In this instructional YouTube video, health and wellness coach Aravind Padmaraju, Ph.D., shares his personal experience of losing his wife in a tragic accident, which triggered a period of intense emotional eating and rapid weight gain. He explains that emotional eating is driven by two core motivations he labels E (Escape) and P (Punishment). To break the cycle, he outlines a set of practical tools: self‑care and stress‑management (including professional help and building a healthier relationship with food), mindful questioning of true hunger, the Hawaiian forgiveness prayer Ho’oponopono (repeating “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you”), and a 90‑second deep‑breathing exercise to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system activation. Padmaraju also promotes a community‑based “Daily Warrior Practice” – a 30‑day challenge with a free first week that combines daily mindset re‑programming, breathing, and healing rituals. He emphasizes that sustainable weight loss hinges on addressing emotional triggers rather than dieting, encourages viewers to identify their own escape or punishment patterns, and calls for action, sharing, and subscription.
Chapters
Are you struggling with the emotional eating and weight gain? There is a small fight happens with your husband or your spouse or a wife, or you get upset with your kid, and you are not alone. I have gone through the same thing few years back. Let me tell you my story of some of the incidents in my own life, how it has actually impacted me and how it has caused me to gain the weight. So in this video, I'm going to explain you how you can break your using these tools and techniques. Okay, let's deep dive into today's video. Hi, my name is Arvind Padmaraju. I'm a health and wellness coach. Let's deep dive into today's topic, overcoming emotional eating and how you can overcome that and also break your weight loss struggle. Instead of we focus on addressing the root causes of building healthier habits. How many of you are interested? Then watch this video till the end. Don't miss it, guys. All these videos, whatever I'm making, it all comes from my own personal experience and what exactly I, I worked on it. So let me deep dive into— first of all, training assignment. Basically, I had to travel to a different city, and I traveled to Bangalore, and I was coming back from Bangalore to my village where my wife was traveling alone. She's supposed to get down at 11 o'clock in the 11 AM— sorry, 11 PM in the night, my uncle went on to pick her. And then I got— I started feeling panicking, what is happening? And also my wife's phone was not reachable. And during this time, and I called my dad, and I came to know that my wife is no more. She met with a small accident and she passed away. That one single incident has destroyed me every single day. And I was feeling that all this emotional pain, I started overeating. Exactly in 3 months, I gained 12 kgs of weight and I hit my highest weight. And I was not able to understand what was happening in my body. Every single time I think there's some kind of a cravings kicks in, I go and eat again. I went into a same kind of a state of emotional eating and again I gained weight. So when you are at the emotional eating state, so restricting your food will not help you. Restricting, um, some kind of food items will not help Reason? You are not addressing the root, the lifestyle and the diet adherence in your diet pattern. Okay, many, many of us, what we think is weight loss solely depends on what, what we eat. But the truth is, it's not about the food, it's about relationship we have with it. Then as a replacement, that is the reason every single time your emotion goes, your body triggers the hunger. Your body craves for the certain kind of a food. That's why you keep eating the same kind of a food whenever these kind of emotional things happen. So that is why when you more and more restrict, it becomes more and more— you need to manage, you need to identify what is the roots of this emotional eating, what is the current emotional state, and also the food challenges, whatever the food relationship you made. Whenever you trigger this particular anger, and you are started craving for the food. This is the replacement. You are all this experience you already create. So emotional eating, there is— there are two important things you need to understand, E and P. Okay, so these are the two key factors will drive you to eat emotionally. So E is escape, P is a punishment. Going through, I lost all my savings. That time it was like an escape mechanism. I want to escape. I wanted to stop thinking it. When I overeat, I'm getting that dopamine hit and all of them. I'm diverting, I'm escaping from the situation. So when we eat to escape, we are trying to avoid the situations basically. So, so just understand guys, your, your health and your overall health and all of these things what is happening in your body, it is more to do with your lifestyle than what what you are focusing on right now, on diet and exercise alone. Yeah, so you need to recognize that pattern. For me, it took all my things. The one of the two techniques what I used to come out of this emotional eating, especially, uh, going in escape and punishment mode, was self-care and stress management. What is the self-care? I started accepting myself. I started— I took some of the some traumas. Until I was not able to do it, I was confused with these emotions and this emotional eating again and again, and also the stress and all other aspects. So what you need, you need to identify it. And if you are not able to, um, address by your own, always take professional help. In my case, I took professional help, and I started also creating a good relationship with the food. Food is not the replacement of the emotions what I am going through. I need to accept the emotions, I need to address those emotions why it is happening, and I need to replace the relationship of stress is equal to food, anger equal to food, guilt equal to food, to guilt equal to guilt, anger equal to anger. So that is how I started accepting myself rather than escaping or giving it as a punishment to myself. Okay, this is the first thing you need to do whenever there is a trigger happens. So you need to start saying no to yourself. There is one more amazing thing which I used during my journey was start questioning myself. Do I really feeling hungry, or is it because of what I'm going through? I want to— I don't want to go through that, and that's why I want to eat. Ask your, uh, the questioning to yourself. Has a strong power. Because 90% of the time, why we overthink and why we go through so much of suffering because of our emotional challenges is we are not accepting the situation. We are not accepting the situation, and we are not taking the responsibility for that. That is the biggest reason. So the moment you accept, the moment you identify the triggers, and you can actually Once you identify it, instead of eating that particular food, maybe replace with some other options. Maybe do some kind of a practice, the breathing technique. So I also do some practice that whenever I'm emotionally down, I use a prayer called Ho'oponopono. This is one of the big, one of the best prayer to release all kind of negative emotions. I repeat, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you. I will keep repeating and I keep visualizing where I have that emotional pain and I keep repeating until I start settling down and I start feeling normally. So I will never escape from now on for all the emotional challenges what I'm having. Even I want you to do this. Every single time there is emotional stress or emotional trigger happens, just first identifying which particular body part you're feeling that, and then repeat these 4 sentences of I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you. Keep repeating, looking at that particular body part until you feel the release of that discomfort on your body. Okay, so try this particular tip. The next important thing, especially for guilt— the guilt also triggers the emotional stuff, and also sometimes overthinking also creates stress. What is the best thing you can do is have some kind of a deep, deep breathing practice. So I think I have also shared with you previously, and 90 seconds deep deep breathing technique. What you can do, every single time you feel stressed, keep your hand on your stomach, take a deep breath in and breathe out. So this practice you can do it for 90 seconds. So once you do the 90 seconds, you see, you see how do you feel. Because your stress is a response of a flight-fight response, which is your mind and body has connected with this particular nerve system, which is called as a sympathetic nervous system. Whenever, whenever you are in a sympathetic nervous system, your stress will go higher and it will keep putting you into that stress response, which creates all of the challenges. How do you come back to the normal state is enabling or activating the parasympathetic nervous system. How do you do it? By doing a deep breathing. Whatever technique I told you, do it for 90 seconds and see how do you feel. So use these two techniques for for your escape and as well as punishment methodology. This is what I used and this is what I suggest to most of my clients. Okay, so until and unless you don't break this habit— can you do it overnight? It's not, because you've been practicing this emotional eating for so long. You need to keep— be more mindful. That's where the community plays a major role. Be with the community of the people. That's where in my community where we do every single day realigning about this energy. So if you really want to know more about it, I do something called a daily magic practice where we actually set your, um, conditions, the right statements to your psychological— basically we reprogram your subconscious mind, rise your energy, follow some of the breathing techniques, and also do a slim little bit of a healing every single day in the morning, 20 minutes itself. So if you really wanted to, um, learn more about it and you want to really practice it, the link is in the below. It's a 30 days challenge and, um, 7 days— the first 7 days is absolutely free. The link is in the description. Please click on that and join that Daily Warrior Practice. Okay, so what I wanted to tell you in this whole video is addressing your emotional eating is very, very essential if you want to maintain sustainable lifetime results. Because these emotional— these emotions you're going to feel throughout your life. There is no escape for it. Yes, and it is, it is also very complex thing because it becomes like addictive. Um, if you don't even feel, um, when you are not giving that food, right, you literally feel that, you know, you get anger, you, you actually feel like not able to control yourself. So what I want to tell you one more thing is It's not about what you eat, it is about what is making you to eat. What is the trigger which is asking you to eat, right? What emotion is making you to eat is also most important, okay? So if you want to break the cycle, use the two techniques which I told you. Release the emotion and also use that breathing technique to release your stress, okay? Hope that is helpful. And what is most important, as I told you, managing your emotions and emotional eating is very, very crucial. Remember one thing, this is going to be your lifelong journey. If you don't know how to overcome this emotional eating, it's going to impact you again and again and again. It's not about you being 100% perfect. Even, even today I go through sometimes all these challenges, and also I eat sometimes more. But you just accept it, because if you don't accept it, you start feeling guilty. You are creating the same kind of a thing. Okay, if you found this video is very helpful, what I want you to do is I want you to share this video with at least 3 friends who are— who you think that who are going through the struggle of emotional eating and who are struggling with their weight loss. You shared with them. Let's hope this video will be helpful for them. They follow the same methods which I shared with you, and There's only one thing I want to tell you in this video. Without action, this video is useless for you. What I want you to do is identify your own emotional triggers. I have an assignment for you. Identify your own emotional triggers. See whether you are following an escape methodology or a punishment methodology. When you are using an escape methodology, identify those emotional triggers and use the method which I told you, saying those 4 sentences: I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, and I love you. Whenever you're seeing, um, more stress is creating because of this emotional eating, start doing this deep breathing technique and let me know how do you feel. And let me know if this video is really useful. If it is useful, and click on the subscribe button and also click on the bell icon so that you will, you will be notified when I post my new video. Okay, thank you so much guys. So I'll see you with one more new video. Till then, Arvind signing off. Take care, love you all. Bye-bye.
