Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships and finally break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hey. Hey. Welcome back.
All right, so today we are going to dive into the topic, and I'm going to better explain how I use the words binging versus overeating versus emotional eating, because there are slight variations of the words. And so while I use them all a lot, there's a different meaning to them. And when I was talking with a client a few weeks ago, as I was explaining, like, what I thought a binge was versus just maybe emotional eating, it cleared up some things for herself and she was able to actually recognize and release some of the shame where she was like, oh, I thought I was binging, but maybe it was actually just emotional eating. And so for her, it created this sense of peace and even a little bit of relief. And so it's good for us to recognize the shame that we carry with different habits, with different actions. So, like, the shame that you feel if you are a binge eater versus an emotional eater versus. And at the end of the day, this is all to help us better understand ourselves and our habits and we don't have to get so caught up in thinking like, oh, now I have to work on my shame. We can also recognize, okay, I do feel a little bit better realizing that I am now only emotionally eating instead of binge eating, and I can work on my shame, but it doesn't necessarily have to be right now. It can be later, right as we are on this healing journey. And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in a week or two is going to be around how to break out of survival mode. And I think there are a couple different characteristics in my book that define if you are still in this level of survival mode, which a lot of us are post divorce. Anyways, I'll get into all of that later, but for now, let's talk about binging versus emotional eating versus overeating. As I was waking up to my habits and my patterns, I noticed the overeating first. Then I realized it was emotionally driven. And so I could see the emotional eating pattern. And then I was able to look back and also see times where it was really, truly binge eating. And so binge eating is what I see as a lot of food and a short amount of time coupled with A lot of shame. Often it's done in secret and it's done as a way to escape.
So there are a lot of emotions that play into binge eating, but there's still the caveat. And I still think about it as like, it's a lot of food in a short amount of time. So when I had a client a couple years ago who said that she was a binge eater because she ate six donut holes and she wasn't hungry, my thought was, okay, she's probably emotionally eating, but in her mind she was like, oh no, that was a binge.
Now to me, six donut holes does not constitute a lot of food.
Now you get to decide what terms work for you and what feels the most aligned the most. True. I'm not here to try to tell you're doing it wrong or to try to convince you otherwise, but one of the things we can start to notice is when we might eat, let's say three cupcakes, and then we're like, oh my gosh, I just binged versus if you ate three cupcakes plus a bag of popcorn, plus some nuts and some jerky, and then chocolate and some ice cream, all within a one to two hour span, that to me is what would be a binge. So when I think about my binge eating days, there was a time when I was living with housemates. I had my own room, but I shared the kitchen and common spaces. This was after college. My ex husband, when we were married, he was deployed and so I was living with these other women. And oftentimes we would have dinner together or near. We'd be down on the first floor having dinner and then I would just take food up to my room or I would have snacks. So the binging that I did, it was in secret. It was up in my room where nobody else could see it. There was a lot of shame in terms of hiding the wrappers. I would take any wrappers or containers or things, put them in one or two grocery bags and then throw them away in the trash. And then I would still often bury them in the trash or I would throw them away before I got home. I would throw them away in a bigger, larger trash bin because I didn't want anybody else to see the evidence. I did this with my ex. When we were married and living together, I would bury wrappers in the garbage, in the trash. I would bury cartons of ice cream. Even though it was low carb or low sugar, I would still bury it in the trash. There was just so Much shame around what I was doing, especially when it was, I have to lose weight, but I need to lose a couple pounds, I shouldn't be eating this. And that's what it came down to. It was like this feeling of I should not be eating this food. And yet I also can't seem to stop. Like it felt very compulsory.
Back when I was in Virginia with housemates, it was typically weekdays that I would binge more, but I would eat the larger bags of popcorn that you can get from the store. I'd eat maybe half a bag of popcorn, many squares of dark chocolate, maybe half a bar.
I would eat a lot of nuts or nut butters. So nuts were the favorite thing because they were crunchy, they were salty. But I also would feel so overly full because I may not feel full right away, but I would feel very full later. And so that kind of contributed to this gross feeling later that night or the next morning.
But I also would sprinkle in and I would alternate in sweet with salty. Usually it would start with a protein bar because I wouldn't be that hungry, but then it would trigger hunger, but I wouldn't feel like eating a meal. So then I would just keep snacking. So typically a binge was two, sometimes three protein bars, half a bag of popcorn, some mixed nuts, dark chocolate, maybe I would mix in some like beef jerky or turkey jerky, something like that, where it's low carb. I'm getting in some protein, but really my body just like it needed a little bit of a meal, but nothing really sounded good. And so I was trying to make smart choices and. But I was eating a large amount of food at least once or twice a week. There would be ice cream and at that point I was not portioning it out. It was like, let me take the whole half gallon up to my room and let me just eat it out of the carton with a spoon. So that to me is a binge. And I've told this story before when I was in high school and I went for a run, probably like 10 miles. I think this was like a Friday night after soccer practice, ran 10 miles around the town, came back home, talking with my sister and her friends in the living room, in the dining room. And I'm just eating ice cream out of the container, this half gallon, low fat vanilla ice cream, and hit my bot like my spoon hitting the bottom of the container. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, what have I just done? And there was shame and guilt and embarrassment and regret of I could have just had a small meal. What was I doing? What was I thinking? And so anytime we are maybe emotionally eating or overeating, we can still have that same shame, we can still have that same guilt or regret. We can still have this desire to do it in secret, desire to do it when no one's looking. There can be aspects that flow, like characteristics that will define all of these. But typically with a binge, it's just. It's a large amount of food and we are vastly overeating.
And I also think about it as it's within a small window of time. So one to two hours for all of that food that I was consuming. I would say for me, it was usually within an hour to an hour and a half.
And then it was like a food coma where I would fall asleep. And depending on how I was feeling and how burnt out I was feeling, what was happening, what was going on that would contribute. But this was the norm for a while.
That is how I think about binge eating. There are strong emotional drivers. There's also this strong desire to escape. And I did a workshop back in the spring, which I'll have to go back and find the number for around the three different types of binge eating. That way we can start to see how to solve them. Because there's binge eating from a restriction standpoint, and we are just too restrictive with our diet. So we now our bodies just are trying to make up for the lack of food throughout the day. There's binge eating from an emotional standpoint, like an emotional driver. And then there's binge eating from a trauma standpoint and a trauma driver. So it's being triggered from a traumatic event that is now driving the binge. And the binge is trying to get you to escape reliving that trauma. So there's a little bit of nuance into why things happen, how they play out. But when we think about that, that's often how I see it. Sometimes alcohol comes into play where then our inhibitions have lowered. And then we're like, screw it, who cares? Why bother? I'm just going to keep eating. Or we have increased hunger, increased desire for food, and less of an awareness and consciousness around just eating intentionally.
So let's look at emotional eating and overeating then next. And the way that I was defining it for a client is just how I see it in my brain. Because any type of overeating will have emotions that are driving it, right? So if we look at the model, we have thoughts driving emotions, and Emotions driving our actions. So if in any form of eating or reaching for food is in the action line, there will always be an emotion driving it. However, I like to distinguish this and notice what is a maybe like a bigger emotional driver versus I wasn't paying as much attention or I still felt hungry so I kept eating a little bit more and I really didn't need the food. And so I like to notice and recognize when I was binge eating or if I was feeling really down on myself, if I had a lot of regret and shame and frustration in my job. Like there were some times later when my ex and I were living together in the D.C. area, I was working a job that I didn't love. I would overeat at lunch because I was very restrictive in the morning. I think I was trying to intermittent fast, but I still had some hangover diet rules and eat as little as humanly possible in the morning. I was running five or six miles, then trying not to eat anything until like noon, but also having sugary coffee, spiking my blood sugar levels, things like that. So I would overeat at lunch. I would eat more than what my body needed because I was just really hungry. And so rather than being able to slow down or eat a smaller portion, I would eat and then even still 20 minutes later I would still feel hungry. It didn't feel like a big emotional driver, it just felt like my body was really hungry. But I would end up overeating and then once I was full, I may not feel satisfied. So because I was running and starving myself in the morning, then also trying to eat low carb and not fueling my body properly, then I also noticed I was reaching for nuts or chocolate or a protein bar. Sometimes it was something sweet, sometimes it was something semi carby or could mimic carbs.
And that was then emotionally eating. The reaching for something sweet was sometimes emotionally because it was like, oh, I want this head of dopamine. This will make this drive better, this trip better, this will help my day to go better. When I was in an office it would be, oh, I don't really like this task, but let me spin around in my chair, pop open my snack drawer, grab a little snack. This will make this task more enjoyable. And it was just these like subtle little default thoughts and default patterns that were running very visibly but just under the surface. I didn't feel aware and in control of them. And I also was really not aware of coaching at that point either. I was just starting to get into it and I didn't have a lot of tools in my tool belt. So sometimes the overeating and emotional eating can get mixed. A lot of my binge eating at night was both driven from restriction during the day and from emotions.
There was also this thought of, once these things change, once these circumstances change, then I'll stop emotionally eating. So it was like, once I get a different job, then I'll stop overeating and emotionally eating in the afternoon. But I did. I changed jobs, and it got better for a couple weeks. And then I still found myself overeating at lunch, emotionally eating through the afternoon, not feeling like I could control myself, and still also being fairly restrictive in what I was allowing myself to eat and what was good or bad. And I was starting to incorporate more carbs once I had that next job.
But then the thought was, oh, I just need to be in my business full time. And then about a year later, I was in my business full time and still noticed me reaching and going into the pantry when I was not hungry. So that's when I really was more aware of, okay, I'm not overeating at lunch. I am starting to incorporate more carbs. I'm letting go of some of these food rules. But I also notice this afternoon hour where it's sometimes right after lunch, sometimes maybe an hour later, where I'm going to the pantry and I'm not hungry, but I'm often looking for something sweet. And that is what I would think of as being emotional eating. There was something that I was looking for, whether it was a distraction, whether it was to feel better, whether it was just procrastinacing, whether it was some boredom. I think a lot of times it's like we're just looking for that hit of dopamine. We're looking for a bit of fun, a bit of joy, a bit of pleasure, and. And not that life has to be bad. At that point, life felt pretty good, felt pretty easy. It wasn't terrible, but I was still looking for this sense of joy, fun, excitement. And food was a really easy place to get that. Part of it is the undercurrent of emotions that we carry with us. Part of it is just how I'm thinking about my day, the pressure I'm putting on myself to perform, the pressure to get results, the pressure to achieve, to succeed, to have it look a certain way.
Because the other thing with my business was when I first started working at full time and I was talking with my ex, I was like, let me try this. Give me a year. Let's See what I can do.
And that was the year of COVID I was pregnant.
I had signed a couple of clients, but he was really upset because he was like, I gave you this year. You don't have a six figure business, you aren't making a ton of money, so therefore you need to give it up. And that was really hard. It was really frustrating. So then moving forward, it was this constant pull logistically with my time as well as emotionally, because I have somebody telling me to give up this dream, to give up this vision, something that I know that I can do, that I know I'm capable of, and yet also putting this pressure on needing my business to succeed and needing it to perform and needing to prove something and earn something with it. And so, of course, those dynamics are all going to play into how I feel about myself, how I feel about my success, how much I'm going to then need something like food to make me feel better, to just give me that sense of relief, or to give me that little hit of dopamine. Not that life has to be bad, but just the way that I'm thinking about it is creating more stress and pressure. And the pressure was shutting me down. And that was something that kind of came out as we got closer to the divorce and post divorce, just recognizing how that has played out. And I believe there was a podcast recently actually around that. Anyways, that is how these intertwine and they intermingle. And so been over six years since I've binged, but there are still times when I notice I might overeat. But an overeat looks like a couple of bites. Like, I remember really doing this work. And this was after Caleb was born. I lost the baby weight and was more in maintenance. But I noticed we went out to this Mexican restaurant, we had some chips and salsa. I ordered a taco salad. And by the time our food came, I really wasn't that hungry. But I had a thought of, oh, this isn't going to taste very good tomorrow. I better eat some of it now while it tastes good. I think I may have been a little bit hungry, but two or three bites really would have been enough. I didn't need that much food, but I kept eating and I kept eating more of that taco shell. But my overeat was really just a few bites because I still took some of it home. But I also could see in the time it took me to stand up and notice, oh, I feel a little full. I wonder what was on. I had come to this conclusion by the Time I reached the car, like, it really only took a minute or two. What used to take me 10 or 20 minutes to flush out and figure out why was I eating and what was going on and what emotions were coming up, I was very quickly able to dissect and understand, oh, this is just what I was telling myself in the moment. And we were talking, we were having fun. We were with another couple and their kids. And so it was easy to be distracted. So even though I was tuned into my body, it was also easy to see how I could eat an extra couple of bites, but that I would see as more of an overeat because there weren't any big emotions at play. It was not a binge because it wasn't a huge amount of food. But that's still what might come up. From time to time, I notice I eat maybe an extra couple of bites, and sometimes it's because I'm eating too quickly. Maybe I don't give myself enough time between getting seconds. Sometimes there's some emotional eating where I notice I want something sweet because it's the middle of the day and I'm looking for. It's almost like sometimes a break. Sometimes we justify our breaks with food or getting a snack. Sometimes it's, I feel really irritated. I feel really stressed. So now I'm going to go eat. I would define that more as an emotional eat, but if I'm not hungry and I'm reaching for food, I think as a general rule of thumb, I consider that emotional eating, overeating is going to stem more from a physiological standpoint. Emotional eating, I would see, is like really being emotionally driven.
And it's only when we get to the point where it's a large amount of food and a short amount of time that I would consider it a binge.
Now, I want you to use these terms for yourself. Don't use this against yourself. Use this as a way to wake up and start to become more aware of the patterns and to see what's happening and why this is here for us to better understand and work through it. Because what's fascinating is even though I had just come out of a period of binge eating, I wasn't in a heavy period of binge eating back in 2017 into 2018. I would say more emotional eating, sometimes some overeating, but not really as much binge eating. But it was interesting because even doing a program around binge eating, I didn't really relate and identify as a binge eater. At that point. I was just thinking, I'M overeating, I'm over consuming. Maybe this could help. And her solution was to feel your feelings.
And I remember getting so frustrated because I was like, I paid 500 for this course to just tell me to feel my effing feelings. Are you freaking kidding me? I am feeling my feelings, damn it. Like, I was so pissed because I was like, I'm fine.
I am feeling my feelings and I'm fine. Nothing is the problem.
Oh, how I just couldn't see it. And that's okay. This was all part of my journey.
This was all part of me better understanding what was going on and when and the timing and really figuring out what was going to help and what was going to work for me. And that's okay.
Looking back, I don't know that I had the capacity to see the things that I could see now, what was six, almost seven years ago. And that's all right. When it comes to healing and healing from trauma, we first go through a period of awakening and I was not yet close to starting to awaken. Like the little seeds, the little breadcrumbs of my awakening journey that started at the beginning of 2022, those had not yet been planted. There were a couple little sporadic seeds from one of my best friends that were planted in 2020 and 21. But it really wasn't until 2022 that I started connecting the dots of these different breadcrumbs and seeing this all play out. And it's sparking enough thought and introspection to be able to start to do the research to recognize what is actually happening, what's going on. And that coupled with then starting to talk with a pastor at church and work with a therapist and starting to read some books, it broke my brain wide open.
So don't use this against yourself. Don't use this to keep on more shame and regret.
But maybe if you're going through the drive through and you recognize, oh, I'm going to get a cheeseburger and fries and a drink, maybe that's not a binge, but maybe you are overeating, maybe you're emotionally eating, but not necessarily a full on binge, how would your perspective change if you thought about it just a little bit differently?
And this is how I think about addiction and food addiction, because I have a really hard time talking about being addicted to food because most of the time we're not addicted to sugar. Even I don't know anybody who goes and takes all the sugar in the raw packets out of Starbucks or Chick Fil A or Any coffee shop. And it's just like, no sugar. Right? Like, we're typically not doing that. So I can't in good conscience say that this is an addiction. And I actually talked about that. Oh, this was back when the podcast was called body you crave early days. I'll get that and put that in the show notes. I did a whole episode around how you are not addicted to sugar. And this is where I think sometimes we are in the habit of reaching for food when we're not hungry. But I don't think it means that we're addicted. It's a hard place to be if you feel like you are addicted to food, but you need food to survive. I just don't know that it serves us or it helps us to think about it in this lens of I'm addicted to food or even I'm addicted to sugar, because technically we don't need sugar. But if you have this thought of I'm just addicted to sugar, it brings on this victim mentality. We feel really helpless and powerless. That takes away all of our power and it amplifies the boogie monster of sugar. It makes it this big, powerful villain where it's like, I can't have any at all because I'm just gonna lose my mind.
And that is not the case. You can create a healthy relationship with sugar just like you can create a healthy relationship with alcohol if you are emotionally drinking and you're drinking to self soothe. I have seen where people look like functioning alcoholics, where they are drinking enough alcohol, where they clearly qualify as being in that camp who have come out and now have a very healthy relationship to alcohol. Not everybody can do that. But when you are reaching for it from an emotional standpoint, it's not that you are physically addicted to it. It's that you are using it to numb out and to self soothe. Sometimes when we change our circumstances, we actually can change our need to escape and to self soothe. Some of that comes with healing. Some of it comes from healing past trauma. Some of it comes from getting out of really toxic and dysfunctional relationships.
Now we still have work that needs to be done. Just leaving the marriage does not change the dysfunctional patterns that are within yourself. But the better we can understand and see and look back and recognize the patterns, the more data we have to work with. And so this is why taking this trauma informed lens and this coaching approach, we want to look to the past to better understand and to better see the patterns and the habits so that we can look at what's playing out currently and how do we want to change that moving forward?
My goal is not that we dig up the past, just to dig up the past and talk about it. Because just talking about it doesn't always create healing.
Validation doesn't always create healing. There's more of a process to it.
But it is helpful in better understanding how we got to the place that we're at now and how to dissect and better see these different things so we can change the circumstances of okay, I no longer eat in secret. I no longer eat alone in my car. I no longer eat in my room or when everybody's gone to bed. You can have some kind of parameters around it, but we still have to look at what's driving it. Let's look at the emotions that are driving that desire for food to begin with. That way you don't need to white knuckle and willpower your way through. This is how we get to the point where we don't need willpower because we're addressing the drivers. We're making it easier to say no in the moment while addressing the underlying emotions that are driving this desire to escape or to self soothe or to feel better or to get that hit of dopamine. And sometimes this is where shame comes in. If we can decrease the shame by thinking about your eating patterns differently, let's do that, and let's use this to better understand and to really create this awakening.
I wasn't at a place in the past where I could see the binge eating for what it was, but now I'm at a place where I can and there's no shame around it. Do I wish I would have woken up and realized these patterns sooner? Of course.
But this is my story. This gives me so much more to work with and it helps me to see patterns, to spot things, and to help other clients with this too. To see things in clients that maybe they can't see in themselves.
And that is the power of a coach. That's the power of a community. And this is how I can help you too, is to better understand not just what is happening from a label or a title standpoint, but the patterns and the cycles and where and how to break them.
So if you would like some help with this, the next best step is to schedule a free consultation on the call. We'll talk more about where you are right now, what's happened in your recent food history, the big overarching aspects of your relationship with food from the very beginning, all the way up to recent years and Then we'll look at where do you want to be? And I'm going to help you to better understand the cycles and the patterns that are playing out. Because it's not just a new set of food rules that you need. It's to better see and to better understand the cycle that's happening and where and how to break it. Just like we have to understand the trauma and abuse cycle and where and how we break that with the love bombing and decide like you have to decide that the love bombing is not love.
That the calm and the peace that you feel when you go back to that cycle again is not real peace because you are constantly on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the next explosion for fear of what's gonna happen next, but needing that person's validation and praise. There are a couple different pieces in here where it's like when we can shift this, then you can break free. But you have to believe that we'll be fine on your own. So we have to look at that codependency with a person. Just like we can look at our codependency with food to feel better. Sometimes it's our codependency with alcohol to feel better or to numb out or to escape and when we could see that and we can drop the shame, drop the judgment and really have a lot of curiosity and compassion. Now we can understand where and how to break this. And oftentimes we are going to break it in the restriction. So we have to decrease the restriction, but we also break it in terms of understanding that emotional desire and looking at meeting your own emotional needs instead of looking for something to do it for you.
Do you want some help? I'm the best person to do it with you. You can work with me one on one or in a small group coaching environment. Both of which are going to help you create the life and body you crave. Because it's not just about the body. It's not just about the number on the scale. It's about creating the life and the mindset and truly changing your self concept, how you think and feel about yourself.
Not just when you've lost the weight, but right now, here in this moment, today, in the body you have right now.
I'm going to teach you how to love yourself now and all the way down the scale. I will drop a link in the show notes to learn more about the body you crave. Accelerator also to schedule a call and if you want more, come follow me on Instagram. I'll drop my links there and we are still doing the listener challenge. Tag me in posts. If you reshare things or you share your own, I want to hear more about your journey. Share what have been some of your aha's. How are you taking and implementing what you've learned here on the podcast into your own life? What does that look like? And if you're not comfortable sharing on social media, that's okay. You don't have to. If you want to send me an email, you want to send me a message, or you want to send me a direct message, you can totally do that too. And it can just be, hey, this is how I was implementing it. This is what I learned. Or this is my key takeaway. This is my aha moment. If you're more comfortable with that, that's fine. I want to celebrate with you. I want to celebrate the progress. I want to celebrate your success because we don't do enough of celebrating the progress and the journey. And I want to help you learn to love and enjoy the journey more. And when we are celebrating ourselves for it and now when you have other people coming in to celebrate with you, it truly becomes so much better, so much more enjoyable.
All right, have a fabulous weekend. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step Book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love. Grab your spot now at www.bodyyoucrave.com BTC it's time to break the cycle.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: I'll show you.
