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.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Hey.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome back.
Okay, so you know how you can be, like, so good during the day and you get to the end of the night, you've had dinner, you're actually full, you tell yourself you don't need anything else. But then an hour or two later, it's now 8, maybe 9 o', clock, and you find yourself rummaging in the kitchen looking for something sweet. And you tell yourself, oh, I'll just have a couple Oreos. Only to find 20 minutes later, you've eaten half a sleeve and you don't even feel that satisfied.
It may have taken the edge off of the craving, but now you want something salty.
So you go and grab a bag of chips, take it to the couch for real this time, just a couple handfuls, just a little bit, Only to zone out eating and find that half the bag is gone. When you come to, these are the moments that feel so frustrating and so regretful because you know you're not hungry. But telling yourself no in these moments feels so completely dreadful.
And so you might be thinking that you just don't have enough self control. You need more discipline, you just need to stop giving in.
And that's often what drives the frustration. I know what to do, but I'm just not doing it.
But like I always say, food is not the problem.
So we need to understand and look for what is the problem. Then I am solving with food.
Because your brain has learned that food's the solution.
So what is it the solution to? Right? And so typically, if we look at how we want it to work with food solves hunger, right? If the problem is hunger, we turn to food.
But right now, you keep turning to food even though you don't have hunger. So we need to understand, okay, what's the quote problem?
And this is where we can think it's the circumstance. So if I change the circumstance, like my job, my house, my spouse, my, like whatever it is, right? If I change some of these things, once my kids get older, once we're past the holidays, once we get over this certain time period, once life settles down, once I'm no longer injured, once I'm not sick, then I'll stop reaching for food. But just changing the circumstance doesn't change how you act and how you show up. And this is an important distinction because as survivors of toxic relationships, food has been one of the easiest ways that we know how to cope. And it's really interesting to recognize and to see this pattern. And this is something I'll talk about more in a future episode of why Food is so Soothing. When you're in this type of dysfunctional relationship, whether you're out or you're getting out, or you might even still be in, we can have this view or this belief of, once I'm out, once I've left, once I'm no longer in this really emotionally tense situation, then I'll stop turning to food. But that's just a thought error. We don't actually stop the habit or stop the behavior because it's in these moments that we're not turning to food because of the situation. We're not turning to food because of the circumstance. We're turning to it because of things that we're telling ourself, because of thoughts and beliefs and then the emotions that stem from them.
What's really happening is you're going about your day, you're thinking, you're problem solving, you're making decisions. But we don't just stop there because we also like to manage other people's emotions. We like to manage their reactions and their responses, keep people happy, keep them from exploding. You might be over explaining yourself, you might be resisting the loneliness, you might be getting a sense of calm or peace or quiet, especially if you've already left.
But now that calm opens up a whole slew of thoughts and emotions. And for things to come to the surface, things that you were maybe able to distract yourself with, either throughout the day or in different relationships, you were able to stay focused on something else. And now that's all quiet. And a lot of times what we're left with is thoughts about ourself, where we're at in life, how we should be further along, how we shouldn't have married this person, how we shouldn't have stayed so long, how we should have left sooner, how we failed our kids, right? We can have all of this drama around who we are and how good we are, and just old beliefs and patterns and wounds getting reinforced.
And of course, now it's nighttime, there's fewer distractions. People need less from you. You don't have to perform.
And your brain knows how to get that fast hit of dopamine because it's seeking comfort, pleasure, relief, distraction.
The real problem isn't that you ate Oreos. It's what starts happening because you don't trust yourself around food.
And it's just this domino effect because you wake up the next day disappointed in yourself.
But sometimes that disappointment is actually a big heaping dose of shame. And it's kind of laced with self loathing of, I shouldn't have done that. I should have known better. I can't believe we're still doing this. Get it together. It's a lot of punitive thinking and comments towards yourself laced with so much shame from the night before. And so you promise yourself you'll be good today for real. You're gonna be perfect, you're gonna get it together.
But you end up spending so much of your mental bandwidth and energy thinking about food and negotiating with yourself and rationalizing and moralizing and trying even harder to be perfect.
You might even be trying to restrict to make up for what you ate the day before.
There might be extra exercise, but you think of it as, I need to burn off what I ate, so I'll just make up for it.
And you try so hard to avoid the, quote, bad foods.
But it's actually hard to live your life when you do that because you don't trust yourself around the food and to say no. And so because you don't have that trust in those situations, you choose to say no to the events altogether.
So you're not just missing out on food, you're missing out on so many pleasurable things and events in your life.
And this is why it's so hard for people to stop emotionally eating during the holidays. It's why so many people say, screw it, I'll start over in January.
Because if what they think they have to give up because they tell themselves, if I want to diet, if I want to lose weight, if I want to keep going, I'm just going to have to eat my frozen Weight Watchers meal in lieu of Thanksgiving dinner. And that's going to suck. And I'm going to get all these looks and comments and people are going to be pushing food on me and I don't want to have to deal with that.
Or you go to the cookie swap and you're trying so hard to just eat one cookie and maybe you're actually successful and you only eat one cookie, but then you're binging on the Tupperware container that you brought home in your driveway because you keep telling yourself you can't have them. You keep restricting and it only makes you want them more.
And when you're in the privacy, in the secret of your own Vehicle where nobody else is watching, nobody else is judging. You have a moment to yourself and you can just relax.
And it's like we just give in.
And then you have to fight and resist. Not just your own cravings, but the smells and the people in your life who ask you if you want the food and are pushing the food. And they made the food just for you, so really you should eat it. Don't feel guilty. Don't make them feel disappointed.
We have all of these thoughts about what life is gonna look like if we're trying to lose weight or break free from emotional eating, if we're doing that over the holidays, and what it entails, what it requires.
And a lot of times, because we feel like we can't say no to the food or we can't say no to the overeating, or we don't know how to handle these situations because we don't fully have a plan or know what to do differently. All we know is to avoid the situations. A lot of people stop drinking in January and they have dry January only to drink their faces off the rest of the year. It does them no good, in my opinion. But in order to not drink, they don't keep alcohol at home. They don't go out to the bars, they maybe don't even go out to restaurants. It's like they have to try to seclude themselves from anything that feels tempting because they don't trust themselves around. It is like, ultimately what it comes down to.
And so it's like, okay, if I want to lose weight over the holidays, that means not only do I have to give up the food where I'm seeking some joy and pleasure and relief, but now I also have to give up the fun activities in my life that I actually love over the holidays, too. Hell, no. That is a big flat no.
Versus we've gotta learn how to lose weight while living our life. We have to learn how to break free from emotional eating and stop binge eating while we live our real lives.
I have a whole process that I walk people through, but what I've found is that underneath, we often find a bigger pattern. It's I don't trust myself to do what I say I'm going to do.
I don't trust myself to follow through on my commitments, because it usually doesn't just stop with food or exercise.
It's putting off tasks at work, not folding the laundry when you get home like you said you would, not calling your mom back even though you're already feeling guilty for avoiding her for a couple days.
Or maybe all those times that you told yourself you were going to leave the relationship, you were going to have the conversation, you were going to initiate the breakup, only to chicken out in the moment.
It's that. It's all of this evidence we have as to how we can't trust ourselves.
And this is so often why we don't like writing down our to do list. We don't like writing down a plan for what we're going to eat because it's like a record of all of our failure, a record of all of the things that we have to feel ashamed about, of how we're not good enough, how we're not doing enough, how we're not measuring up, how we're eating too much, we end up using it against ourselves.
But the writing it down part is not the problem.
The problem is what's underneath it. It's this. I don't trust myself. I don't follow through on my commitments. I don't follow through when I say I'm going to do something.
And we have to learn how to work with ourselves, not against us. We have to learn how to work with our brain, not against it, work with our trauma, not against it.
And so here's what I know. You have spent not just years, but decades in relationships where you learned to override yourself, to question yourself, to suppress what you wanted, to manage someone else's emotions, to prioritize everyone else's needs.
And even after you left, you still found yourself overriding your wants, desires, needs, your intuition, your gut knowing, your gut instinct, that still small voice that knows what you want but is also terrified of the impact that is still happening now with food. Whether it started in your marriage or after you left, the cycle still continues. And it's all the same. It's the same cycle we have to break.
What if you didn't have to fight yourself every night?
What if you could finally understand what you're actually needing in those moments and you knew how to meet those needs without abandoning yourself.
And eventually you got to the point where food didn't have to be your fastest path to relief.
That's exactly what we're going to unpack in this next live masterclass, how to stop giving into your cravings at 8pm Even though you spent all day being so good.
I'm going to drop a link in the description so that you can learn more and register, but I'm hosting this on different days and times throughout the week. So view the calendar, see what works best for Your schedule and come, come actually take some steps forward.
So whether you heard my invitation for the coaching participant and you're like, huh, that sounds interesting. What does she actually teach? What is she actually wanting me to do? This is actually a great place to come join me for a workshop. Join me for one of these classes because you will hear my process and how I think about this and how I teach it. You're going to learn how I solve the pattern of emotional eating and binge eating.
This will be really important.
Or if you're thinking, oh, there is no way I want my emotional eating journey documented on the podcast, hell no. But you're still curious and you want to solve it. This is a great way to learn the steps and better understand the simple process that I have created that has allowed me to stop binging for the last seven years. I have not binged one time since 2019.
Binge free since 2019.
And I'm really proud of that.
I am almost as proud of that as I am proud of my divorce, which, again, future podcast. I've tried recording that one several times, to be honest, and it's just so long, I'm gonna have to break it up into multiple different episodes. So I'm getting there. I'm just trying to figure out how to frame it so it's not just this one long, gigantic story that is just never ending.
But that said, if you're someone who's dealing with emotional eating or binge eating and you feel like there's some other piece missing, like you understand the concepts, but it's just either it's not clicking or you're not able to implement it, you're not able to do it, and you keep relying on being perfect. Food rules, trying to have more willpower, and you want some help. Join me for this live workshop. We're gonna be talking about emotional eating, binging, and also these cravings. How do we handle this desire for food?
This is one of the biggest things that I help clients work through.
So if you would like to do this too, I would love to see you there. Check out the description for the link. All right, y' all have a great weekend. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free. 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 VTC.
It's time to break the cycle. I'll show you how.
