Managing Emotional Eating with Tiff Hall

0:02 A listener production. In today's episode, we are throwing it back to where it all began. If you are new to Crappy or Happy, you may not be aware that in the early days I co created the show with my very good friend and celebrity fitness trainer Tiffany Hall, and one question that both Tiff and I constantly received and still receive is how to overcome emotional eating, how to break the pattern of emotional eating. So Tiff and I recorded an episode together to try to provide some answers to that question. And since I know this is still such a hot topic, a big issue for so many people, I thought today that we might pull this one from the archives, revisit that episode from the very early days of Crapy to Happy.

0:55 I would love to know what you think. Please do email me and let me know if you have any thoughts, if you'd like me to acp band on this topic in a future episode. But for now, I hope you enjoy this episode with myself and my good friend Tiff Hall. Now Cass, we have so many members and people. We meet daily who really struggle emotional eating. It's really common, you know, and I think it's more of a problem for some people than others. So I guess it's one of those things that happens on a bit of a spectrum that you can have the occasional emotional you know there, we've all been there. But some people it's much more habitual and leads, you know, and much more of a problem in terms of their health and weight and fitness and their whole self self esteem and all of that. So I suppose it's useful to start with what are we talking about when we we say emotion emotional eating?

1:56 Because when I have ice cream, I feel emotionally. So happy, of course. Yeah, you know, like, how do we define negative emotional eating? Well, I think when we start using the word negative, we're talking about the impact that it's having on your life. So it doesn't necessarily always have to be a bad thing. It's like any of these things, they're not necessarily bad in and of themselves. It's only when for you personally, you start to identify that this is becoming a problem. So when we're talking about emotional eating, essentially what we're talking about is any way you might use food to make you feel better. So that can manifest in lots of different ways. It might be that you you know, people call it stress eating or comfort eating if you are feeling stressed or lonely or frustrated and you go to food for comfort. So I think we all have a sense of what that is. It also manifests as for example, you know people who really have trouble tolerating big emotions, you know, if they're really in emotional pain, I want to stuff down feelings, you know that actual.

3:02 Right, feeling suppressing, yeah, numbing, yeah, suppressing your emotions with food. And in another way, it's sometimes it can be almost like filling up if there's a sense of emptiness. Or boredom or boom. Yeah, you know, you're sort of filling a hole in your life or filling a void with food. So for different people will have their own different version of what emotional eating means to them. And it can make you feel crappy, right, because then if you're emotional eating, you can put on weight, you can well feel lower your mood absolutely well, First and foremost, whatever it is that's making you feel crappy, it's still going to be making you feel crappy after you've eaten that type of ice cream, so you haven't actually solved the problem, and you know, that's what we need to get to later in this episode, is you know, how we can find other ways to soothe those emotions that don't involve food, because the thing about emotional eating is that generally the consequence is.

3:59 That you feel worse guilty and or shame. You know, you feel you feel bad in your body, you feel bad in your mind, and the problem still hasn't gone away. So it's actually like a double triple whammy, you know, in terms of the crappiness. So can you define for us then, what's the difference between like emotional eating and when you know, binge eating or people who struggle with that. I think that really fundamentally, the difference between emotional eating and binge eating is quantity. Okay, so I can be like a person might be feeling bored and stressed and lonely and go and have a tub of bowl of ice cream and feel, you know, feel beat in the short term. When we talk about binge eating, the definition of the psychological definition of that is eating a much greater quantity of food than would normally be a reasonable amount of food to eat in one sitting. Usually eating in a much shorter space of time, and you would reasonably expect and often also a sense of being out of control, like not having control over that behavior.

5:09 And is it usually secretive, so that can be often done in secret. So you know, that's when we start tipping over into like a psychological like a binge eating disorder if that's happening frequently, which is you know, which is an issue that requires professional. Help, and that's something too. It's important to talk about that as well because a lot of people do struggle with it. They do, but I think the everyday person who's eating emotionally, they you know, there's kind of there's a difference that they're on a spectrum again, but there is a fundamental sort of difference between just having the occasional you know, stress snack and a chocolate bar and really eating large quantities of food in the short space of time.

5:50 And the emotional eating can really set you back if you have fitness or weight loss goals or you know, even for the processing of these of your emotions, you're not learning how to deal with things that worry or stress or hurt you. Huh No, that's exactly right. There is not It's not a healthy way to cope. And also what we know is that that it becomes habitual. It becomes very habitual for people. You know, So when you do a behavior, whether whether it's emotional eating, whether it's drinking alcoholic having glass of wine, or whether it's you know, getting online and buying yourself you know, online shopping. This all things that we do kind of compulsively to make ourselves feel better. And I put them all in the same category. Any behavior that you sort of do compulse compulsively to make yourself feel better has the potential to have has got that emotional component to it, and has the potential to have negative consequences.

6:46 But what happens is you get that immediate again we're back to the dopamine. You get that immediate dopamine hit that reward center. It feels good temporarily doesn't help actually in the long run, but that feel good hit that you get temporarily kind of why that into your brain so that the next time you're feeling a bit crappy, your brain goes, oh, well, last time, this is what I did and I felt better. So you go straight to that behavior again. So when we're being mindless, you know, not really paying attention. You know, when you're kind of all caught up in your head and you're not feeling very good, you just you're reacting kind of emotionally or habitually. You will kind of go to your default to these patterns of behavior which don't necessarily serve you, so they become really routine.

7:28 And the emotional eating can make you feel crappy from you have that high, the dopamine hit and. In sugar there's a crash that's got that effect because. It's a physiological crash as well as the mood as well, and so you're just feeling so crap. Gil and then you get stuck in this Oftentimes people will get stuck in this kind of shame cycle. So you're feeling really bad, so you do this thing like eat a big bunch of whatever it is, you know, ice cream or the Timtams or whatever, and then you feel so bad about yourself that you almost kind of go back back around. Then your own coping strategy is to make yourself feel better, is to eat and around and around it goes. Yeah, And then I've seen a lot with my members on two f XO, they go on a huge fitness blitz, like they'll go on a long run or a punishment sort of exercise thing to sort of like get rid of that lady. Yeah, and then they they're not enjoying the exercise, then they feel worse, and it's like they move into like a starving then stuffing cycle of like exercise.

8:33 Then you know, emotional leading. Then you know it's it's can bring on all sorts of problems. Yeah, and I think you know that sort of extreme, those extremes you know, you're talking about over exercising, compensating, trying to even but you know, then there are things like even purging, binging, purging that's obviously disorder, laxative use, lots of things that people do to then try to negate. But what they should be doing is dealing with the emotion, not the ideally the habit. Yeah they're doing yeah, Yeah. Isn't it fascinating how our minds and our bodies work together. And in emotional eating, it's not actually about the eating at all. It's always no problems. It's about the emotion exactly.

9:18 It's got nothing to do with food. And this is fundamentally the difference between it like a physical hunger and an emotional hunger, and oftentimes people can't tell the difference. They feel like they want food, but they're not physically hungry. You feel quite urgent, can't it. Yeah, And oftentimes with emotional eating, it does feel urgent, whereas a physical hunger will come on more gradually and it tends to be more kind of in your stomach, like you feel a rumbling in your stomach, whereas an emotional eating will be very much sort of it's a fixation in your mind of you know, focusing on wanting to eat something, and it might be a. Very specific food that you're. Craving, Whereas when you're physically hungry, like you can almost eat anything, whereas emotional eating you might tend to reach for that thing that makes you personally, you know that you identify as a comfort.

10:02 So you could sort of see patterns of foods and what you're attracted to and things. I always used to say to my contestants on the Biggest Loser who were in that position they were morbidly obese because of emotional eating. I'd always say, just ask yourself, am I hungry or am I hurting like gray? Is it in emotion or is it in my stomach? Like you say, rumbling, great, So if it is hurting, is that something that just comes on as an adult, Like how does that manifest? I was just gonna say that's a great question. I also often use the question like what are you really craving? Like what is it that you really need right now? Yeah? So, you know, oftentimes some of these patterns start really early on in childhood, and I think people get kind of really interested in like where did this start and try to solve the problem. Is it because my parents?

10:49 You know, oftentimes it does start if food is used as a reward in your household, or you get messages about food that you have to eat everything on your plate. So some of these healthy relationships with food can start really early on. And I would say that sometimes it might be useful to look into that, but sometimes actually we don't. I mean, we just need to deal with the problem now. Yeah. I think some people can get very fixated on needing to work out why this is happening and why do I do this? And I need to understand myself better. And actually, as soon as you identify that it's a problem, then we just need to we can do things to start addressing that and turning it around. But yeah, oftentimes, yeah, it's not something necessarily that comes on in adults. So though it might, I think sometimes it starts earlier on, for sure, and then it develops and it progresses, and as I said before, it becomes very habitual, becomes very sort of routine.

11:44 Can emotional eating just suddenly come on, like perhaps you've had no issue with it in your teen years or anything, and then maybe you experience trauma or a difficult work colleague and then you find yourself emotional eating. Can it just suddenly happen? I guess any of these issues, any unhealthy coping strategies, can potentially develop at any time in life. So what we're really talking about here is not a food issue per se. It's a management of emotions issue. It is. So if there's not you know, you might have never had an issue with food, but you may have had difficulties with dealing with or processing difficult emotions. You might come from a family where you don't deal with emotions, or you know. There can be lots of different personal backgrounds that people might have. But I guess fundamentally the issue is if if I'm not able to manage my emotions in a healthy way. Then any of these other alternative ways of managing emotions may come into existence and may then slowly develop and become more habitual and repetitive.

12:50 Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Well then how do I deal with these emotions that can be quite confronting and hurt and icky? Where do you start? If you think that this is an issue for yourself? I think one really useful thing is to start by keeping a food darry. If you're a person who struggles with emotional eating, then I think it can be really useful to track. And people find this very tedious, but it can be very insightful. There's some good apps that do it. There are a good but so if you can start tracking what you eat and when you eat, and particularly how you were feeling at that time, you start to see patterns of times of day, of people, of places, and of emotions. That's interesting that potentially cause you to eat food that you would not normally or food that you would prefer not to. Yeah, and I've had clients do this and say, perhaps, oh my gosh, every time my mom calls there you go, I go for X or Y. And it can be a person who's a trigger or it can be you know, something from childhood that comes up or a memory.

13:57 But isn't that fascinating? Yeah, it is, and you start to see those links and have those insights. And sometimes people already have a sense. Of what they are. But so I think you know, first and foremost recognizing your own personal kind of weak spots almost you know, like what your own personal trigger points are, because they're different for everybody. I always say, if we're talking about emotional eating, the keyword is emotion. So it's about understanding what that emotion is, Like you said, like what's hurting or you know, what are you really craving? And then it's about coming up with alternative ways to soothe that emotion that don't involve food. And there are lots and lots of different options, but it needs to start with, well, what is actually going on for me right now?

14:47 Because, for example, if. It's boredom or you might just want to go and do something, read a book or put a movie on or something, as opposed to if it's a feeling of loneliness, it might be call a friend or go and play with your pet or you know, so if you know what the emotion is that needs to be soothed, Then you much you have a much better chance of adequately soothing it because you'll almost like apply the remedy that fits them. That fits so food's the wrong sort of medication here, Like, that's not going to medicate and make you feel better. It's the mindfulness and self care stuff. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so. I always suggest to people, you know, will come up with a whole big when you're feeling calm and relaxed and well, you know, like come up with a whole big list of things that make you feel good, things that you find soothing or comforting, and stick them somewhere where you can see them coming up.

15:42 After the break, we are going to talk about some of those specific things you can do to soothe other than using food. You're listening to Crappy are happy with Tip and Gas. You're listening to Happy with Tip and Cass. We're talking about emotional eating. Cas. You mentioned there are some. Specific tools that we can use to deal with the emotion in the emotional eating. What are they? By understanding what is the specific emotional need that needs to be met, then you have a much better chance of knowing what might be helpful to sue that emotion. So this is where the food diry comes in. And this is where you know, really checking in with yourself about what am I really feeling, what's hurting right now?

16:28 What am I actually craving can help you to know what might be a really appropriate and suitable response. And I think it helps to sit down and write a big list of there. So they almost have like a repertoire of a little self soothing nice thing, yeah, that you can draw on in that moment when your whole body and brain is saying all I want is chocolate right now, you can actually take a breath and have something that you can go to to say, well, what else might I need? So you know, for example, if you are feeling exhausted, it might be that you just need to lie in a warm bath, you know, relax do so meditation or relaxation. If you're feeling lonely, you might want to call a friend and play with your pet, something like that that feels that lonely loneliness kind of neat.

17:10 If you're feeling bored, it might be that you need to read a book or listen to the music, or take yourself out to a movie or you know again like catch up with a friend. So if you know what it is that you're feeling, then you can kind of have a little arsenal of tools that you can draw on, you know, and there are lots of them. Go for a walk, have a warm shower, you know, diffuse some essential oils. Endless, yeah, endless, so many. And I find that a lot of our members talk about the emotional eating late at night, you get stuck in your head, and sometimes they might be on Facebook and it might trigger something because social media can be quite triggering in terms of fear of missing out or you know, self esteem, all of those issues. And instead of watching the TV, like, perhaps switch off the TV if you know it's going to bring on boredom and emotional eating, and take up something else, like one of my members suggested, you know, learn a bit of sign language, or learn how to knit, start an instrument. I mean, there's so much you can do, or just relax creating.

18:20 You just read a book, yeah, absolutely, pick through some magazines I mean yeah, or. Go to bed, yeah, and get some proper sleep. And that is that is so important, isn't it Just an early bed can Yeah? And so that is actually another like I think managing stress generally, if you know that you're a stress eater, and we hear that all the time, Oh this is my biggest problem. I'm a stress eater. Well, don't let yourself get too stressed. You know, there are things that you can implement into your day every day that are self care strategies. Building in regular breaks, going out for a walk for fifteen minutes at lunchtime is proven. To reduce your stress sagnificantly. Being in nature or doing something relaxing fifteen minutes out of your day has a massive positive.

19:03 Treat the stress. Yeah, and stress eating is so popular. And something that I love doing is stretching. Start the day with a stretch. You start your day with meditation and stretching. For me, I sort of like work it in there. And stretching is so important because it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and tell us about that cast because it's so important because it switches off the stress chemical, doesn't it in your brain? Yeah, And when you're stressed, and obviously your cortisol levels are elevated, that's when you are most likely to reach for sweet sugary snacks. That's actually a physiological effect on your body. But so the sympathetic nervous system is the bit that's responsible for you know, the part of your brain gets aroused when you're feeling stressed or anxious. It's that fight or flight center of your brain that releases this cortisol and the adrenaline and gets you gears you up for battle. Yes, so just taking some calm, deep, die fromatic breaths, just for a minute has the effect of switching on the parasympathetic nervous system, which is actually like the relaxation response. So it's like telling your brain stand down, it's all right, calm down the physiological arousal and actually put yourself more into a relaxed state.

20:17 It's fascinating. You can't have that stress hormone and the relaxation hormone flooding your system at one time. You got switch one off and switch the other one on. So can you take us through diaframatic breathing? What is that? So we're talking about taking deep, slow breaths all the way into your belly. So when you're feeling stressed or anxious, you tend to shallow breathe, breathe up in your upper chest. That short breathing. I see people all the time actually obviously in my practice, and what I actually get them to do, particularly if they suffer from anxiety, is I count the number of breaths that they take per minute, and oftentimes that number will be sky high, like eighteen twenty even thirty thirty three breaths per minute, so you can imagine how short and shallow that breathing is. So then I them to just breathe in, like almost even just for the count of three, all the way to your belly, so you feel your belly rise and then breathe out. Yeah, So just breathing all the way in and all the way out its it comes to you instantly. And how simple is breathing and doing that for one minute? I find I will actually get people to do it just for one minute, and then go back and count their natural breaths again, and it comes right down. It actually has the effect of right after one minute, slowing their breathing right down.

21:36 So turning it turning it around. It doesn't it doesn't necessarily drop it all the way to a really very calm state, but it certainly will make a big difference. And those deep breaths are chemically changing your body. Absolutely. Yeah, So if you're listening right now, you might even want to just pause this episode and do that for one minute. And what I will usually ask people to do is to get a watch with a second hand and actually watch the count in. For three and out for three. This is particularly for people who are overbreathing, so that gives you ten breaths per minute. Obviously in for three and out for three is six seconds, so that's ten breadths per minute, which is a really nice, comfortable, calm breathing space.

22:20 So yeah, welcome to try that. To just press pause. And pauses now spend a minute the only time we'll say it, but pause it and come back. One of the ways I find is really effective in helping people to deal with emotional eating. I'm not a psychologist from a trainer. It comes from meal preps. So if you prep some snacks and some healthy food on the weekend, say, and it's in the fridge, it's there. When you feel that emotional eating is coming on, you just go and you have the healthy food in the fridge, it's already there. I call it like an SOS meal, like it's urgent it's a safety and if you're really craving that sugar because you're stressed, you just go, Okay, my sos meal is a beautiful, you know, soup that I've got frozen in the freezer.

23:11 I'm just gonna pull it out. I'm just gonna eat it and deal with it. So the physiological hunger is gone and you know it's emotional. Is that helpful? Caps Yeah. I think the more that you can obviously remove the offending food items and have healthy options on hand, that's obviously going to remove the temptation for people. So having things that are quick and easy to grab. I think maybe you know, when you say, if I'm really craving something sweet, then maybe what I'm more inclined to reach for is some fruit or some yogurt, not so much as soup, but you know, so they could be just having healthy options that might satisfy that craving. And there are. Healthy, healthy ways to cook sugar, you know, sweet things absolutely that you can have in the house that just moves your way from doing damage with something you know, quite menacing, like well I scream or yeah, leaders of ice cream or whatever.

24:01 Not that ice cream in itself is bad it's not. So it's really an individual thing about a person identifying that it's become a problem for them. I would also, I think it's really important when we start talking about topics like this, and I'll come back to this over and over. It's that self compassion because the more that people get self critical and beat themselves up, the more likely they are to maintain this behavior and get stuck in that vicious site. So it has to come back to self compassion, being kind to yourself. It's not the worst thing in the world. You know, I'm not a bad person. Everybody has, you know something. Everybody's got their vices, you know, we all do, and that's okay, but you know, and learning from a setback. So if I set out to to, you know, try to curb this emotional eating habit that I know that i've I've got, then occasionally there's going to be a setback and that it's okay.

24:50 But if I can learn from it, and if I can recognize, oh, okay, so that was a trigger and maybe I could have been a bit more prepared for that one, and then that's going to help me in the future, as opposed to going in to that straight into that cycle of what is wrong with me? I can never get it right, I'm hopeless. And this is this kind of self talk that we know goes on. We've talked about the inner critic. This is the kind of stuff that goes on that just creates more bad feelings, more guilt, and more of the same behavior. And we're not saying that treats are bad. We are talking about emotional eating here, so you know it's not bad to go out and have an ice cream and a treat whatever. We're talking about using that ice cream to deal with emotion. So I guess, yeah, it does come back to the self compassion.

25:34 It does. And is that more of your mindful nurses? Absolutely, yes, it all comes back to mindfulness. It's just amazing. We love it, listen, we love it so fundamentally, what we're talking about here, all of this that we've been talking about so far, is this idea that there is a lack of a capacity for one of a bit of a term to manage strong emotions or a fear of being overwhelmed by strong emotions. So people, particularly who are like surprise dressing big emotions, can be really fearful of being overwhelmed. So mindfulness practice is about learning to sit with your feelings, like learning to sit with your thoughts and feelings and not be not have to run away from them, not have to suppress them or push them aside. And it's cultivating a capacity to tolerate that discomfort.

26:21 And when you know that you can tolerate discomfort, you don't have to force anything out. You can just learn that it's actually okay. I can see how I can be angry. Any emotion that's actually fully felt and acknowledged, you know, felt in your body and given some space, moves through very quickly. We know this, like emotions move on themselves very quickly. They what keeps them stuck and what makes them a problem is the more we try to resist and avoid and push them away or suppress them, deny them, you know, all of those things that we do, and you know with food with othersgies, which actually you know, perpetuates the problem and makes it worse. So at the heart of it, what we want to do is to be able to learn to be able to sit and to regulate our feelings and to know that that's okay, all feelings are welcome, and that I can handle that.

27:15 And you say that there are no bad feelings, don't you know? You can't be a human without having all of them. And you know it would be lovely to only ever have the happy, positive feelings. Very unrealistic. So part of being a human on this planet is learning, you know that we can Actually we're okay, We're going to experience the full range of human emotion. Nothing's inherently good or bad. It all has its place and its time. You know, some are less comfortable for sure, but that's why I say, we're just learning to tolerate some discomfort and then they'll move on, you know. Yeah, happy, this is an emotion too. It calms, it goes. It's not We're not meant to be happy all the time. Are we part of happiness to me? When we're talking about crappy to happy?

27:58 Yeah, part of happiness is how having a core belief and inherent understanding that I can deal with anything. Yeah, Like that's an inner strength, Like come at me, world, Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't have to be afraid of my feelings. So that makes me feel it's an inner contentment, I suppose, and a piece and an inner confidence that I can handle. I guess it's how you look at it. Like if you're experiencing failure and you feel uncomfortable, if you sort of look at failure as well, I'm learning from my mistake and I'm going to be even stronger from that mistake. Yeah, and it's a challenge. Yeah, then it can be positive absolutely, Okay, Yeah, it's all got its place. It's very helpful. So if we just were to grab a cup of tea, sit there, do some deep difromatic breathing and be aware of those uncomfortable feelings and sit with it.

28:44 Practical practicing meditation again will help to build that because that's all it is. It's just sitting and noticing what's there and letting it be there. It's that simple, and I think that's really helpful. Cast and dealing with the emotion and the emotional eating, not having the trigger foods around, not having. The trigger foods around, but also not demonizing any food because what we know is that as soon as you demonize a food, your mind fixates. On it and it's all it wants. Yeah, So I think that's really important in this conversation. Not demonizing the food and not demonizing the emotions as well, and no bad feeling demonizing yourself. I hope that you enjoyed that little dip into the archive, because I know this topic is very pertinent at this time of year, and if you enjoyed the conversation between Tip and I, I encourage you to go back and revisit seasons one and two of the show.

29:34 Meanwhile, I will be back in a week's. Time with another solo episode, but for now, I truly hope you have a safe and a happy New Year. Listener