choice of “forget it, I’m just going to not feel.” then so many of us, what we do is we use food.

Food is the thing that we stuff down. We stuff our feelings down with food instead of feeling. We don’t feel. So instead of feeling, we stuff our feelings down with food and we wonder why we are struggling in our bodies, struggling with our health. And I have to say that this is the number one reason in the almost three decades I have been working in the realms of, first Whoa, full on fitness and nutrition,  and then moving way more into eating psychology and healing at these deeper levels.

So let’s just take a walk down this road so that way I can give you some examples. I really wanted to use this podcast today to riff on,   A client that I’m, I have a crush on. So I want to start doing a client crushes and these client crushes are clients that are just slaying it. And it’s  it’s so different than when you look at a personal trainer or somebody that’s in the diet industry and they’re dropping these before and after pictures of 90 pounds down in 90 days, which is just so sad because I’m like, show me what happens in the next,  90 to 120 days and show me what’s really going on there because that’s just BS.

 And this is from an almost three-decade career that I’ve witnessed over and over. It’s from research that shows us that any weight loss diet, 98%, not any, but 98 percent of all weight loss diets will fail, which just means you might lose some weight, but you will gain it back. And for most people, they gain more weight back and messes with your metabolism.

It’s all messy. But why would we reach for that? We would reach for that because we are bringing in and eating more food than our body needs.  Okay? So just feel into that. We are bringing in and eating more food than our body needs. Whenever we take in more energy than what our body needs to live, to expend, then we are going to store that energy as body fat and our bodies are going to expand.

And that is just how it works. That is just how it works.  And so when we see our bodies and we’re frustrated, we’re going to get into what happens when we get triggered. And actually, what are we getting into right now? We have a trigger. The trigger is we recognize that I don’t look the way I want to look.

I don’t feel the way I want to feel. I know that I’m eating these extra foods or whatever it might be. We have a trigger and it usually, is something intense. Like you look at yourself in the mirror and what you see is unacceptable. You get tagged on a picture in a Instagram or in Facebook or something.

And you’re like, “Oh my God, I didn’t even give them permission to tag me. I can’t believe my picture is out there.” And you look at what you’re wearing or how you look and you have an Inner experience.  And I use the word trigger because that inner experience usually doesn’t feel good.  Another thing that can trigger, there’s so many things that can give you this intense inner experience, but another strong trigger is just you’re continually binge eating or overeating and it feels like food is in control of you.

And that can feel so painful and so out of control.  And what’s happening is that the food going in your mouth, the emotional eating, overeating, binge eating, that particular thing is triggering a very intense negative inner experience.  So many things can trigger negative experience. You could have, in fact, the one of the client that I’ve I want to talk a little bit about the client crush story I have today.

She’s a stressful, job and that’s what triggers her. It’s the middle-of-the-day stress that triggers her. And as soon as she has that inner experience of a stressful day at work, like to reach for food is it’s next to impossible to break that habit. But in actuality, that is what we need to do.

So what I have learned in almost three decades of doing this work, that the number one, absolute number one place where you need to start working, where we can start working is all of these other reasons that we are eating besides physical hunger. Okay. we talk about this a lot in Hello Body Freedom because at the end of the day,  food cures physical hunger.

Like it’s amazing for physical hunger, right? Food is also nourishment. it can work like medicine in the body. It can be like really powerful to get the body functioning, in beautiful ways.

So here we are eating food for a million reasons. Now let’s talk about this because if we’re overeating, we need to not look at how we can restrict and get the undereating started to lose weight. What we really should do first is if we can look at the reasons why we’re overeating and we can start to untangle those, this whole process of moving into your ideal size and feeling like all the advice that your health coach might give you can actually work because you are now not eating at the whims of all of these other things.

So for instance, here’s a couple of reasons why we would eat completely outside of physical hunger. I just gave one from a client. Stressed, feeling lots of stress, very like get the food. I got it. You got it. You got it. Munch it in, right? Bored. I cannot tell you how many clients say, “well, I just eat cause I’m bored.”

Well, guess what? Bored is an emotion. Bored is an inner sensation in the body that your particular nervous system doesn’t feel happy with. It doesn’t feel good about. It’s uncomfortable. It’s so uncomfortable that you will go eat some food to fix feeling bored. At least now you’re not bored anymore.

You’re chomping it down. Right? Just some examples. Tired. Like when you’re totally exhausted,  no holds bar being exhausted and not getting enough sleep on the regular will totally mess up hunger and enough cues. So you will actually think you’re hungry when you’re not because your body is reaching for energy whenever it can.

When actuality, you probably just need a nap.  Now you’re reaching for food. You’re trying to get a hit and an energy. So if you’re trying to get like an energetic hit, you’re probably going to be reaching for some fast-burning carbs, like white flour, white sugar,  type stuff. Processed foods, things like that.

But let’s keep going. Cause there’s more. A lot of us eat for comfort. So maybe we are lonely. Maybe it’s been a really long day and now we finally made it to the end of the day and our tank is empty and dammit, we deserve it. It becomes the thing that is the soothing thing. The thing that makes you feel good. Or what if you were just like every other woman on this planet where we have to be everything to everybody.

We gotta be on with the kids. We gotta be on with the husband. The fricking pets need all of our attention. Then the work and then the boss and then it’s this never-ending take all of me.  And now at the end of the day, let me tell you, food is my time. I hear this story all the time with clients.

This is a big one. All right. And what about just guilt? How many of you eat the food off of your kid’s plate because,  Oh, we can’t waste that food. Or you finish the food on your plate, because you feel guilty that they’re starving kids someplace in the world, because somehow you over eating food is going to fix that problem.

No. Logically, that makes no sense. But what does make sense is that you have a learned response of guilt that your parents gave to you, your grandparents, that society gave to you, that you’re feeling guilty for eating, leaving that food. And because the inner experience of guilt is so uncomfortable for you that you just go ahead and eat the food. 

Right? I hope you are seeing a theme here. What we do in HelloBodyFreedom right when we get in, this is the first thing, and I’m not saying that it magically happens inside the first 24 to 48 hours. I’m going to give you a story about sometimes how long this process takes because so much of this can be unconscious.

This is why we need help untangling this. We need coaching support, therapeutic support to really, truly be conscious. Build our consciousness around these behaviors, right? And so the very first thing we do and hello body freedom is we untangle all of these other reasons that we are eating outside of physical hunger.

And of all of those reasons, 90 percent or more are completely connected to emotions that we don’t understand, that we don’t know how to feel, that we never learned how to feel. We never learned how to work with it, process it, move through it, resolve it, get to the other side.

But what we did learn how to do is stuff some food on top of that feeling. So that way we can numb it out and not feel that feeling. Okay, this is what we’re here to talk about. And I know this maybe sounds like doom and gloom, but I’m going to give you a couple of ways in which we help,  our clients do this.

And,  one is, I didn’t even come up with it this, I just inside of a coaching call last week with my client crush, she is just flat out. She came up with it on her own. And the reason she came up with it on her own is because she has expanded her consciousness around her behaviors.  She’s finally being able to connect the feelings in her body, the intensity in her body with the eating of the food.

And the reason why this is so important, and maybe some of you, you already know it. Some of you already know that it’s the end of the day. I know I shouldn’t be eating this tub of ice cream, but I’m going to eat it anyways. Where there’s a lot of consciousness around what you might call a self-sabotaging behavior.

But in this case, as in a lot of cases,  we just don’t have a lot of consciousness and awareness around the behavior itself as it’s happening. And then we think it’s something else when we don’t realize what’s really going on is this inner experience inside the body. So let’s talk about that.

We have three things that happen. Number one is there’s a trigger that happens. Something happens to create an inner experience that doesn’t feel good. So like the stress example, this is with a client.  She’s got an important job. She’s a professional, she loves working.  And.  It’s stressful.

And for her, when that stress starts to build up, think about it, what does stress feel like in the body? It’s a real nervous system response. It can get dysregulated cause you’re starting to move into, sympathetic nervous system. And all of a sudden this intensity that you’re feeling in the body leads to a behavior.

And for so many of us, that behavior is immediately to not feel what’s going on. And instead, we stuff the feelings down with the food. Okay. So that remember the trigger can be anything. We talked about looking at a picture in the mirror, I’m feeling like you’ve spent days or weeks or months with like feeling out of control around food, right?

It can lead to this trigger, this inner experience, it doesn’t feel good. And then the next thing we do is the behavior. So the behavior can be eating to numb out the behavior. I see a lot with clients is that they’re so fed up with how they feel that they immediately go into the multi-trillion dollar diet industry and they get swooned  in with these

glossy, sexy ads where you lose all the weight, you don’t have to do anything and check market off of your life and then everything will be fine and dandy. But in actuality, 90%, 98 percent of those fail for,  it’s just, it’s a shit show. It’s not the right way because you’re not, ever handling these deeper reasons why you are struggling.

You’re not doing the embodiment work necessary to get to the other side. Okay.   But still, I guess what’s so painful about that when clients go into diet mode, the truth of the matter is that it does feel better. At least you’re doing something. At least you’re feeling more in control than what you were.

At least you’re like, okay, I’m getting my health back. And the truth is that diets, I think of diets as the baby and the bath water. It’s both. There are some legit great things. If you’re going to talk about like eating vegetables, eating whole foods, right? These are really great ways to be in a relationship with food.

They’re nourishing your body. You’re going to feel better, right? You’re going to have all sorts of health markers. The positive health markers go up, the negative health markers go down. There’s some really good stuff with that. But the bath water when it comes to dieting is this all-or-nothing approach.

It disconnects you from your body.  It creates food preoccupation. It creates mental obsession. It gets you freaked out on a scale. It allows the scale to either be the best part of your life because you lost some weight or ruined your day because you gained some weight. It is an Epic failure. An epic failure.

Plus most diets are so drastically cutting calories or creating insanity around cut out this entire food group,  and then you wonder why you psychologically crave that food group.  Duh,  that’s part of the problem. So anyhow, why did I go on that tangent? I’m not quite sure. Oh, because the behavior of going on a diet at least makes you feel better.

So there is the baby in the bathwater and that’s part of the reason why we have to get out of diet culture altogether. We have to throw everything out and then rebuild,  with a nourishment focus and a health focus that is learning how to D program all of this diet brain stuff. Okay.

All right. So let’s keep moving on because I’ve got some good shit for you. We’re almost there. We’re almost there. So the issue.  Is the inner experience. The trigger will always happen. Okay, you are going to have a day that’s stressful at work. You are going to have a day where you feel lonely.

You are going to have a day where things just aren’t going your way. You’re going to feel all the feels. You’re going to see a picture of yourself. Here’s what I promise you. Let’s say you get down to your ideal size. I’ve been there for a long time since like 2012. We’re talking like over a decade now.

You are going to be at your ideal size. You’re going to be feeling good and comfortable in your body. You’re going to be doing all the things and you are still going to see a picture of yourself and you are still going to have a thing that something hits the wrong way. Ooh, that smile or Ooh, that thing right there.

Ooh, is that’s a weird angle or something, right? There are certain things on the outside world that are just likely not going to change. Okay.  And so understanding that triggers are real.  The issue is what we’re doing with our inner experience. What most of us do is we don’t have the capacity to feel what we’re feeling.

And so we immediately shut it down either with a diet or just shoving more food in our face to numb out whatever the experience is that we’re feeling.  So let me talk about how to stop shutting it down. Because here is the full-on truth. I’ve been sharing this a lot with clients lately who run the struggle bus. 

The only way you will ever learn how to work with that inner experience and what do I mean by that? I mean coming to a place where you can actually feel what you’re feeling in your body that you can over time, learn to expand your capacity to be with and feel it, and then to be able to deal with it, process it, heal it, and that’s kind of jargony.

What do I mean by that? That means that you are going to know what to do with whatever this experience is in the body.  However,  If you keep reaching for food is the answer, you’re just gonna stuff those feelings down. All of that intensity that you had the opportunity to work with, the opportunity to feel it, deal with it, heal it, process it, resolve it.

All of that opportunity goes out the window if the answer continues to be to eat.  So that’s what I want to help you with today. I want to show you what some of the clients that I’ve been working with are doing. I want to show you the way that we start off all of our clients in Hello Body Freedom.

And I want to give you just, I got three for you. I’ve got one, two, three, and you can choose all of them.  You can choose none of them and just keep choosing to not feel and just stuffing your feelings out with food. You get to do you. Okay.  I have learned that when we can do this. Whenever we can create some spaciousness away from eating. 

So that way, and this is obviously if food is your thing, you would not even be listening to me if food is not your thing. Okay. So when you create the spaciousness of the eating, what it does is it gives you room to be able to allow yourself to feel.  So the very first thing we do with our clients right when they come in on day one, inside of the very first lesson we teach is we work with body cues.

Eating because of hunger, stopping it at enough. It’s the very first thing we do. We don’t tell you to eat broccoli, although broccoli is good for you. I’m not going to diss on broccoli, right? But we take an approach that starts to deprogram all your diet and sanity, your diet mentality, the bull, crazy, insane shit that we have going on in our head from living in a culture that glorifies skinny and glorifies dieting. 

And we’re just going to untangle that shit. Okay. That’s the first thing. And then how do we do it with body cues? So we’re saying, eat whatever you want. Like you’re going to find, if you want a salad, eat a salad. If you want a steak, eat a steak. If you want pie, eat pie, but you’re going to wait until you’re physically hungry and then with the physical hunger and then with the enough, and then when you’re finished and you’re at enough. Kitchen closed, you move on with your day.

Now, whatever’s going on, you can feel what you’re feeling.   I think that this is an important way to start.  because it is, I think the most absolute intuitive and connected way. And the more you can continually create this interoception, this inner attunement to your own self and body cues, hunger and enough are two really great ways to continue working with and focusing on this.

And then learning how to give yourself what you need. Like the building up of that inner self trust, that inner, “I’ve got me” this is a very powerful way to start it.  Here’s where it doesn’t work.  Body cues are real tricky. If you were holding on to, I’d say more than, 30 pounds of body fat. So any of our client,  even maybe even less than that, but like definitely 30 and up you like the more body fat you have on your body, the more hormonal dysregulation you can have.

So leptin and ghrelin, that hunger hormone, that enough hormone. It can get real messy where you’re not hungry when you should be hungry or you think you’re hungry and you’re not hungry and then you can’t really tell what full is. Also, if you’ve been dieting for a long time, right? So what dieting does is it completely messes with our hunger and enough cues.

So what you learn when you diet is you learn how to get extremely hungry because they massively cut calories, right? And so you don’t really pay attention to all the subtleties of what hunger could be until you’re just starving Marvin. And then the next thing you know, you’re overeating and binging. And so the more often you stay in that loop, that restrict and binge loop that dieting creates and that diet culture creates, the more your body only gets used to these two extreme ways of being in relationship with body cues.

So the process of really tuning in to body cues is really hard. And I’ll tell you straight up if I drive by a Starbucks at three o’clock in the afternoon. And I’m just bored or a little tired. I’d be like, “Ooh, that sounds good.” And then I start thinking about like the yummy cookie that’s in there and like the fun, like syrupy sugary thing.

And literally I can be like, I  think I’ll think there’s hunger there. Yeah, I think there’s hunger.  There is a full-on psychoemotional connection to hunger and enough. I swear. I don’t have any science behind that. I’m sure some scientists can find that out somewhere, but it’s wackadoodle hunger and enough.

So even though I. fully believe that this is like the really tuning into your own body cues, working with hunger, working with satisfied.  For some of us,  we need more parameters within that in order to not use food. So that we can feel what we are feeling. So I want to give you my client crush a little background story So she definitely has as we all do so I’m not calling anybody out or anything.

She has as we all do  Childhood trauma from what our parents do. So it’s either what our parents do or what our parents don’t do. So if our parents activate our nervous system Don’t validate our emotions   We don’t get the love we need. We don’t get the attention we need. We don’t get the belonging we need.

We don’t get the validation that we need. we don’t get the touch we need there. We don’t just support. We need, there’s like all of these ways in which, it’s not just what happened to us, but it’s also what didn’t happen to us, right? That equals.  a dysregulated nervous system, right?  And so for so many of us, the reason why we use food when our inner experience feels so uncomfortable is because we learned how to do this since we were kids.

Y’all, we have a very strong habit loop of doing this. Okay. And so this particular client, she’s really focusing on eating healthier because her and her family, they don’t, eat quite the healthiest foods. It really matters to her. She’s really doing a good job about getting that exercise in and getting her hydration in.

All these things are great, but none of this is going to equal weight loss and none of this is going to equal healing at an emotional level. So even though we talk about this and she’s been inside of Hello Body Freedom for over six months, less than a year. I want to say she’s right around like the seven or eight-month mark at this point.

It’s what I think,  which for all of you in diet culture, you’re like, no, just let me lose 90 pounds in 90 days. Then I’m going to be done with it. Dude, you’re doing it the wrong way. You’re going to lose it. You’re going to gain it right back. And then you can come back and talk to me. Okay.  So here she is learning all this jargon about trauma and nervous system dysregulation and she’s hearing the words, but the hearing of it isn’t the same as embodying it.

And connecting to it. And so I’m like, come on, I want you to get in, try these embodiment practices. We’ve got short embodiment practice and try this. And so she does,  I have a, it’s a client crush. She’s doing good. She’s doing the things and it’s still hard.  So she gets to work super, super stressful, immediately starts eating, doesn’t even think about it.

She sees that she’s doing this and her focus instead of on that continues to be on well, but I’m exercising or well, but I’m drinking more water and I’m like, but I’m eating broccoli now with my meal. And I’m like, okay.  But really the deeper healing is a little bit deeper than that.  So we get on a coaching call and she’s like, Oh my God, under I’ve had the biggest epiphany ever. 

I’m like, tell me,  she said, how do I say this without so her family, there was an argument inside the family system.  And what that did when she was witnessing this argument,  Is she had a, an inner experience, you could call it a nervous system dysregulation. She got triggered by the outside thing and her whole body had a full-on remembrance of, “Oh my gosh, I remember feeling this way when I was young”  and it was so powerful that she was able to make that connection in that moment. And here’s what’s cool about it. The fact that she’s been in Hello Body Freedom for that long, that she could make that connection, but have prefrontal cortex like this part of her brain, she was still able to access it even though it was an emotional experience in the family system that she was able to use her smart top part of her brain or prefrontal cortex to be able to analyze and go, “Oh my God, I know this feeling.” 

“Oh my God, I know this feeling and I remember it. I remember it from so long ago.” And then this Led up to us having a very profound coaching call about some experiences that she remembered and especially what that felt like inside of her body. And then how she then immediately started the memories of using food to, and then one memory after the next memory.

And then I ran upstairs and I hid the food and then I ate the food in hiding. And then,  it just, it was the flood. And she’s   I’m so ready to be done with this. I’m so ready to be done with this. And for me, that’s just my most Epic.  That’s what I want everybody to experience. It is the most Epic transformation you could ever have whenever you have that level of connection. 

And so her very first step, now that she’s ready,  because we were trying, only when you’re hungry, eat when you’re enough.  Then when she gets into work, she just starts getting stressed and then she starts eating. So she came up with this and I love it so much.  She came up with zones because she works from home.

There are times and places, specifically places of the day where she is at in her home.  And inside of these particular, one is her bedroom and one is her office in her home. And these are where she finds herself eating outside of meals. Right? She’s eating for a million other reasons that she hasn’t been able to connect yet.

So she decided to put up signs and these are called, she called them no food zones. They’re giant signs. They’re bright red and she’s doing this on purpose to help her remember. Because remember, whenever our stress response goes up, this inner experience takes over. We lose cortical control in this time, which makes it so easy to just put food in our face.

And if we’ve been doing it for so long, the habit loop is so strong. She wants visuals everywhere. And she’s like, I cannot tell you it’s literally happening. So she has been able to get through a workday at her office,  without having to go and munch. She is no longer Using food, in her bedroom, like all of these different ways that she would be using food because she simply created a boundary.

And what is that boundary? That boundary is, it’s like a safe space to not eat. And when she’s not eating, she’s now. learning how to feel and because she’s in Hello Body Freedom and she’s a VIP coaching client, I mean like walkie-talkie support. We’re like, what can I do now? How can I move through this?

She moving so fast through her ability to be with what she’s feeling, tolerate it, expand her tolerance,  process it, deal with it, heal it, All of these things. And then she is learning, like she’s literally learning how to take better care of her own self, her own nervous system, her own dysregulated stuff going on instead of using food is the answer y’all.

It just doesn’t better than that. So that’s what I wanted to offer you today. Number one.  Eat because of hunger, stop it enough. For some people that’s too vague. not everybody. This is why in Hello Body Freedom, we individualize everything for everybody based on what they’ve got going on.  But that’s where we start people from.

And then she came up with these no-food zones, which I thought was epic. And it’s exactly right for her. It might not be right for you, but it was exactly right for her. And then the other thing, the third one that I wanted to share with you is one that we’ve started using with clients, which is,  Trying to just get them into normal eating patterns, which I mean a pretty normal eating pattern would be eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, right?

Pretty normal. So what if you only ate breakfast and then you closed kitchen until you got physically hungry and it was time for lunch, you ate lunch and then you close kitchen and you move on with your life until it’s time for dinner and you eat dinner and then you close kitchen after dinner. 

I have other client crushes going on that are using that tactic and it’s really working as well. And why do we need to use these tactics? Because we need to be able to create space in between the eating. Whenever we can create some sort of like a boundary, right? This kind of outer boundary that is not a diet that is not saying I can never eat this food or that food, but it is simply saying in this moment when I know I’m not hungry because it is between meals in this moment when I know it’s time to work, not time to eat, right?

Whatever that might be, I’m going to choose other things to do besides eat so I can learn that whenever something comes up. Then I can do what I need to do here, which inside of hello body freedom, this is what we call the feel heal deal process. This is where we learn how to feel it to heal it. We learn how to expand our tolerance and work it that way.

So I am curious if you are willing to try one of these three tactics in order to give you the possibility of feeling what you’re feeling when it’s not time to eat. So when you are not physically hungry, being able to use that as the opportunity to practice feeling what you are feeling. Now that in and of itself is like a whole other rabbit hole.

We can go down,  which I might do now that it’s like top of my head in the next episode, but I will keep you posted. Have an epic, epic, epic week. It’s so good to be here with you. And I hope that this was helpful.  And I hope that you start to feel instead of Stuffing down those feelings. I hope that you can, play with that.

And if you need help with it, simply drop me a DM. I have lots of free resources. I can help you. And, I’m happy to, so drop me a DM on Facebook or Instagram. Those are two great places. And, I’ll see you next time. Thanks for coming and playing. Bye everybody.

• Hello Body Freedom
• Institute for the Psychology of Eating
• Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge