28: Emotional Eating: Breaking the Cycle with Science, Psychology, and Hobbies With Rita May
An emotional eating coach Rita May dives into the issues around emotional eating and the science behind it. Learn how to uncover triggers for emotional eating, how to better cope with your emotions and how to replace emotional eating with healthier activities. Through her insightful and knowledgeable discussion, you’ll find practical solutions to managing your emotional eating struggles while improving your overall health and wellbeing. Tune in and take the first step towards overcoming your emotional eating!
In this episode we cover:
What is emotional eating?
What are some examples of emotional eating habits
How to find the right hobby to help you destress and give you an outlet to replace emotional eating
Summary:
Emotional eating is a real struggle for many people. According to Rita May, an emotional eating coach, this is especially true for driven professionals and entrepreneurs who are successful in other areas of their life, but can't seem to manage their emotional and stress eating.
Rita May has developed an effective method based on three pillars: the science of nutrition, the psychology of eating, and the neuroscience behind habit change. Emotional eating is defined as eating for reasons other than hunger and can become a problem when it's the main or only coping mechanism to deal with issues in life, or when it leads to unwanted weight gain and body image issues. Typical reasons for emotional eating include avoiding an uncomfortable feeling or emotion, looking for comfort in food, releasing tension, numbing oneself, and escaping reality.
Fortunately, there are ways to combat emotional eating. Having a hobby can help with emotional eating by providing a better way to release stress than eating, providing an excuse to have a break, and providing a distraction from eating. Journaling can be a relaxing hobby that can help process challenging emotions, improve mood, and lower stress.
Writing down in a food journal how you feel before and after eating, what happened before eating, how stressed you were, how much you slept, and other issues can help uncover triggers for emotional eating. A brain dump can also be beneficial to release tension and gain clarity about issues. Writing down 5-10 things every day that you are grateful for can make a big difference. Additionally, exercise, meditation, coloring, art, photography, painting, knitting, learning new skills, and other activities can help release endorphins and make you feel better.
So if you're struggling with emotional eating, you don't have to face it alone. Take the time to explore hobbies and activities that can help you cope and manage your emotions in a healthier way.
Mentioned In This Episode
Where you can find Rita: Website
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Transcript:
[0:00:02] Dr. Destini Copp: And my special guest today is Rita May. Rita is a scientist termed emotional eating and health coach. She helps driven professionals and entrepreneurs who are successful in other areas of their life, but can't solve this one challenge, which is emotional and stress eating. So Rita, I am so excited to chat with you today, and we're going to be talking about how having a hobby can help with emotional eating. But before I get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience a little bit more about you, how you help people and why you started coaching?
[0:00:48] Rita May: Yes, of course. Hi Destini. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. As you said, I'm an emotional eating coach and I have professionals and entrepreneurs who are successful in other areas of their life, but they have this one struggle, this emotional and stress eating. And I wasn't always a coach, I was actually one of those professionals who had this challenge. And it was my personal journey that inspired me to learn about nutrition and the psychology of eating, so I could help myself and then later others too. In my early twenty s, I was caught up in the restricting and binging cycle because of two restrictive fat diets. And I overcame this. But later, as I worked as a postdoctoral researcher and scientist for about 15 years in the UK. And then in Switzerland. I'm Hungarian, by the way, and hope you don't mind my accent. And I found myself eating to relieve stress by balancing demanding work in a competitive field, loads of business, traveling, looking after our small children, and attending to all the other responsibilities. I realized that eating healthy food and moving regularly isn't always enough to live a balanced and healthy life. Because when we don't have the tools to deal with our emotions and stress, eating can quickly become a comfort or reward after retiring day, or a distraction from our uncomfortable feelings or problems.
[0:02:44] Rita May: Then, as we repeat this behavior multiple times overeating becomes a habit like smoking, drinking, gambling or other addictive behaviors. And to learn break from this emotional eating habit, I chose an integrative health coach training that included the psychology of eating as well. Not only information about nutrition and lifestyle as they usually do, I have also read many books and taken many courses to have a comprehensive view of emotional eating. I learned about limiting beliefs, mindfulness neuroscience habits, neuro linguistic programming and more. And then this enabled me to get free emotional eating and later to develop a program to have my clients do the same. And my method is based on three pillars the science of nutrition, the psychology of eating, and neuroscience behind habit change.
[0:03:55] Dr. Destini Copp: I definitely want to jump into all of that with you, and I have a ton of questions for you. Okay, first of all, I just love your accent. Absolutely.
[0:04:07] Rita May: Thank you.
[0:04:10] Dr. Destini Copp: So I really want to dig in and to get into the details about what is emotional eating. And I think a lot of us can relate to some of the stuff that you mentioned there. We get into our daily lives, running the kids around, working nine to five or even longer right. All the stress that we have daily. But talk us a little bit about emotional eating.
[0:04:40] Rita May: All right. Yeah. Very happily so. I would define emotional eating as eating for reasons other than hunger. And in general, it's not the best thing. Everyone does it. We need to celebrate or bond with family or friends. It only becomes a problem when it's the main or only coping mechanism to deal with some issues in your life. And it's also a problem if it leads to unwanted weight gain and body image issues. And it can be also hurtful mentally if you feel terrible after eating and you feel guilt and shame for what and how much you ate. So what are the typical reasons for emotional eating? Typical reasons are avoiding an uncomfortable feeling or emotion, or distracting yourself from it, or looking for comfort in food, or releasing tension, or numbing yourself and escaping reality. Let's see a few examples. Feeling overloaded, overwhelmed, stressed or anxious are very common reasons to overeat, as eating serves as a release, especially at the end of the day. And it's often coupled with alcohol, too, to relax.
[0:06:10] Rita May: And you may also feel like you deserve a treat after a hard day. Other triggering feelings could be sadness or loneliness. I'm sure you've seen at least one movie where the couple has broken up and the female character comforts herself with a big tub of favorite ice cream, for example.
[0:06:34] Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah, that was one of the things that came to my mind when you were mentioning that. Right. You're trying to kind of eat your feelings away, is what I was thinking about.
[0:06:46] Rita May: Yeah, but some people actually suppress anger with eating when someone upsets them or cannot say or they cannot say what they wanted to say. And in this case, they have the urge to eat something. And it's usually crunchy after an argument. But sometimes it can be only simply tiredness that drives us to overeat. In this case, you want to gain energy from food to push through. And eating can be also an excuse to have a break because you don't let yourself have a break otherwise.
[0:07:25] Dr. Destini Copp: And I think I can relate to what you just said, eating from being tired. When you're tired, you're like, oh, I need some energy, right. So I'm going to go eat even though I'm not hungry. I think that's a very natural reaction to being tired.
[0:07:41] Rita May: Exactly. Yeah. But we deserve to have a rest.
[0:07:45] Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah. So let's move into the next question. And it's really kind of what we're here to talk about today is how do you think having a hobby can help with emotional eating? So instead of if we're tired or if we are sad about something or even angry and we don't want to turn to those chips, what else can we do? How do you suggest that we turn to a hobby to kind of help with that instead of doing some of these emotional eating habits?
[0:08:23] Rita May: Yes, hobby actually can serve when you are stress eating. A better way to release stress than eating. When people are very busy and tired, they need to prioritize self care and a nice relaxing hobby can be a great way of spending some time to do something they enjoy doing. And because the more you enjoy your life, the less you need to escape from it using food or alcohol or other things like social media or drugs. So if you have some fun hobbies, you feel better and you don't need food as an emotional crutch. And hobbies can be also a good solution for loneliness or sadness. Because when you meet other people having the same hobby you can do the hobby together maybe or join online communities and make friends with people having the same hobby. And I didn't mention at the previous question but boredom can be also reason for emotional eating. When you feel bored and you don't know what to do and you just say eating sounds good. But if you have a hobby then you can remind yourself that you could also do that hobby instead. And if it's a boring task usually sometimes when we have to do a boring task we either eat during doing it just to make it more interesting or we eat before it to procrastinate because we don't want to do it. And having a hobby can be something that you look forward to doing after you finish this boring task or it could be a good reward after a stressful day instead of rewarding yourself with food as well.
[0:10:29] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that instead of using it, instead of using eating when you're bored or something, go try, go do a new hobby and find a new hobby.
[0:10:42] Rita May: Yeah. And hobbies can also work as destruction from eating when you start giving up emotional and compulsive eating. So when you have the urge to eat you can destruct yourself and keep your hands busy with your hobby. But destruction is actually not what I teach to my client as a permanent solution since it's not always possible to do, especially if you are at work. And I also believe that it's better to learn to feel your feelings instead of avoiding them and distracting yourself from them. And we also need to find the underlying issues for emotional eating and solve those problems instead of covering them up with eating or just a hobby. Because covering up is like putting a useless band aid on an infected wound. You can't see the wound anymore but it's still there and it's getting worse on that useless band aid. But these have the destruction such as a hobby at the beginning can be a good tool and while you develop the emotional fitness to be able to deal with your intense emotions without eating or solve other underlying issues. And after working with me for a while, food becomes a much less important part of my clients life. And suddenly they have a lot of free time that they previously spent with thinking about food, planning their diets, and criticizing and torturing their body with way too intense exercise or too little so not eating enough that I wanted to say. And often when I ask them what they want to fear this time up with, they have no idea because they got used to spending that time researching the latest diet or planning the new meal plan or finding some magic solution. And that's why I asked them in advance to think about hobbies or activities they enjoy but don't have time to do now. So they can have a list of activities to choose from later and let's.
[0:13:05] Dr. Destini Copp: Explore that a little bit. So how do you suggest that they find a hobby that would work for them based on kind of what their emotional eating needs are.
[0:13:20] Rita May: At the beginning? Journaling can be a really nice relaxing hobby to start with because when you are struggling with some challenging emotions or you're trying to process a bad day, writing about what's happening can really help you process your feelings and improve your mood and lower stress as well. And there are many ways journaling can help you. If you want to discover what triggers your emotional eating, I highly recommend writing down in a food journal how you feel before and after eating, what happened before eating, how stressed you were, how much you slept, some relationship or other issues or other things that affected you that day. And if you see your eating habits, your feelings around food, meal times and the events that happen written in front of you, you start noticing the recurring situations and feelings and sometimes even food that cause you to overeat. Another great way of journaling is a brain drop, brain dump. This is simply when you write down whatever is on your mind and just keep writing until you feel lighter. And getting those thoughts out on paper help you release some of that tension and also helps you gain some clarity about those issues that are going on in your mind. And a gratitude journal can help. Also writing down 510 things every day that you are grateful for, you can turn it into even a daily ritual in the morning or in the evening and it makes such a big difference. And some exercises can be good hoping, but not some difficult fitness challenge or pushing yourself some extreme level, but something that you enjoy doing, like walking or hiking or dancing or some yoga or pilates or playing with pets or biking in nature or gardening or something like something that you enjoy. And it's just moving your body because that releases some endorphins and you feel better. Other great hobby could be meditating, if you can call it a hobby. I actually make personalized meditations and reprogramming audience for my private clients to help them reprogram their mind and replace their old unhappy beliefs such as I can do this, I'm destined to be fat, and so on to more helpful and empowering beliefs. And then of course there are coloring and some kind of art, photography, painting, knitting or learning new skills.
[0:16:54] Rita May: I'm sure that people can find a lot of great hobbies on this podcast to start doing well.
[0:17:03] Dr. Destini Copp: I like what you suggested in terms of starting with which is the journaling, and then moving on from there to finding an exercise, not a crazy exercise routine, but just movement and moving your body. And I agree with you, meditation would be another one that I would recommend there. So Rita, before we wrap it up here, do you have any last minute tips for the audience?
[0:17:31] Rita May: My last minute tip is to be really kind and nonjudgmental and non critical to yourself and just explore your emotions, feelings, thoughts as a detective and how they affect your eating. And not criticize and judge yourself all the time because that negative staff talk is really bad for emotional eating. That's actually one of the triggers. Also.
[0:18:11] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that. And Rita, thank you so much for joining us today. But before we go, can you tell the audience where they can find you? And I believe you also have some free gift for them.
[0:18:22] Rita May: Yes, they can find me@ritamayblog.com. And on Instagram. I'm also retamay blog. And I'm also on LinkedIn and Facebook. And I have multiple free resources at ritamayblock. Comfrabies. One of them is free training for people who want to learn a bit more about emotional and stress eating as well as compulsory eating. It's 49 minutes training and it helps people understand why they feel out of control around food, shows the mistakes they are probably making that amplify the problem and give solutions to fix these mistakes. And it can be also found at the freebies page on my website.
[0:19:14] Dr. Destini Copp: And Rita will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes so people can click on them and find you. And thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I learned so much myself today and really enjoyed learning and hearing this from you.
[0:19:30] Rita May: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed talking with you too. Bye you.