(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Mindful Balance Mini Podcast. If you are a woman over 40, ready to break free from fad diets and discover the power of balance and confidence in your life, then this podcast is for you and I am so happy that you are here. I'm your host, I'm Rachel, a nutrition and mindset coach and I'm going to break down everything you need to know into bite-sized pieces of sustainable and realistic tips.
(upbeat music) I wanna invite you to join me as we explore practical strategies to stop overeating, nourish your body and use the potential of your amazing brain to achieve your goals. If you haven't already, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode filled with insights on nutrition, mindset and building healthy habits. (upbeat music) Hi and welcome back to the podcast.
It is you and me time again and I hope that you are as excited as I am to spend the next few minutes together working on you. One of my cats, Pi, is actually not feeling great so I really hope that I'll be able to get through the next couple of minutes recording without him being really sad and needing lots of love. Today though, I want to teach you about breaking the cycle.
Whatever unhealthy, unhelpful cycle you feel like you are currently in, for some of you this may be the cycle of overeating and for others it may look completely opposite and be a cycle of dieting and restriction. There are two sides to this cycle. Either way, I will explain how these are actually both part of the same exact cycle. Whatever cycle you are experiencing right now, I know that it can feel like it's part of life. This is just how it is and that it is never going to end.
It just goes round and around with one thing leading to the next exactly the same way every single time. When I was doing some of the research prior to recording this episode, I realized that the range of emotions that women feel around overeating can be very wide, which means that it might look very different for you compared to someone else.
But all of these feelings have something in common and that is one, that it doesn't feel good to overeat, it doesn't feel good to eat more than your body needs or feels comfortable consuming in a certain period of time. And number two, it does feel good and that is because in the short term there's definitely a temporary relief that happens when you let yourself go and just eat as much as you want and as much as you think that it is enjoyable. This is how I see it go for most of you.
You feel some kind of discomfort or negative feeling, whether it be an urge to eat or other negative feeling like overwhelm, stress, frustration, boredom, sadness, et cetera, whatever the negative emotion of your choice. You eat and by that I mean completely checking out, letting the food comfort you and then you feel better for a few minutes. There is that kind of pleasure that comes with eating but then immediately after that you feel worse. So what do you do?
You restrict your eating, let's say the next morning to make up for what you ate the night before. You get overly hungry because when you restrict how much you eat then you get overly hungry and that's normal when we are withholding food. It is our body natural response to up the hunger cues. So you feel lots of urges again. You eat to feel better then you feel bad, then you eat to feel better, you feel bad, restrict and so on, repeating forever.
This is why I mentioned earlier that the overeating and restrictions are the two sides of the same cycle. One is literally and figuratively fed by the other. So does that sound familiar? I'm going to guess that it does because this was my story and something that I have heard over the years more times than I can count. One thing leads to another and everything in this cycle is a problem.
So if you are in that loop it can be very confusing to figure out where to break the cycle or how to break it. Which problems do you solve first? There has to be a starting point that can halt this entire habit. Well, kind of. There definitely is a better starting point. And that's not to say that you can't start anywhere because really fixing any of the problems will be helpful but in my experience there is one spot that is a better place to break it.
But before I break it down for you, I'm going to go through the other places that are helpful and talk about why they work and why it's also not the most effective way to break this behavior pattern. First, what most of us do when we try to break the overeating restriction cycle is we try to reverse engineer it. We know where we are right now and we try to go backwards from that moment. When we do that, what usually happens is we get confused about how to do each step.
So let's go through that path together for a minute. Let's just go through this mental exercise right now. Okay? So step one, you don't want to be consistently hungry. We know nothing good comes out of that. So you go into step two. To do that, you need to stop trying to restrict to compensate. Step three, in order to not restrict, you have to stop feeling badly or guilty for eating. Then you go to step four. To be able to do that, not feel badly about eating, you would have to not overeat.
Step five, to not overeat, you'd have to either not feel any negative emotion or not have any urges to eat. And then step six, to not feel bad or not feel an urge, you'd have to not do whatever triggered that. Let's say restricting or whatever else that happens in your life. You can't let your boss upset you. You can't let a family member make you frustrated. Basically, you have to live in an ideal world. If you went through all these six steps, then congratulations.
But we're actually back in square one because we're trying to figure out how not to do all those things. And that is exactly what we're trying to avoid. That is the reason it is called a cycle. Once you take the first step, it leads you in the same motion over and over again, possibly forever. So just think for a second about one woman in your life who is still for years constantly dieting.
And here you have your proof that if you don't take an intentional action, it is so easy to live like this your entire life. And that is where I wanna offer you an alternative. If you don't want to continuously be stuck in the cycle, then stop worrying about what the next thing is or what the previous thing is. Just focus on one action that you can take right now. So let's take another example.
Say you choose to focus on not restricting because we know that in the cycle, the restricting and the overeating are actually both part of the cycle. But you choose to focus just on one thing and that is not restricting. And to clarify, when I say restricting, I'm not talking about setting self boundaries because that is actually very, very different. Self boundaries are coming from self care and restriction is more about punishment.
And I may have to do an entire episode about that and how these two things, restriction and boundaries, are so very different. But let's get back to trying to stop restriction. This is something that is extremely, extremely scary. I know that. Especially if this is the only way you know to take control. You are afraid that if you continue to overeat but don't immediately after that restrict yourself, then you are going to just gain more and more weight. But pay attention because this is the key.
If you don't restrict, then you're not going to cause the over hunger that likely will lead to overeating. Ding, ding, this is what we want. We want to stop the over hunger. So this is something that you need to ask and be super, super honest about. Are you willing to take the chance and possibly maybe gain weight if it means breaking the cycle of constant urges, craving, restriction?
What it will look like is you making an intentional choice to move on after, let's say, a weekend or just eating too much for dinner. That's an alternative to the Monday morning diet decision. To be able to do that, you'll have to not feel so much shame and guilt and anger about what and how much you've eaten yesterday or the night before or on the vacation that you just got back from.
That guilt and anger and other really not great things or great and fun feelings are the things that drive you to cut back on what you're eating to make up for it. We all know people who eat, let's say, during a holiday and it seems like it doesn't bother them. They have zero need to overcompensate because they just accept what happened and they move on. And when we look at these people, it almost feels like, how can they just do that?
I used to look at people like these and not understand how is it possible that they have no drama about eating or drinking too much sometimes, which is a totally normal behavior. Okay, now let's say that you have done that. You stop restriction and you give yourself permission to move on after overeating. That is a good place to break that cycle. I have to now be completely transparent with you that doing this will be helpful, but some of you will need more than that.
This will only be part of the solution, but not all of it. And here's why. If you stop restricting and dieting, some of you can still be in this feel bad, eat, feel bad, eat cycle. Some people advocate for a solution that addresses the feeling bad piece of it, which honestly seems like a reasonable solution.
This one makes sense because if bad feelings come before you eating your entire pantry, then if we can just avoid the negative feelings, what is called emotional eating, then overeating won't happen. Most of us are aware of the fact that overeating often happens when we are, let's say, bored or lonely or nervous or any other sticky feeling. We all have our list of our most common pre-overeating emotions. So what do we do to solve that? We know that certain emotion cause us to overeat.
We try not to feel the negative emotion or we try not to get to the point that we have those feelings. If you have tried that, then you know that that also doesn't work. You can feel completely fine. You can address feeling lonely. You can not be sad or stressed and yeah, still have cravings all day long. You can't, as a strategy, try to avoid feeling anxious or frustrated or overwhelmed. Not feeling bad ever is unrealistic.
We're not going to feel good all the time and that, without even mentioning how sometimes feeling happy is what triggers us. Birthdays, holiday parties, going out with friends, celebrations of achievements or a milestone. And we try to avoid all the feelings, but do we also try to avoid all the feelings of feeling happy? No, no thank you. But no matter how hard you try, you are not going to be able to eradicate all the feelings that trigger eating.
Trying to not feel feelings just isn't the solution. Since your thoughts are the cause of your feelings, it does help to work on feeling less of the negative stuff. By, let's say, thinking more positive or more neutral thoughts, as long as you recognize that having no negative feelings at all is just not possible. And that is how we get to the last option. And I want you to pay attention because to stop overeating, you need to stop overeating.
Wait, wait, I'm not wrong, I didn't make a mistake here. You break the cycle of overeating by stopping to overeat. This is the piece of the puzzle that you work on. Think this through with me just for a second. If you don't overeat, you don't feel bad about it, which will help the cycle from going into restricting or more eating in response to those bad feelings. I know, I know, I know, it sounds almost too simple, but how the heck do we do that? You stop overeating by feeling the bad feelings.
You feel the cravings. You feel all the negative feelings and the happy feelings, but without turning to food. You feel that is the only action that you take. That's how you get off this roller coaster. You let negative feelings and cravings happen. You feel them, you process them. You don't avoid them and you let them exist. And while all this is happening, you don't take actions from these feelings. The only thing you have to do is not act on them.
I know, I know that it sounds too simple because it is simple even if you have all the doubts and the reasons why this won't work. You start by feeling and not eating. You give space and room to all the human emotions without eating and you know that is possible because there are many, many people out there going through stuff every day without making food the solution to all their discomforts and circumstances in life.
Going back to the other solutions for a second, yes, you can absolutely start breaking the overeating, restricting, overeating, restricting cycle with trying not to feel so bad or not restricting in a non-beneficial way if you'd like, but what it comes down to is how not to make food your only go-to solution, which is what triggers the rest of this cycle.
I want you to hear this, that not reacting and not taking action on your cravings is something that is always available to you and you have to make the decision to feel whatever it is that you're feeling and at the same time not eat in order to numb it, avoid it or make it go away. That never-ending cycle is not actually a never-ending cycle, it's not.
It has a very clear end that you can opt for every single time you feel an urge or craving to eat when you're not truly hungry or it is past fullness. Make the choice once and then make that choice over and over and over until your brain adjusts and doesn't operate on autopilot around food. By no means do I suggest that it is one action and done. You will for the rest of your life probably have cravings and want to eat more than your body needs sometimes.
But with practice, it can get much, much easier. You won't turn off the noise, there's a lot of noise when we feel those urges and cravings. You won't turn off the noise but you can 100% dial down the volume so that it doesn't hijack your brain all day, every day or every time you see a donut. Your feelings are not the enemy and the only reason that you have been turning to food to solve those feelings and make them go away is a habit.
Breaking a habit starts, ready for it, with breaking the habit replace complying with the cravings, with feeling the feelings. When you do that, it's like taking an elephant off your back. Such a huge relief. All right, I hope you found this helpful. I will talk to you next time. Take care, bye. Thank you for tuning in to the Mindful Balance podcast today. I hope you enjoyed our conversation and find inspiration to find your unique balance and confidence.
Remember that the journey continues on Instagram. You can find me @rachelemmanutrition. That is one word where I share daily nuggets of wisdom to help you reach your goals with ease. If you loved today's episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback fuels our mission to empower more women on their mindful balance journey. Until next time, take care and stay mindful, bye. Thank you for listening to the Mindful Balance.
The Mindful Balance is brought to you by Rachel Emma Nutrition. Our editing and mixing engineer is Michael Plawner. Our theme song is Good Feelings by Bo Leeson. The information in this podcast does not substitute for medical or psychological advice and is intended for educational purposes only. Please consult a qualified health professional regarding health conditions or concerns before starting a new diet or health program.
Rachel Emma Nutrition LLC and accompanying websites and social media platforms are not responsible for adverse reactions, effects, or consequences resulting from the use of any suggestions herein or procedures undertaken hereafter. (upbeat music)