142. Overcoming Emotional Eating

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 142. of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today: overcoming emotional eating. If you’re like most people, when you hear the words, emotional eating, you probably picture a woman crying in bed, eating a half gallon of ice cream right out of the container.

I know that’s what’s depicted in rom com movies and on TV, but that image is just plain wrong. Emotional Eating is something that we all do. Both men and women do it. And it typically looks nothing like what we see on the screen. And one of the keys to becoming the healthiest version of yourself is getting control of your food choices.

And the way you do that is to stop the emotional eating. This is especially important for runners who typically don’t consider themselves emotional eaters. Hmm, interesting. We’re going to talk about that today. So in this episode, I’m gonna explain what emotional eating is and what it isn’t. And I’m going to share some things that you can do to begin the process of overcoming emotional eating for good.

And when I talk about coaching, and when I talk about my particular program, and the way that I do things, I have four main pillars of my program, four main areas of focus, and those include nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset. And mindset is the foundation of everything that we do. Armed with the right mindset, there’s basically nothing that you can’t accomplish. Okay?

So mindset is extremely important in the work that we do in my coaching program. And mindset includes both mental and emotional strength, both mental and emotional well being. And emotional eating is one of those things that is one of the hardest things to master, especially for the type of people that I work with athletes runners, because they know what to do, knowing what to do is one part of this, but actually doing it consistently is a whole nother thing.

Okay, so we work on this, we focus on it, we spend time working on improving and eliminating emotional eating, eliminating the need to do this, to engage in this behavior of emotional eating, okay, and I’ll explain what it is and everything here in the podcast. But I just want you to understand that it is something we will work on.

If you want to get back into control and feel like you’re in control of how you eat, you know how often you eat, how much you’re eating, the types of foods you’re eating. If you want to feel like you have control again, then this is an area that we need to focus on. Okay. And if it’s something you want help with, I got you. To learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.

You fill out a quick application and we can have a conversation and get started. Okay, I’d love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, called the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply And let’s get this thing started. Cool.

Okay, so let’s get into this topic of overcoming emotional eating. Then first I want to explain a little bit about what emotional eating is and what it is. And like I said at the beginning here, we have this picture in our head of emotional eating, being something very similar to what we see in movies in romantic comedies and pictured on television shows and things like that. And they usually show some woman who just went through some bad breakup or really got her heart broken by a boyfriend or something like that.

And so they picture her in bed with the half gallon of ice cream and next door is a half eaten large pizza and she’s just got a spoon and she’s just digging into it crying watching, you know, some sort of lifetime movie or something like that. Right? And this is just such a, I think this is kind of a dumb depiction of what emotional eating is because, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s fine and it kind of conveys the message they’re trying to get across in the movie or whatever.

But that’s really just such a tiny part of what emotional eating looks like, okay? Emotional Eating is not just eating because you’re sad and you went through some big breakup, emotional eating is not something that only women do. It’s something that we all do. Men and women both do this, and we do it regularly, you probably don’t even know that you’re doing it. It’s such an automatic habit, okay?

So emotionally eating is not necessarily the way that it’s depicted in the movies, it is something that is pretty mundane, and looks pretty benign on the surface. But it’s something that can really kind of thwart your progress if you’re trying to improve your health, if you’re trying to improve your body composition, if you’re trying to improve your relationship with food and nutrition and exercise, okay.

So what emotional eating is, is using food as a way of changing how you feel. So imagine that you come home from a long day at work, and you’re a little stressed out from the work day and the boss and the project you got going on. Or maybe you have kids that have just come home from school. And you know, things are a little chaotic at the house in that moment, right.

And what you do in that moment is reach for something to soothe you, something to help you deal with the stress that you’re experiencing in that moment. And so you go for the cookies that are sitting out on the counter, or the chocolate cake that’s been, you know, sitting in the fridge, or you know, the pretzels, or the potato chips, or whatever it is, okay. So you use food as a way of suppressing that stress that you’re feeling in that moment.

It’s actually a way of numbing, or we’re trying to numb that emotion, we don’t want to feel that emotion of stress. And so we eat instead. And when you eat something, especially those things that I mentioned, sugar, potato chips, pretzels, any kind of refined carbohydrates, any kind of sugary type of food, it feels good, we get this release of dopamine, we get the feel good, you know, serotonin go and we get the feel good chemicals going in our brain.

And we’re like woo! Yeah, there we go. I’m feeling better. I don’t have to feel that stress anymore. The reality is you do, you still experience the stress. But for a brief moment there, you’re numbing yourself to that distress, okay. So we use food, and alcohol and drugs and cigarettes and caffeine, any kind of mood altering substance, even shopping and scrolling through social media, things like that.

We use these to try to feel better, we use these to numb ourselves from having to feel the emotions that we’re experiencing in that moment. And it doesn’t just have to be grief, or sadness. And it doesn’t have to be just because something major just happened like some big stressful event. It could just be an every day, you know, source of stress. Like I said, like the kids coming home from school or something like that.

It can be something really mundane. It can even be something like you’re eating because you’re bored. You know, you’re sitting at home, you’re working all day. And every 30 minutes or so you just get up and you’re like, sure I’m bored and you go to the fridge and you start rifling through what’s in the fridge or going through the pantry and grabbing various bags of chips and stuff like that. And we’re doing it because, you know, we just want something to kind of numb the boredom. So anytime we’re using food to try to feel better. It’s almost always a numbing act.

In this country in the United States, we are really, really good at numbing. We are a highly addicted society here. We eat a lot of food emotionally. We take a lot of prescription drugs, we take a lot of illicit drugs. There’s a lot of that alcoholism and a lot of drinking that goes on here in the United States. And all of these things are done because we are trying to feel different or feel nothing, we just want to stop feeling whatever that feeling is.

So emotional eating is just using something externally to try to feel better internally. Right, and even runners, even people who are athletes in and, and know, better and know like what to do, we know that, you know, eating certain foods is probably not in our best interest, it’s not going to help us to run that faster marathon that we’re training for, it’s not going to help us stay fat adapted, or whatever it is that our goal is, we know these things.

But we still engage in this emotional eating behavior every single day. And I talk to people, every single day, I talk to runners who are really, really good at sticking with their running plan, who are really good at sticking with their strength workouts and are really good at sticking with their cross training, they will get up early in the morning and get stuff done.

And they feel great, because they’re exercising, they’re doing what they’re supposed to and when it comes to eating and sticking to their food plan, it is really, really challenging. And I find this pretty interesting. We can be really mentally and emotionally tough around exercise. But when it comes to food, we just melt, we melt like ice cream on a hot summer day, we just melt, we cannot deal with what’s happening around us.

We cannot deal with the stress or feeling or the frustration or the anger or the you know, irritation or whatever it is, or the boredom, we have a really hard time just dealing with, you know, life around us. And so we use food. And we have been using food as a coping mechanism for many, many years and decades. Most of our life, actually, we’ve been taught this from an early age our parents have, God love them, but our parents have, you know, kind of created little emotional eaters, you know, they they reward us with food, when we’re feeling sad, or we’re crying or we’re like a little upset, to give us food to try to soothe those feelings, to try to make us feel better, you know, all good intentions, and all that.

But I think we need to like break this cycle. If you’re a parent, maybe we can kind of break this cycle of not using food as a way of helping our kids to soothe themselves, don’t teach them how to use food as a way of coping. Instead, actually deal with the emotions that they’re experiencing. And I’ll get to that in just a minute what we need to do in order to break this cycle and to overcome emotional eating, okay, but understand that, you know, emotional eating is just something that we all do, we all engage in.

And something that I find very interesting is that we don’t typically emotionally eat, you know, broccoli, we don’t typically emotionally eat, you know, like chicken breast or something like that. We’re emotionally eating the stuff that lights up our brain that makes us feel really good.

You know, so it’s going to be the really hyper palatable foods, the foods that have been engineered to make us feel good to release that dopamine to give us the biggest hit of dopamine, dopamine possible. I never hear people telling me oh, you know what, I had a really, really stressful day at work. And then I came home and I just, I was just feeling really stressed out. And so I ate a whole bunch of brussel sprouts. Or I just, you know, started really digging in to that chicken that I made and just ate a lot of that chicken like, we don’t do that.

Because those kinds of foods, we know those types of foods are healthy and good for us and all that. But they don’t light up our brain the way that doughnuts do, or cookies, or chocolate cake or ice cream or pizza. That stuff is amazing at biting up our brain. You know, so just keep in mind that the types of foods that we’re using to soothe ourselves, it matters.

And it’s one of those things where I wouldn’t be talking about this if we were emotionally eating with broccoli, because it’s not a big deal. Who cares, right? I mean, we do want to be able to deal with our feelings and things like that. But when we emotionally eat all the junk food, it negatively impacts our health and our fitness and our ability to to accomplish our goals and our ability to become the person that we ultimately want to become, okay.

So just understand that if you find yourself going towards those hyper palatable foods, that junk food, then you got to look at that as probably being some sort of emotional trigger that’s causing you to go for that kind of food. Okay. And again, this is something, if this is normal, there’s nothing wrong with you. If you engage in this kind of behavior, you know, and maybe you do it regularly, maybe you do it from time to time, maybe you’ve done it your whole life, this is normal.

This is kind of your brain just doing what it’s been trained to do. Over the last several decades, your brain only wants one thing, it wants to feel good. Your brain is always searching for pleasure. It wants to keep you safe, and your brain wants you to feel good. And it wants to stay away from anything that feels unsafe, or that doesn’t feel good. So going for when your brain is feeling stress, for example, going for broccoli does not do anything to make your brain feel good. But going for chocolate chip cookies that are warm and gooey, and just came out of the oven.

Heck, yeah, your brain is going to go for that, because that is going to light up the pleasure centers of your brain. And that is going to make you feel really good for a little bit. For a very short period of time, you are going to feel good, but that is what your brain is supposed to do. Your brain is supposed to chase pleasure, avoid pain, seek, you know, something that feels safe, and avoid anything that feels unsafe. What feels unsafe is the stress that you’re experiencing. What feels really good and safe, is to just dig into a big ol plate of chocolate chip cookies.

But the thing is, you can untrain your brain. And this is the work that we actually have to do. This is just a habit that you’ve developed. And this is something that you can undeveloped. Anytime you have a habit that you have engaged in for a period of time, that is something that you’re choosing to do that you have chosen to do, and you’ve trained yourself to do over decades, and it is something that you can train yourself to do differently. Okay. And again, there are negative consequences when we use these types of food, you know, the highly palatable foods or sugary foods, the pizzas and things like that the junk food, when we use junk food, there are negative consequences to our emotional eating, okay, we think it’s just fine as good is gonna feel really good.

I’m gonna like finally, like, get some relief from this stress I’m experiencing or this boredom or this, you know, irritation that I’m feeling. But there are negative consequences to this. You know, you, you stay, you don’t stay on your food plan, you don’t stay fat adapted as a runner, your training is going to be impacted by this, your weight is going to be impacted by this. You stay in that sugar burning zone instead of being in the fat burning zone.

And you don’t build that trust and confidence in yourself. You’re breaking down the trust and confidence in yourself because you tell yourself, okay, I’m not eating cookies, I’m not eating pizza. But then you give in, because you just want to feel better in the moment. And when you do that, you don’t have your own back in that situation, what you’re doing is you’re actually breaking down the trust that you’re trying to build in yourself, you’re breaking down the confidence that you’re trying to build on yourself. Trust and confidence are so important.

If you want to do anything long term, if you want to create great results for yourself, it’s going to require you to do things consistently, and to build up trust and confidence as you go. And the more you do what you say you’re going to do, the more you are in integrity with what you want for yourself, the more trust and confidence that you build in yourself and the more motivation you have to keep going because you start getting better results. Breaking down that trust and confidence, you know, stops that process.

You no longer feel motivated, you feel frustrated. And when you feel frustrated, you end up going back to the emotional eating. It’s a vicious cycle, right. So the real work is going to be in learning how to feel your feelings. The real work is going to be learning how to experience having an emotion without eating to make it go away or to numb it. Not eating your feelings. So when you stop eating to feel better All the emotions are still going to be there.

And the real work comes in learning how to sit with that. The real work comes to learning how to feel all the stuff that you’ve been trying not to feel for so long. And this is a very uncomfortable process. For most people, this is really difficult for us to do as human beings, especially as adults who have been using food as a coping mechanism as an emotional management tool our whole lives. Okay, let’s take away the emotional management tool. Now, what do you do? How do you manage your emotions? If you’re not using food to numb them? Because you’re gonna feel all that stuff? It’s gonna, it’s not gonna feel good, it’s gonna feel terrible.

Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to feel terrible for that short little period of time, because it usually doesn’t last that long. It might be 10 or 15 minutes, let’s say when you come home from work, and you’re stressed out, and the kids come home, and there’s chaos, and you just want to dive into that plate of chocolate chip cookies that you see sitting on the counter.

What if instead, in that moment, you just were like, Hi, I’m feeling stressed out right now. I am feeling chaotic right now. And what if you just bypassed the chocolate chip cookies? And just felt chaotic? What if you just felt stressed out? What if you just felt a little irritated? For 10 or 15 minutes? It’s a crazy concept, right? To just feel your feelings.

But when we’re willing to feel anything, there is almost nothing that we can’t accomplish. Do you know how badass it is? To like, just sit with a feeling and just feel it? This is what I call becoming an emotional badass when you can actually just sit with any feeling doesn’t matter. Positive or negative? Of course, we love the positive feelings, right? Joy, bliss, excitement, happiness, love. We love those feelings, right? Those are all fine. We’ll feel those all day long.

Oh, but don’t give me the negative emotions. I don’t want to feel the stress or the boredom or the frustration. I don’t want to feel grief or sadness or loneliness. But what if you just accepted that that is just part of being a human being. Because as a human being, guess what? You get to feel all of the emotions, you get to feel love, and joy and bliss and excitement. And you get to feel sadness and loneliness and grief.

Like you get them all. You can’t just have the good feeling emotions. And I’ve talked about this before life is about half good and half not so good. It’s about 50/50, right? 50% of the time, things are great. And we feel amazing. And we’re happy. And we’re content and we’re at peace 50% of the time, we’re stressed out, we’re pissed off. We’re irritated or annoyed or angry. And that’s okay. What if it was just okay to feel all of it. I know, it’s such a crazy concept.

We do so much stuff to not have to feel any of these negative emotions. We do so much we drink. We take drugs, prescription and non prescription drugs. There’s gambling and porn and shopping and scrolling through social media, and numbing ourselves with TV and all the stuff that we do, all the food that we eat, and the cigarettes and the caffeine and everything that we do just to like, numb ourselves out.

And there’s nothing wrong with occasionally having a drink or occasionally having a cup of coffee or occasionally watching some Netflix, like those things are okay, they bring us some pleasure. It’s okay to do those things here and there. But there’s a difference between, you know, eating mindfully, drinking mindfully, and drinking to numb ourselves, eating to not have to feel our feelings. There’s a big difference between those two, when we know when we’re doing it, we know what we’re doing.

So you just have to get really good with feeling your emotions. You got to get really good at experiencing the whole swath of human emotions that we get to experience. It’s okay to feel that way. It’s okay to feel bad. Every now and then. You can feel bad and still stick to your workout schedule. Right, like you can still crush your runs, you can be going through a hard time or be stressed at work and still hit your running schedule and hit your workouts at the gym and go to yoga, and do your strength training.

You can feel bad and do all those things, right? Because doing those things is actually a form of stress relief. It’s a form of managing our emotions in a healthy way. But when it comes to food, we don’t think we can feel bad and stick to our food plan. But you can, you can absolutely feel that and stick to your nutrition plan. You can feel bad, and still avoid the junk food, you can feel bad, and still skip the alcohol, or the potato chips, or the chocolate chip cookies or whatever you’re using to try to, you know, change how you feel? What if you just didn’t change how you feel?

What if you just kind of felt bad sometimes. So crazy concept, but it’s also the very first step in trying to change this behavior. Okay? Really, the very first step is being aware of what you’re doing, being aware of the fact that you are experiencing an emotion and you’re trying to eat to try to numb that emotion. That’s the very first step. It’s self awareness, it’s being aware that you are using food, some external substance to try to feel better on the inside.

Notice when you’re doing that, I really don’t want those cookies, but why do I find my hand reaching for them? And why is this moving towards my mouth right now? Why am I doing this? Sometimes it feels like we’re out of control, right? But we’re not, you’re never out of control, you are always choosing, you’re always deciding, you’re always in control. You just have to learn how to see that and how to take back that control.

Okay, what you’ve been engaging in for decades is just some automatic behaviors, they become very automatic, okay. But we can change that. That is something you can absolutely overcome and change. And the first step is just understanding what you are doing in that moment. What is the emotion you’re feeling in that moment? Name it: is this stress, or anxiety or irritation or anger? What is the emotion I’m experiencing right now? Put a name to it.

Once you do that, it kind of takes the electric charge out of it, you know, it kind of softens it a little bit. You’re like oh, okay, okay, I’m really irritated right now. Speak into that, I’m irritated right now. Kind of takes the, the, the intensity away, right. So it’s no longer overwhelming, you’re just like, Okay, I’m just feeling irritated, I can deal with that right now. And then it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating this process and learning how to sit with those emotions.

Because listen, it’s just a habit that you’ve done. Like, it’s just a habit you’ve developed, and you’re good at it, and feels automatic. And it feels like it’s mindless. But it’s just a habit. And habits are built one decision at a time, both good and bad habits. So the work is in those moments of decision. What is that you’re choosing in this moment?

Okay, you’re feeling an emotion in this moment, and you’re trying to make that emotion go away, you’re trying to numb yourself to that emotion, what is the decision you’re going to make at that moment is going to be to feel your feeling or to try to not feel your feeling? Is it going to be to go for the junk food that’s going to make you feel better temporarily, very, very temporarily.

Or are you going to do the thing that you know is going to move you towards your weight loss goals and towards your running goals and towards you becoming that best version of yourself? What are you going to choose in that moment, habits are built one decision at a time. And there’s a million little decisions that we need to make in order to change these habits.

So make good choices and be willing to feel your feelings. Be willing to experience all the emotions that come along with being a human being. Okay, this is not easy. And it’s not even necessarily fun. It is hard. At first it takes some practice. But you can do this. You do hard things all the time. This is just one of those things that you have to learn to do and learn to get good at and all that takes is repetition.

Get your reps in and continue to look at these experiences that you’re having as learning experiences. And at times where you can practice feeling your emotions. And maybe at first, you can only do it for a few minutes, and then you give in, you’re like, Okay, I just can’t do this anymore, and you go for the cookie, right? Maybe next time, you can go for a little bit longer, maybe instead of two or three minutes, it’s like eight or 10 minutes. And maybe the next time you give it like 15 minutes, and then you find that after about 16 or 17 minutes, you don’t have to go for the cookie anymore, because you’re starting to feel better.

Understand that a lot of times we feel these emotions for short periods of time, and then they go away. Then they come back, you know, we were always feeling different emotions. We’re always experiencing different emotions through our life and throughout our day. But understand that nothing is permanent. Think about a bad breakup you went through decades ago. Does that bother you anymore? No, not at all. You can think about that and just be like, Yeah, whatever.

But at the time, it felt like your whole world was collapsing, you know. So none of these emotional states that we enter into our permanent okay, just understand that. Habits are built one decision at a time. I want to offer you this. make some good decisions this week. Right? move in the direction of your goals, move in the direction of who you want to become. Okay. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

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