Emotional Eating - The Science
Good morning, guys. Let's listen to some Queen. Let's get pumped up for today.
Speaker 2:I would sing, but I'll ruin it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's beautiful. Come on, please. Daily podcast.
Speaker 2:Good morning. That was a minute that a minute intro for you. Daily podcast about being under pressure, maybe comfort eating and stress, same thing. Let's have a look at it, guys. Hold on.
Speaker 2:Let me have a look at this for you now. So stress eating, comfort eating, one of the main things people say, isn't it? We go, I'm overeating because I'm stressed. I'm overeating for comfort. I can't control myself.
Speaker 2:That's why I'm doing it. So even with the best plan, even knowing gotta be in a calorie deficit, knowing hit your protein, we sometimes feel out of control. Right? I mean so what do we do about this? Before we go into it, we need to define these terms because this it's very important that we go into the definition and meaning because if we don't, blanket terms don't help us.
Speaker 2:Right? So in academic literature, the normal understanding of comfort eating is eating to relieve negative emotions or affect, you know, anxiety, anger, depression, stuff like that, to relieve those. So basically, we call it emotional eating or comfort eating. It means the same thing. Another term we use is stress eating, which is eating induced by stress.
Speaker 2:So who eats more when stressed and why is at the heart of understanding comfort eating. So both of them are very intertwined. Right? We get stressed. We get a we get emotional.
Speaker 2:And the Latin word the Latin definition of emotion means to disturb. So it makes sense. We get something that disturbs us. And when something disturbs us, we must then be undisturbed or reverse disturbed, get rid of the disturbed by eating. Right?
Speaker 2:That's what we do because we think that eating doesn't. It's fast. It's easy. It's nice. It's it's easy to do.
Speaker 2:We can keep going and it's, you know, usually within either arm's length or a walk to the fridge. Right? But interestingly, why is stress eating more common with women? It is more common in women than men. In a 2012 study concluded this study concluded that comfort or emotional eating has been a core theme of explanations for overeating obesity for decades.
Speaker 2:The study suggested emotional eating is more common in women than men and in obese than non obese and and in obese versus non obese individuals. Many studies associate comfort eating with a greater risk of obesity. Chronic overeating of energy dense foods as may occur with comfort eating is a risk factor for weight gain and is likely to be detrimental to health over the long term. So comfort eating, it is suggested that sixty percent or more of individuals who are overweight or obese are also emotional eaters. Emotional eaters are particularly likely to consume foods high in fat, sugar, and calories in response to negative emotions.
Speaker 2:In combination with increased body weight, these eating habits place emotional eaters at higher risk for developing diabetes and heart disease. This isn't new stuff, guys. I'm just going over the studies that are just saying this stuff. Right? The population of emotional eaters also struggles with weight loss.
Speaker 2:Emotional eaters are half as likely as non emotional eaters to achieve the 10% weight loss goal of standard behavioral weight loss treatment. Right. The 2011 study studied a large sample of employees over two years. Approximately fifty percent of the sample gained weight while the other half lost or maintained weight. Higher levels of emotional eating predicted greater weight gain.
Speaker 2:So comfort eating and BMI, again, there's a there's a correlation. And a 2014 study, a Swiss sample of participants enrolled in eating in an eating activity behavior survey and found that emotional eating was linked to heightened BMI over one year. Okay? It also found that increased levels of physical activity helped reduce the negative impact of emotional eating. Higher levels of emotional eating plus higher physical activity equals a lower BMI and associated with more fruit and vegetable consumption blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 2:Okay. So when we look at this, if it's clear. If you if we don't control or if we don't understand the comfort eating, stress eating, there's a huge chance that that's gonna be the main factor behind your weight gain. Not information, not me telling you about protein, me telling you about carbohydrates, me telling you about fat, not me telling you about calorie deficit. All this external information we think is gonna change things for us is not the key.
Speaker 2:The key must be to shine a light inside yourself, understand what is actually happening when you're comfort eating and when you're stress eating. What is actually going on in your mind? Right? Because remember, we cannot do something that we think is not good for us. This is just a this is fact.
Speaker 2:Right? Will you put out your hand in a fire right now? No. You wouldn't, obviously, because you would burn. So you cannot do it unless I physically force you.
Speaker 2:There's nothing I can say that would convince you to put your hand in a fire. Right? Unless you believed in, like, religion and things and then, know, you speak to God or whatever. My my work. Likewise, if you were to sell me a handbag or whatever or a computer and I came with money and you found out that that money was fake money, there's nothing anyone can do for you to accept that money and give me that computer that you're about to sell me.
Speaker 2:Because you know it's fake. You see it's fake. You see it's not good for you. You cannot accept it Unless I physically make you accept it or some of you know what I'm saying? So once we see the falseness, fakeness, or the bad in something, truly see it as horrible for us, we we can't touch it.
Speaker 2:Now what happens in comfort eating and stress eating is we think there's something in it that we think is good for us. There is something that lets us say, even with ninety five percent of it being horrible and I'm gonna feel terrible afterwards and it's gonna put me put weight on whatever, there is a small part of us that agrees that it's good for us in the moment. And we need to figure out what that is. What is that story that gets said in that split second that enables us to go on straight and do it impulsively? The only way we can do this is if we really watch ourselves during these episodes we have.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely the right word. Don't know if it's a medical term. Do even when this happens. The next time you start eating, overeating, comfort eating, stress eating, instead of trying to fight against it and say, no. I'll just do it.
Speaker 2:Like, what happens in the mind. What is actually happening? What is the mind saying? Once you see what the mind is saying, you can see the whole structure of what's happening. And in seeing that whole structure, what's happening in your mind, shining that light on it changes it, completely changes it, melts it away, eradicates it in a form completely transforms how it acts on you.
Speaker 2:You now see what's happened. You can now act in way that you want to as opposed to being very impulsive because what happens is we start eating fast. We love it. We feel bad. Fuck it.
Speaker 2:We keep it. It's good for us. We don't really see what's happening. We're doing it impulsively. And then impulsively, we then go, oh, I shouldn't eat more, but, oh my gosh, I need more.
Speaker 2:I hate myself. I hate myself. I shouldn't eat more. And the more we say we shouldn't do something, the more we're fighting ourselves and then we're gonna break and we're gonna eat more until there's nothing left. That's what happens.
Speaker 2:We stop when there's nothing left. We have to control we have to the word control is tough in this one. We have to understand what happens here because if this is the thing that is linked with the the highest risk of obesity, if this is the thing that's linked to us overeating and going over our calorie targets, this is where the main event is. Right? You can look at the sideshows but this is the main event.
Speaker 2:So I want you to really start observing what is happening in the mind. There is no answer to this. I can't give you an answer. All I can say is when you do observe and watch without any judgment whatsoever about what's happening, so you can't be labeling that's a good thought, that's a bad thought, you can't do that or you shouldn't be able to do it. You shouldn't judge anything that goes through your mind in this moment.
Speaker 2:You just need to watch, stop and watch. Once you stop and watch, something happens. I don't know what happens but something happens and the power of it diminishes over you. I've had this experience many many times. I've had it many times.
Speaker 2:My recent one was the anxiety one I had. My sister told me I got to do a speech at the wedding in a few weeks. My father was going to do it but he can't speak English so you know, I'll over I'll take over. And before bed, I was thinking of the speech. Oh, what do I need to say?
Speaker 2:La la la. And I felt my heart racing from anxiety going high. Right? Was like, my god. Fucking I can't I got my heart racing.
Speaker 2:I can't sleep. Right? I don't wanna feel anxious. And then I said, no. No.
Speaker 2:Let me let's let's watch. I wanna sit and watch. So I sat with that feeling and watched it, and it went away in a few minutes. I'm not making this shit up. This is just what happens.
Speaker 2:A lot of you said this happened to you. A lot of you said, we the more we run away from something, the bigger it becomes. The more you run away from a fear, the bigger the fear is. The more you run away from the anxiety, the more it's gonna be an anxiety for you. The more you run away from the weighing scales, the bigger the fear of the scales.
Speaker 2:When you feel this comfort eating urge and stress eating urge, sit with it and and watch it in the trenches. Sit next to it. What is happening? Don't try and run away from it because you will just break and go go and do what that thing is wanting you to do. This is the main event, guys.
Speaker 2:The main event. The main event. So there's a few studies here as well. So, you know, many studies are showing all this stuff. Very complex studies, of course.
Speaker 2:This type of stuff is very complex. So studies suggest that individuals with the highest susceptibility to emotional eating might benefit from interventions that teach emotional regulation skills and distress tolerance strategies and to aim to improve emotional well-being. A 2018 study concluded that several such approaches had shown promising results in reducing emotional eating and facilitating weight loss, including mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy. So the answer to this isn't more fitness information, more nutrition information. It simply is emotional.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't even say a regulation. Emotional awareness, watching what happens without judging ourselves, sitting with it. Let's see what happens. Dean would say, well, mindset coach, you're not your thoughts. Right?
Speaker 2:And in a sense, you're not your thoughts. Your thoughts are automatic. Some of these intrusive thoughts you get are automatic based off memory, based off experience. They're they're very false in a sense. But what we do is we take these thoughts seriously.
Speaker 2:We actually make them real. We debate them in our heads, and they turn into a real thing physically. Right? So we have to see that the thoughts and we have to watch thoughts as they pop in because they'll always keep coming in. Right?
Speaker 2:If there was one thing that a lot of people if we could master, this would be the we would be sorted. I I truly believe if we could master stress and emotional eating, life would be far easier when it comes to nutrition because we are not ruled by our false negative automatic thoughts. We're not ruled by someone else being able to impact us emotionally. We're not ruled by external things. We are the masters of our minds And when we are the masters of our minds or we are this watchful thing over our emotions, happy days.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean? Alright, guys. Hopefully that was helpful. There's research on this and it's clear. It's all mindfulness.
Speaker 2:It's all mindset when it comes to this. If this is the number one thing behind two groups, one gaining weight and one not, this stuff, and it's all mindset stuff, The answer is you have to look internally yourself. Stop looking externally for answers. The answers are internally. I'm gonna see my favorite second favorite philosopher tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Well, it'll be today. I'm gonna see my second favorite philosopher, called Montaigne. He was a renaissance man. He read all the classics and stuff. And he eventually he created the personal essay.
Speaker 2:He created it. The personal essay is in writing about his own mind, about topics. And Shakespeare got a lot from this guy, lots of people did. And what he did was he was like, I've read everything and actually I need to be my own guide. Need to look internally and I want to share my inner workings of my mind to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 2:This self knowledge like Socrates talks about self knowledge empty to mind, self knowledge is the only knowledge is the only thing. And he went deep into his mind and looked into the things, watched it, what was happening, different topics, what was going on. Right? This is a this this is the main piece of wisdom that's gone through history, but it hasn't quite infiltrated everyone's mind yet because we think the answers are someone else more knowledgeable will tell me what to do. There's another system out there that's gonna work.
Speaker 2:Some mindfulness guru's gonna tell me the way to think. None of those are gonna work. You have to look inwardly yourself and observe. That's it. And he figured it out and he wrote the essays and you can read them.
Speaker 2:Some of them talk about, you know, his struggle having a boner. If you want to watch it guys. But other than that, enjoy your day and I'm listening to some Queen. I'm enjoying myself working. So adios people.
Speaker 2:Speak to you soon.
