Hangry & Emotional Eating
Good morning turtle heads. What are we talking about today? I think stress. I spoke about this before and it might elude you because it can't be asked. What do mean talking about stress?
Speaker 1:What do you want about how can we handle stress? What is stress? But there was a good study actually recently by University of Montreal and they don't look at actually which is an important distinction. They looked at people who say they're very stressed and looked at people that say they're zen and actually see if there's a difference in the actual physiological changes, the internal changes, are there things going off inside the difference of these two people or is it just on the surface they say they're stressed, they're zen but actually that doesn't go deeper. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So 123 healthy volunteers who self identified as either zen or very stressed out. They give them loads of assessments and all that, right, and looked at subjective ratings of perceived stress, depressive symptoms, anxiety, emotional regulation, resilience, and mind wandering. And they looked at Ollie's. Right? So what they did notice was that thirty minutes after waking the people that said they were very stressed out people had higher levels of cortisol.
Speaker 1:So it might be that these people are waking up and they're already thinking of stuff and getting stressed about it and the cortisol is higher which is a stress hormone and that could be causing their day to go off and be more stressed. So that's one they found. However, the rest of the day they didn't really see a difference in their stress hormones and stuff. They all had similar kind of ups and downs and there was no real difference but the study was small, right? The study was small.
Speaker 1:So what it does show though is that the people who said they're always stressed were actually finding it more difficult to regulate negative emotions versus people that was in. So sometimes we say I'm stressed out but that's not you know you're not deeply stressed or you feel like you say it and maybe saying it makes it is helpful but you're not actually having the internal reaction of a real stressor, you know. But the problem is that if you waking up and your cortisol levels are higher because you are always stressed out, then the researchers did say that these types of people over time will see physiological changes. You will actually see a stress response happening in the body. And when that happens we know from Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Alzheimer's, how bad that can be, this chronic stressor.
Speaker 1:So the takeaway the researchers are saying is like don't accept that being stressed out is a fact of life, that is part of life. Don't say that I'm always stressed. The way we speak to ourselves is so important that if we say we're always stressed we then find it hard to regulate our emotions because we're a self fulfilling prophecy. Become a self fulfilling prophecy by saying you're always stressed out, but actually you're not. And you know deep down that not everything is stressing you out.
Speaker 1:So when you're saying you are stressed, you're doing yourself a disservice because you're making it hard of yourself. You know, the mind is a weird thing. We can speak to it and we can have this dialogue inside and we're kind of different from it or like we feel there's a divide in the mind and we can fight each our mind all day every day. And when we say we're stressed, we're stressed, I'm kind, stressed, I'm not Zen, can't handle it. It's going to cause problems and it does cause problems actually when it comes to emotional regulation and this then leads to, another study I want to talk about about being hungry.
Speaker 1:Anger because of hunger, right. So they looked at a group that fasted fourteen hours overnight across the day, skipped breakfast. They looked at that group so basically what people do intermittent fasting, right? They skip the breakfast and have food. They brought them in asked them a series of questions versus a group that had breakfast, they weren't fasted.
Speaker 1:And the group that was fasted they, showed more negative emotions including anger, tension, fatigue, confusion and fewer positive emotions so lower vigor, slightly lower feelings of self esteem, right? So basically it doesn't make you feel awesome when you're hungry. We've all had that feeling, right? And there's a lot of reasons, there's a few reasons they say that like this causes it, it's like psychological explanation that you're hungry and you wanna release a bit of cortisol, you want to eat and you feel angry if you can't eat immediately because it's a control thing. That's like one of the hypotheses, like loss of control that we need to stop.
Speaker 1:We feel uncomfortable from this hunger feeling and we need to resolve it right now. But the main thing really is that the study confirmed that food restriction in terms of a lot of time is gonna lead to negative emotions. Negative emotions lead to worse decisions. Right? How do we handle negative emotions?
Speaker 1:No. If you're saying you're always a stressed person and then you get long periods of time when you're not eating and then when you just before you get hungry, you're feeling terrible, you've got bad emotional regulation, that time you do eat could be a binge. It could be a time where you eat way more than you need, then it makes you feel worse and that spirals out of control. Right? So we really need to look at whilst people think skipping breakfast and it's fine if you do and you're fine, but if you are skipping it not at the like if you're skipping it because you think it's gonna be better for fat loss but then realizing, do know what, when it gets to 1PM I am I'm angry, I'm I'm I'm feel terrible, I'm eating.
Speaker 1:Maybe you need to relook at the strategy because everyone's gonna strategy because everyone's gonna be different in this regard. I am not I don't feel bad when I feel hungry. Like, is this hunger that bad? Hunger isn't really an emergency for us when we feel it because in the modern world we are miles away from this like starved, real painful hunger state. We feel a bit of hunger and then we panic and then we go and eat.
Speaker 1:Feeling a little bit hungry in the depths it's absolutely normal and should be accepted because if you can't handle the uncomfort of a little bit of hunger, right, you're always gonna be ready, searching for food as a comfort mechanism. Not just for hunger, for everything else. Like, food is never the answer when you're stressed or you need comfort. Food isn't always the answer when you feel a bit of hunger. Sometimes you need to just go for a walk or you need to drink some water or drink some Pepsi Max or Coke Zero or something, like it doesn't always mean you have to go and eat.
Speaker 1:Right? And you need to look at this yourself. When was the last time I ate? Did I eat a meal with protein, carbs and fat? Know, what were yesterday?
Speaker 1:What was my food intake like yesterday? How's my activity been? It's been really really high or low. You need to look at the full picture and decide for yourself if it's the right time to go and eat again because a lot of people actually have got really bad control when it comes to eating like eat too fast, me, I eat rapid. I should enter eating competitions because goes against every single unbelievable food.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't do it at all. I should eat slow. But when I do eat slow and purposefully and mindfully, the times I do it, it definitely fills me up more. I feel fuller. I've, like you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna say the exact I'm not gonna break the science down to, some foolish thing, but, like, giving my brain a chance to register the eating could be something we can say, or the satiety response is more effective. All this stuff happens. Right? And I think it all comes down to this full picture saying, how have you gone from speaking about stress to now hungry and all stuff? Well it all connects, right?
Speaker 1:If you're always stressed out, you're trying to, you know, you're going go into a deficit, right, which means you're going to feel a bit hungry at times, and because you feel like you're always stressed your emotional regulation of that hunger signal is going to be bad and it's going to lead you to decisions you don't really want to be doing. So this is how it all ties together. What's the answer? Buddhism. Well Buddhism is the answer to some of this.
Speaker 1:I you know I spoke about that last week where if you can, the Buddhists would be like you need to have clear comprehension and for clear comprehension you have to look at things as fair facts so the fact is I'm feeling a little bit hungry. Full stop. Not I'm feeling a bit hungry if I don't eat now I'm going to die, I don't eat now it's terrible I'm feeling a little bit hungry. Then you've got the bare fact there, then you've got this thing clear comprehension of purpose where you go you have the chance then to speak about your purpose and why you're doing it. Okay, well I'm trying to lose a bit of weight, I'm trying to lose a bit of fat and for me to do that that means I am going to feel a bit hungry from time to time.
Speaker 1:And should I be able to sit with a bit of uncomfort when I'm doing something that puts my body in a bit of a stressful state? Of course. And if you can give yourself chance to time and like Viktor Frankl talked about, as I said this quote loads of times, you know, the gap between stimulus and the response is like the golden zone. Like, if you can if the stimulus and response, the gap is bigger and bigger and bigger, gives you a chance to bring bring in your purpose, bring in your why, bring in, you know, wisdom and clarity and all that stuff, then you're gonna make better decisions. But the problem is we don't let those things come in.
Speaker 1:We're so fast, rapid, and that's what bad emotional regulation does. It means that you're impulsive, you feel an emotion and you feel get a feeling and it turns into an emotion and the emotion causes an action so fast you can't even see it happening and then that's what a twirly spirally thing happens. We've covered a lot of ground today. I'm going to finish this podcast now but I think, for, like, practical takeaways, I would suggest on this is that if you feel a bit of hunger today, just sit with it. Like Dean spoke about this, the Buddhist talk about it, the stoics talk about it, Krishna Murti talks about it.
Speaker 1:Sitting with a fact and just observing that fact without anything else, no movement, no fighting it, no disregarding it, not even accepting it, just sitting with it like a friend, sit down next to the friend for ninety seconds. You know, that's the fact. The fact is that feeling of hunger is there. The fact is feeling comfortable, right, you sit with that ninety seconds. The research says Dean mentions is that if the feeling emotion will subside, but the emotion won't subside or go away if you fight it.
Speaker 1:It's gonna aggravate it, cause it to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So kind of like the chimp paradox model. But if you just sit with these things, the facts, and just look at them, you'll be amazed how less, how your day is less impacted by your your, you know, list of emotions and feelings. And that's where moderation has been real act with, wisdom comes in. So that's your task today.
Speaker 1:When you are hungry today and you might be genuinely hungry, that's fine, but just sit with it for ninety seconds, the feeling of it, you know, just sit and look at it, nothing else, ninety seconds and see what happens. See what happens to your thoughts, look at what's happening, how it connects up, what it's making you want to do and just sit with it and let me know how you feel after the ninety seconds. Do you feel more in control? You might go neat still, it's fine but do you feel like you actually have the control? That's the most important part.
Speaker 1:But, that's it. I'll speak to you all tomorrow.
