Transcript
A (0:00)
We all need to learn to get back to that center position because that is ultimately where true healing is big picture. We all need to learn to have a balance of healthy self regulation where we look to ourselves first and see what we can internally process and become accountable for before we talk about it with other people. If you pay attention to this part of the emotional healing architecture, many of your food behaviors will be self resolving. The underlying emotional and behavioral roots of food have to be resolved for that behavior to no longer be something that your brain prioritizes because right now your brain has wired you to immediately link certain cause and effects with that behavior. You need to dismantle how your brain is perceiving reality and emoting so that that desire to go reach for the pint of ice cream is no longer something that your brain is aware of. We've brought it into a new state of awareness where it has new choices and decisions.
B (1:00)
Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken, the code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?
A (1:16)
Let's get into this episode on emotional eating. This is a topic that I bring up toward the end of break method in module 3 and one of the typical pieces of feedback that I get from the lecture that I do there is that many people never really stop to examine their food behaviors, their relationship to food and how food fits into their behavior cycle as a whole. And it's typically an aha moment. Personally, I never thought that I had an emotional relationship with food, especially until the last few years. And then really the last few years I started to notice sneakier patterns regarding justifying certain food food choices because I already felt like crap. For any of you that are out there listening to this or watching this, that are moms or even new moms, sometimes you go through this period where at least for me, my body didn't look and feel the way that it once did. And instead of that being a motivator, it actually became the reason that I started to justify eating some gluten free Mac and cheese, sampling my kids toast and little by little I gained about 25 pounds. And it snuck up on me because I have positive self deception and I actually thought that I looked better than I did. And then I started to watch videos and see photos and I realized, dang, I really let myself go. It was a moment of realization for me that sometimes if our food behaviors don't necessarily come with a physical manifestation like Weight gain or physical symptoms like migraines. Sometimes we can just sweep them under the rug and excuse them or justify them or pretend that they're not operating. My hope is that in today's episode you'll start to understand the way that food may play a sneakier role in some of your emotional ups and downs that you might have otherwise not noticed. One of the things that I really like to look at is that when we're thinking about role of food in our overall behavior, sometimes people think about food literally just by like the ingredient or what's on their plate, and they're not really thinking about how they relate to the idea of food. Much more broadly, people are impacted by the idea in relationship to the concept of food rather than the actual macronutrients on your plate. Today is all about exploring past programming from childhood and beyond that influences the way we think about food. Plan for food. The state of mind that we're in when we're eating food doesn't take long for people, I'm sure, to start thinking about how they engage with it. And I know for some people can sometimes start mindlessly snacking, for example, if they're doing something where they're stressed out or they're doing busy work that's really repetitive. Oftentimes there's this oral fixation where you just keep wanting to, I'll have another chip and another chip and all of a sudden you look in, the entire can of Pringles is gone. How did that happen? Well, it's because I was tunnel vision focused in this other area and my brain was prompting me to just kind of keep this feedback loop going of reaching for something, oral fixation, so that I could maintain my focus. If you think about how the education establishment has started to engage kids with adhd, this is, it's a cousin to a fidget spinner. If the kid can't focus, they give them something to fidget with so that hopefully they can focus while their body's doing something physical. Sometimes snacking functions in this regard. It's much like fidget spinner. When we're thinking about food in general. I think there's this idea that if you just have enough willpower or if you just have the right meal plan, somehow all of your behavior issues surrounding food are just going to magically disappear. But what actually ends up happening? Yo, yo, dieting, doing really well for a few weeks and then all of a sudden completely backsliding. Or you make one mistake and then because you made that one mistake, you kind of say Well, I already made a mistake today. I might as well just go all over the top and just do it for the rest of the day. These are some of those sneakier things that can really just completely destroy our health, destroy us emotionally, be pathways to guilt or shame or anxiety. And I think when we're talking about this topic today, I want you to be aware that food itself can trigger something, but we also can be triggered and then, then tie that trigger to food. When we're thinking about this, think about behaviors like chronic snacking, overly controlling your meal, your. Your meals, or your macros where you're just very, very fixated on needing things to be measured. Constant planning and thinking about food. There are people that are always thinking about their next meal, or they could be eating the current meal and they're already thinking about, I wonder what I'm doing for lunch. A great example of this would be my husband. And I feel bad because I bring up my husband a lot on the show, but he knows the way I roll. One of the things he's very aware of is that his brain always needs something in the future to think about to get him to feel excited so he can keep going. So he'll look forward to going to the store at the end of the day or on the way to the pickup the kids from school, school to get an energy drink. So it's almost like he's able to let that energy drink be a dangling carrot that allows him to move through discomfort during the day because he knows he's going to get that reward on the other side. Some of you use it more as a reward structure. Some of you actually, in line with that reward structure, you sabotage yourself with the reward. Here's the example. You've done really well all week. You've stuck to your meal plan. And for what it's worth, this is why I hate the concept of a cheat day. If you've ever done a diet, because it builds in this behavior and normalizes it. You've done really well for a week. You're feeling super good. You're like, oh, my God, my bloating's down. I'm really starting to look fit. I think I could have a pizza tonight. Sure. Yeah, let's have a pizza. And then you're rewarding yourself for a job well done during the week with pizza. But then if you're me, the next day you wake up bloated, and you're like, oh, why did I do that? And again, depending on what emotional state you're in, some people Go right back to the beginning and get very fixed on being restrictive again. Other people will take the opposite position, which is, I already kind of feel like crap, so why not pile on? And I noticed over the last few years that I certainly have that tendency that I was not aware of. One of the things that I do want to draw attention to, which will be something that we talk about in this episode and the next episode on Peptides, is really about the role autoimmune disease has played in my life and my ability to become strict with my diet. I got diagnosed with lupus when I was 23. And the only way for me to stop the symptoms was to go on a very strict nutritional protocol. I was about 23 at the time, and I had done the Western medical route where the doctor looked at me and said, you're gonna have to be on these following medications for the rest of your life. These are the following things that might happen to you. And thankfully, I'm me and I'm stubborn. And I was like, nope, I'm not signing up for that. And I went on a hunt to find some sort of alternative practitioner. At 23, I was living on the big island of Hawaii, and it just so happens that I found an alternative doctor who was a Western MD but really was likely a functional MD all the way back then. I'm 40. Just to give it some chronology, his name was Dr. Thal. I go into his office, he's wearing Grateful Dead stuff, everything. Very Grateful Dead, hippie cave. And everyone's like, trust me, this guy's a genius. He's just gonna fix you right up. I get there, talk to him through my symptoms, and he was like, here's what you gotta do. And I realized that one of the things that had led up to me having this diagnosis and all these symptoms was that I had been living in Hawaii at that point for about a year, and my diet had radically changed because I was living with a bunch of Japanese people. And if you've ever spent time around Japanese people, they eat a lot of rice. Virtually every single meal, I was eating rice. So I was eating, in some ways, healthier than I ever had been. Farm to table, everything organic from the farm. But the one thing that changed was that I was suddenly now eating rice with every single meal. And it turned out it really was the rice that pushed my body to its absolute limit. And then I was dealing with this whole host of symptoms when I'm talking to Dr. Thal and he kind of lays out, these are the things you gotta Do. It was a phased approach. In the beginning phase, it was obviously very restrictive. I could only have greens basically and I was allowed to have one coconut water a day for a little bit of sugar. But other than that, I was not able to have any fruit, no sugar, no grains. Pretty much lived on avocado, greens, cucumber. I think sometimes I was allowed to have a little bit of a red pepper, but other than red pepper and an actual coconut water out of the coconut, I had no sugar to speak of. And that lasted for a few weeks. I immediately started to feel better. It was probably like a week in, I felt drastically different. And when I went on to the maintenance phase, he told me, you're never going to be able to eat dairy or grains likely ever again. And just for clarity's sake, I'm saying grains like G R A I N S like grains. A lot of times people are like, you can't eat greens. But no grains. From that age really up until I had my last two babies, I have four babies, I was strictly Paleo. I was the one that would go out to a restaurant with all my friends and if there really wasn't something I could eat, I would just not eat. I was that dedicated. I was that dedicated because by rewiring the way I was approaching food, and I had obviously been faced with all these very debilitating symptoms, I was able to make the connection where a piece of bread didn't look like delicious bread anymore. Bread started to look like a rash, or a bowl of rice started to look like muscle spasms. Sometimes we get to this place where we have to get ourselves backed into a corner where things are so bad or so painful that we're able to rewire how we think about food. Now, for those of you that are relatively familiar with brain pattern types, mine is the abandoned, hold it all together type. Naturally, I don't want to be a burden. I'm good at being self sufficient. I don't want to ruffle any feathers. Even though if I look back in all of those times where I was like, I probably don't need more rice right now. I was just, you know, eating what was there and was participating in the meals. But eventually when I really started to look at what's happening emotionally under the hood, some of this hold it all together quality of not wanting to be a burden and not wanting to be annoying with how I need different food than somebody else really was part of what got me in this deep, dark hole. As we're going through this, I want you to think about these kind of opposite sides of the pendulum because I was probably overly relaxed and just not wanting to be a burden. And that led me to a symptom pattern that was profound. While others deal with more restrictive, obsessive fixated disorders where they are not eating food or they become so afraid of food that eventually they become so restrictive that they lose so much weight that they start to have other physical problems on either side. Whether it's not caring at all and just not wanting to be a burden or being too restrictive and rigid. Physical and emotional symptoms can be a result of this. Be aware that this can happen on both sides and of course, everywhere in the middle when we think about food behaviors. I also want to earmark here. Hiding food is another one that people sometimes overlook. Example would be, let's say you've ask your kids to eat a certain way, but you keep your little treats or snacks or marshmallows up on a really high shelf that nobody else knows about. That's a behavior that's worth examining. If you are quick to snap at people. If they want to share food with you, that is something to examine because that sort of reflects of scarcity of like, you can't have any of my food. This is my food. That comes from a deeper brain pattern that is not. That is not a typically occurring behavior. And one of the places that I see this, and again, I see this with my husband sometimes, but I see this with clients all the time, is that even with a child who in my mind, if your child's like, mommy, can I have some of that? To me. And of course my brain pattern's on this far left side, so a person would be like, sure, take all my food, even if I'm starving, please, you first. There's a, there's an imbalance to that too. But with children in particular, you would think you would want to just be giving to your children without any sort of hesitancy or without any sort of rigid response where you want to covet your food. But I do see this pop up with parents where parents are like, you have your own food. That's a behavior that I would also like to draw attention to today because I do think that that is something worth working through. Why is it that even when it's a four year old asking for a bite of your food, is your instinct to kind of lift your shoulders and say, no, this is my plate. Go get your own food. That's coming from a childhood wound. And it's worth us tracking the etiology of that, much of what I want to focus on today is understanding how childhood inputs both taught us how to think about food and how we engage with food. One thing that might be worth mentioning is the distinction between self regulation and CO regulation because this is something that isn't necessarily taught and many people don't have this vocabulary. So I'll pause here and make sure that we're all working with the same definitions. When you are faced with some sort of emotional hardship or things just get tough, there are certain brain pattern types that look to others to help them feel better. And other could be a person, other in early stages could be a pacifier, it could be a stuffed animal or a blankie. But the instinct isn't, I'm going to work through this on my own and I'm going to self regulate and get through this. The two terms that are going to split here are CO regulation and self regulation. Co regulation is when you feel that discomfort or the pain and you look outside of yourself to either be comforted, soothed or assisted. For people that self regulate, you don't have that instinct. You don't reach outside of yourself. You go within yourself to strategize how to solve the problem. Some people don't only strategize, some people also dissociate. So that's something worth noting is that there are people that self regulate that one of their mechanisms of getting through it is simply to dissociate. Their physical body is present in it, but they check out until essentially that stress or that nervous system response times out and then they kind of come come back. And in those cases, that type of person may struggle with having a great memory because effectively they're there, but they're not there when they dissociate. Those mechanisms of strategy and dissociation would be on the self regulation side. In general, those who tend to self regulate are less likely to have some of these sneaky under the radar food behaviors. What is more likely to occur for you is that when you get stressed out, you forget to eat. And I know that this is a huge one for me. When I'm stressed out, I have no hunger signals whatsoever. For those of you listening that have been through breakups, especially as women, I know we have a lot of men that watch the show too. Women know that there are people that when they're stressed out and going through breakup, what happens? Some of us look the hottest we've ever looked and we get super skinny and ripped and then other people hit the Ben and Jerry's pints and we put on a lot of weight. But typically we fall into one of those two categories and we don't usually switch. This ties right back into our conversation on self regulation versus co regulation. Can you think of which one would be which? Yeah, I think you got it. Ben and Jerry's CO regulation. Forgetting to eat and looking the hottest you've ever looked because you're in a terrible dumpster fire of a situation in your life. That's the self regulation piece. One of the things that's important for us to recognize is that our food actually does very much matter to our mental state and our health and our brain and body do read certain nutrient levels just like a fuel gauge in a car. Some of our behavior will become erratic or even dysregulated if we don't have the nutrients that we need to thrive. An example of the self regulation type that may forget to eat. Eventually you start to experience a cascade of emotional regulation and probably making some pretty poor self sabotaging decisions because your body doesn't have the nutrients that it needs and you are now not thinking rationally. Although you tend to be that self regulated person, if you go for a long enough period not properly nourishing your body, that can actually be a pathway to very reckless self sabotage behaviors. And if I'm describing you and you feel called out, good, same girl, same. I have been there myself. Eventually someone that loves you is like, can I be honest with you? You are too skinny, could you please eat something? And if you're like me, and I'll admit it too, because again this sort of food oral fixation thing, whether you're on the self regulation or co regulation side, they can come in tandem. Often that same person may magically having not smoked cigarettes for a long time, may also start kind of closet smoking cigarettes. Or in their that phase during sort of a wild breakup or a low point in their life, they're not eating but their mouth is still getting the cues that I want something, I want to be doing something with my hand to mouth. So what am I going to start doing when we start chain smoking cigarettes? Obviously this is also going to lead you down a potentially very dark path where you're going to have to pull yourself out of a hole that you've dug yourself. Let's dig into the co regulation side of how this can work for some people. When they get sad or their heart is broken, they look to food as a way to soothe themselves and co regulate. So you may start binge eating, you may think to yourself it doesn't matter. I don't have anyone to look good for. All of the behaviors that kind of kept your body composition in check before really were rooted in some sort of external validation seeking. I can maintain these habits or these eating behaviors as long as somebody's giving me the feedback that I look good. But as soon as that feedback gets pulled away and you're all alone in your heartbreak, suddenly you may go off the rails with eating whatever you want or eating Ben and Jerry pints of ice cream into the evening. The right hand side is much more likely to lead you into shame because eventually you're going to continue to pack on the pounds or put yourself into a situation where now you really also don't physically feel well. That will be that pathway for you to experience your version of self sabotage. And eventually that pathway tends to lead toward guilt and shame. What have I done? I really let myself go. And then your brain is looking for something to pull you out of it. And typically in that case the shame, that little kind of onset of shame is one of the ways that you may start to pull yourself out of it. But for select people, that actually starts a cascade of an even more profound eating disorder behavior. I'll take a moment to remind you if you haven't listened to the previous episodes. In brain pattern mapping, we track nine distinct markers and four of those markers are behavior. And they specifically look at how behavior unfolds in a four phase cycle. Chronologically, we're tracking early stage, transitional and late stage behavior. If we look at this left hand side that we're talking about with self regulated behaviors, typically in those early stages, this is where again you go strategic or, or dissociating and you are not eating, you're just kind of powering through life and trying to avoid having to deal with the heartbreak or pain that you're in. Eventually, like we talked about, you could lead yourself down a dark path into some sort of chaos. And it would be the chaos that you create that would eventually cause you to snap out of it and go back to your beginning of your cycle. Essentially, as you're moving through those four phases, what I would expect to see there is that maybe you start to hang out with friends that you know don't bring out the best in you. And then maybe you start to default back to old, more reckless or wild behaviors. You have a bunch of fun, you blow off some steam, and then you realize, yeah, I can't, I can't do this anymore, I'm too old for this, or I can't live my life like this anymore. I thought I'd outgrown this. And it's, it's the awareness of living a life that you intentionally chose not to live that ends up pulling you back to the beginning where hopefully you get a fresh start. For those of you that are on the right side and you look toward CO regulation, it can be more challenging to reset because of how that shame experience at the end can start to trigger even more dysregulated food behaviors. When we're thinking about food behaviors like the snacking, hiding, overeating, mindlessly snacking, restricting, forgetting to eat. All of these things are ultimately rooted to not just our emotional addiction cycle, but our perception of reality. You've heard me talk about in previous episodes something called the neurocognitive funnel. And brain pattern mapping tracks these nine markers that make up the neurocognitive funnel. The very top two are going to tell us how you perceive reality at that very base level. In our world, we're always looking at pixels and we're trying to organize these pixels into things that make sense. So we're creating these definitions and when we create these definitions, we, our brain is then going to have an emotional response to how we've defined it. Even when we're looking at the split between those who are more self regulated and those who co regulate the self regulate people. When they're experiencing that the pain or the heartbreak, their perception of that event is not necessarily that life is over and I'm never going to move on from this. There's a part of them that naturally realizes this sucks, but this is temporary. Nothing feels futile. They're still acutely aware of a future where this situation has ended. And although the pain is happening right now because they are that self regulated type, they have built the skills and the understanding that they can get themselves out of anything as long as they stay committed and keep methodically working through it. Another way to describe this is that these people on the left tend to be relatively relentless. If a bunch of bad things happening people are like how are you still going? It's not really like my mom or my dad or my genetics. It's literally my brain pattern. My brain pattern forces me to keep going and to to some degree keep looking on the bright side. Even if we know that that bright side is not right now, then if we look at the co regulating people on the right, what often ends up happening is their perception of reality. Those very instant moments, the wound or the heartbreak feels so victimizing and such a Personal rejection that you can quickly get to this experience of futility. No one's ever gonna love me. This is always going to happen where you start to think in these very broad blanket statements. And it's in these more negatively skewed broad blanket statements that we end up looking for that ice cream, that bag of chips, something to make us feel better. Because there's a part of us that, that's trying to seek pleasure. To be honest, the more I work with clients who are the self regulate type, I think their entire construct of pleasure seeking is not really wired all the way. And I'll back this up. I think sometimes people that are on this left hand side that tend to be more the self regulating types, they can maybe in the past they have maybe like some wild tendencies. Like I know, for example, I was a raver for a really, really long time. For many years I went to a rave every Friday and Saturday of like every weekend for my whole life. In my teens. That to me was like the closest I got to pleasure, which for me was really just peace. Not having any commitments, just getting to completely be myself and kind of blend into a big crowd. That's not really the type of pleasure that we're talking about here with the right side people, people. So people on the left, typically, their pleasure, which if you're listening to this on audio and putting it in air quotes, really has more to do with relaxation and peace and being free of the burden of commitments and having to be responsible. That obviously can get you into other bad patterns too. It never got me into drugs because I was just much too controlled of a person to ever dip into that. But I think people on the left have likely dabbled with hallucinogens and partying and things like that. That might be an example of where over time you eventually start to justify that until you're like, what am I doing? I don't do this anymore. I need to go back to being like a mom or business person. But on the right hand side, this experience of pleasure is much more rooted in dopamine and wanting to chase after something and kind of get that immediate feedback and that immediate feel, feeling of pleasure. This is actually very opposite. This is not peace, it's not relaxation. It's a very high arousal state. To contrast this, the left side people are typically looking to kind of be in almost more of a moderately neutral state where they can just kind of let go. The people on the right are actually looking for this high arousal state dopamine hit where they're actually Experiencing pleasure, whether that's through craving a piece of food, right? Like craving pasta or in some cases craving drugs, right? They want that pleasurable feeling. For example, with somebody who struggles with opiate use disorder of the feeling of taking opiates, it's not necessarily the peace or the letting go, it's the actual tangible feeling. Each side of this and hopefully by now that you're listening, you've essentially figured out where you belong. Because it doesn't take much conversation on this for you to be like, oh yeah, I'm here, I'm there. So hopefully you place yourself by now. Some of the behaviors on the right side that are more rooted into co regulation can be trickier to stop because there are likely other ways that you co regulate as well that go far beyond food. For this reason, I want to emphasize to you that work like break method and even just the insights of that you can gain from brain pattern mapping highlight ways where you need to learn how to build the ability to self regulate. Because if you continue to reach to outside mechanisms either to cope or soothe or reward, you're going to be forever dependent on something outside of yourself. You need to learn how to become truly independent and only then when you rewire some of those more internal emotional structures will you stop engaging with food in these destructive ways on the left hand side. Interestingly, people here need to actually learn to be vulnerable and and learn how to let some of their heartbreak or pain out into a space where they can have somebody at least process it with them because this is something that their brain won't naturally look to. Example, if I'm in pain, my instinct is I need to be alone and I'll be quiet. If I'm like really mad or something's really wrong, I go completely dead silent. And all I want to do is be away from everybody.