How to Quickly Stop Emotional Eating in 5 Minutes or Less

Hey, Lux Lifers! Welcome to this week's episode where I am going to give you a simple yet powerful hack for you to stop emotional eating in its tracks. Now, this is the hack that I use when those cravings hit, and yes, I still experience emotional food cravings. They don't ever go away. Just because I've stopped dieting forever and I've lost the weight that I've wanted doesn't mean that those cravings just automatically disappear. So let me just tell you a little bit of a story to give you some insight into how I use this hack and how powerful it is. So the other day I found myself standing in the kitchen with a fork in my hand and leftover birthday cake on the counter. It was about 2:00 PM in the afternoon on a workday, and I remember that because The Talk, the TV show The Talk, was on TV. And usually when I'm eating lunch, that's usually what I will turn on and watch while I'm eating lunch. So I just finished eating lunch, and I was distracted, y'all. I was probably checking email while I was eating lunch. The TV was blaring. And it was just one of those moments where I was completely aware that I was wolfing my salad down my throat. But I didn't care. I didn't care enough to do anything about it except to just keep shoveling that kale salad with grilled chicken and black beans down my throat. And y'all, I'm very consistent with what I eat for lunch during the week. But looking back, I was mentally, at that time, mentally beating myself up for not getting enough done that morning. Here it was lunchtime. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and I did not accomplish what I had set out to do that morning. And I just felt like I was behind, you know, it was just one of those mornings where I found it really hard to get focused, to get started on the big tasks that I wanted to do. And so I found myself like wasting time doing— I shouldn't say wasting time because it was things that needed to get done, but it wasn't anything like huge that was moving the needle. It was kind of the stuff that really didn't matter as much. It wasn't high priority tasks. Let's just put it that way. So if you've ever found yourself in a moment like that, where you're just eating your emotions, you're just shoveling food down your throat, the faster you can get it down, like you're putting your next forkful of food onto your fork before you even finish swallowing the last one, like you're just on autopilot, I just want you to know you are not alone. Because on this day, I wasn't just eating my emotions. I was also buffering with my phone, buffering with the TV. Like, so much was happening, and I was so disconnected from how I was feeling and what I was eating. So it's not a surprise to me that as soon as my salad bowl was empty, I was up looking in the refrigerator. Doors open. I was like, what else can I eat? And I opened the refrigerator doors, and there it was— the cake box with my leftover birthday cake on the top shelf in the refrigerator. Mind you, the cake had been sitting in the refrigerator for a few days by this point, and until this time, I didn't have the urge to eat more of the cake after the slice that I had on my birthday. It was delicious, by the way. It was vanilla with buttercream frosting, and it was fantastic. But at this particular moment in time, around 2 o'clock during a workday, all I felt was unsatisfaction. Even though I just finished eating a very sizable salad in a very big bowl, How I felt was unsatisfied. And what did I see in front of me in that moment of unsatisfaction? A cake, birthday cake with buttercream frosting. Surely, my brain said, a little bit of cake will make you feel satisfied. So what did I do? I grabbed the cake from the top shelf in the refrigerator. I put the cake box gently on the counter. I could smell the buttercream frosting as I reached to the left of me, opened up the drawer where our utensils are, and grabbed a fork. Now, mind you, I grabbed a small fork, like a dessert fork, because, you know, a smaller fork means it doesn't really count as much. So with my mouth watering, because I could smell the buttercream frosting, I knew it was in the cake box. I took off the lid of the cake box, and I saw that my husband had been enjoying my birthday cake because it was almost gone. And then on top of the unsatisfaction, FOMO kicked in, and I had the urge to eat the cake. It was even stronger because I was like, well, shoot, like, this is my cake, and what if I want cake later and there's none here? So I better eat it now. We also call that limbic hunger, right? Eating ahead of time. So here was my plan, y'all. My plan as I was doing all of this was to have one small forkful, have a little bit of a taste of the cake, and then put the cake back in the refrigerator. That was the plan. So I took my first forkful of cake with my little fork because in my mind the little fork was not as bad as a big fork. And of course I didn't want to like cut a slice and put it on the late because then that would be admitting to myself I'm actually eating a slice of cake that was unplanned. So before I even finished swallowing that first little forkful, I was working on my second forkful. You know how that is. Because this is what happened, y'all. The cake was— I opened up the cake and it was like evenly sliced because my husband uses a knife to cut the cake. Like a normal person and put a slice on a plate. So the cake was evenly sliced, and then I stuck my little fork in the bottom of the lowest layer, and now it started to look like it was tilting and it looked uneven. And so now I had to try to even out the rest of the— the rest of the cake to even it out with that little forkful I took on the bottom to hide my cake craving, because God forbid my husband open up the cake box and see that I had been digging in there like a little mouse. So I strategically tried to take the forkfuls of cake so it looked like the cake was still sliced with the knife, and it— I didn't want it to look like I touched the cake at all. So this is what my brain is like working through, right? Can you relate to this way of thinking? Like, really, the amount of logic and reasoning and strategic thinking that went into eating this cake. It was like ridiculous. I can look back on it and laugh, but in that moment, I was dead serious. All of this rationalization to make me feel better about, you know, in the middle of my cake attack, it's just ridiculous. Ridiculous. So just imagine me with my little dessert fork and the cake is still in the box, right? I'm just like digging little forkfuls of cake at a time and just shoveling them in my mouth. So about this time, I'm about 6 forkfuls in, and suddenly something snaps me out of eating cake on autopilot. Okay, back to the cake story. So remember, I was saying I was about 6 forkfuls in of this cake, and I was on autopilot. I was like digging the fork into the cake while I'm swallowing the last forkful that I put into my mouth, and I'm like strategically trying to artfully take the forkful so the cake doesn't look too jacked up. So I was completely on autopilot, y'all. Do you— let's just talk about autopilot for a second. Do you understand why emotional eating feels automatic? Let's have a teaching moment in the middle of story time. So there are 4 common emotional triggers that cause us to eat on autopilot. When you're triggered emotionally, say you're feeling stressed, food seems like an easy way to calm down the chaos. Or maybe you're feeling bored and you find yourself snacking because you feel like, "Oh, there's nothing else to do," and eating is just a way to fill up that void of time. Another common trigger is overwhelm, completely what I was experiencing that day when I was dealing with the cake. When you have too much on your plate, and it's really easy to turn to food for relief. The fourth trigger is celebration. Yes, the happy moments. Food is how we reward ourselves or celebrate our wins. So these triggers, these common triggers— stress, feeling boredom, overwhelm, celebration— they are so common. And you know what that means, y'all? It just means that you're human. It just means that you're deeply human. You're not broken for feeling this way. And wanting food because you're feeling this way, your brain is just doing what it is wired to do. That is it. So this is what's happening in your brain. So for instance, you're feeling stressed, your body releases cortisol, which amps up your cravings for high-energy foods like sweets and carbs. It's just a survival mechanism which is designed to keep us going during the tough times. Now, my brain was believing that I was having a very tough Wednesday at lunchtime because it was like, oh my God, we didn't do enough today. We're unproductive. We have so much to do this afternoon. Like, cake. That's what we need. Cake, sugar, carbs. That's what we need. So your brain knows that food can offer instant comfort, at least temporarily, because in that moment I was feeling pretty good because that cake was good. And this is why I was reaching for that cake before I even realized what was happening when I had opened up that refrigerator door, saw that cake on the top shelf a bazillion times before then, and didn't think twice about the cake. But in that moment, my whole body, my nervous system was activated. Cortisol was like flooding my nervous system. I was stressed. I was overwhelmed. So what I want you to know is that emotional eating is not about hunger because clearly, I was not hungry. I had just finished eating a huge bowl of kale salad with grilled chicken breast and black beans. Very, very filling. My brain was looking for relief. It was looking for comfort, and it was looking for a distraction from this feeling of overwhelm and stress. Okay. Teaching moment over. Let's go back to the story. So again, picture me in the kitchen. I'm carving out forkfuls of this cake with my little baby fork on autopilot. And then something snapped me out of it. You're going to laugh. It was not that Kevin, my husband, walked in and like surprised me. It wasn't that Nola, my pup, started barking at her squirrel friends outside. The thing that snapped me out of this autopilot automatic eating was a commercial on TV, y'all, and not just any commercial. It was the Wegovy commercial that came on. And you know that Wegovy song that gets stuck in your head? I'm not going to— I'm going to save you. I'm not going to sing it right now because if I did, it would surely be stuck in your head for the next 3 hours. And anyway, y'all know how I feel about these pharmaceutical companies and their misleading, autosuggestive ads on TV. So that's a whole nother rant that I'm not even going to get in. But that's why it's funny because it was a pharmaceutical drug commercial for Wegovy and that autosuggestive jingle that snapped me out of autopilot. That song disrupted the rationalization that was going on in my head. You know, that internal dialogue that was going back and forth in my head that was basically just giving me permission to keep eating the cake. Just get another forkful. We got to even it out a little bit more. We're not ready to stop this lovely buttercream taste in our mouth. One more forkful. Go ahead, Jennifer, you can do it, right? So that commercial, that song, it snapped me back into reality. I put the fork down, I took a deep breath, and in that moment, I was able to reconnect with my logical brain and implement the hack that I'm getting ready to share with you now. It's like that commercial just snapped me back into reality. So in that brief moment when I came up from air, the fork was down, I had finished chewing the last forkful of cake that was in my mouth, I remembered to ask myself this one question. Jennifer, are you hungry right now? And of course, right away, the answer was, girl, come on. You know you are not hungry. You don't want this cake. What is really happening? And I had a moment to reflect on the day and like, how did we get here? And I thought about how I was really feeling, and I acknowledge the feeling of overwhelm. I acknowledge the fact that, Jennifer, like, girl, you are feeling overwhelmed, and this is why we are here right now standing in the kitchen with a fork in your hand and a half-eaten cake in front of you. So that one question, what am I really feeling, was my first step to quickly stop the emotional eating in literally 5 minutes or less. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Okay. So let me just break down this strategy for you. I call this strategy or the hack, I call it the pause. So when you are feeling an emotional urge to eat something sugary or fatty or carby, you can pause and ask yourself a question, right? The first thing you do is pause. And if you're watching me on video, you see me like holding my hand up as like, stop, like pause. We're just going to stop. What we're doing or what we're about to do, we're going to take a deep breath and we're going to move on to step number 2. Step number 2 of this strategy is name it and claim it. So you're just asking yourself, okay, girl, am I physically hungry or am I just trying to feel better? Like, what is really happening? And answer the question, right? Answer the question. Here's one thing about our brains. They're like Google. When you ask yourself a powerful question, it will always give you a powerful answer. So the question is, am I physically hungry or am I just trying to feel better? And if you're trying to feel better, it's like, okay, well, trying to feel better from what? What is that emotional trigger that's causing you to eat? The third step in this hack is that you're going to now shift your energetic state. You're going to do something small to like shake that energy off of you. You're going to stand up, you're going to breathe deeply, shake it off like Taylor Swift, like Whatever you need to do, whatever your go-to is, this physical movement resets your brain and gives you some more space to think. It separates you even more from that immersion— emotional urge to eat. And the last thing you're going to do, because now your logical brain is kicked in, you're like, okay, girl, like, we're okay. We're just feeling overwhelmed, just a little bit stressed. We're just feeling a little bit bored. We're going to choose a different action. So you're going to replace the eating with something that feels good, like maybe texting a friend or petting your, your fur baby, going for a short walk, turning on some dance music. Like, you will be amazed at how this one choice can completely shift your mood in an instant. In an instant. So let me tell you what happened with my cake story. So once I was able to pause, I put the fork in the dishwasher, closed up the cake box. I put the cake box back in the refrigerator on the top shelf. I went up to the bathroom to rinse my mouth out with mouthwash because that instantly removed that delicious buttery cream sugary taste. My mouth so that I had that craving for the sugar. And then I walked down to my husband's office to tell him that I had cake, but I didn't say it like in a bad way, like, oh my God, babe, I ate some cake. I said it like it was no big deal. Now, I did that because I didn't want to carry any shame around eating the cake. I didn't want to be like, what's he going to think when he opens up the cake box and he sees that I like started carving it out with these little work fulls, none of that, no judgment, right? And he could care less that I ate the cake. I wasn't announcing it for him to care. I was announcing it for me to normalize my action in my brain, to tell my nervous system like, it's okay, we just had some cake. It's all good. The world is not coming to an end. I am not dying. Like nothing terrible is gonna happen. My clients aren't gonna quit because I ate birthday cake. Like The world is okay. I am okay. So, babe, I just ate some cake. Like, he's like, okay, that's good. He didn't even look up from his computer. And then the last thing that I did is I went and I walked on the treadmill for 15 minutes, not because I'm feeling guilty about eating the cake, but that's what I do every single day after I eat lunch. I do that because that's another hack. I probably will have to do a podcast on that, but walking, movement after you're eating is a hack to reduce insulin spikes and keep your blood sugar balanced and your brain alert. So I got into the habit of doing that every day after lunch. I go down, I get on the treadmill, or if it's nice out, I will go outside and walk for about 10, 15 minutes. Okay, so I have recovered from the birthday cake by using my own strategy, my own hack called PAUSE. But as I'm closing out this episode and this story, I just want you to understand this: overcoming emotional eating is not about willpower. Emotional eating doesn't happen because you're weak or you're undisciplined or you dislike or you can't do it. It happens because your brain hijacks you because it's trying to protect you, right? The good news is you can learn to interrupt this automatic response when you are aware of what's happening. It's not about controlling your emotions. So it's about creating a plan that helps you respond differently. So notice I didn't judge myself when I like snapped out of it. I wasn't like, oh my God, Jennifer, stop feeling overwhelmed. You need to feel good right now. That was not what was playing in my head. That was not the strategy. The strategy is recognizing what's happening, acknowledging the emotion, accepting the emotion, and having a plan, a strategic plan to help me respond differently to what was happening in that moment. Now, I've been practicing PAUSE, this strategy, for years, and it works 100% of the time. Yes, it does. You can practice PAUSE when the craving hits. You can practice PAUSE when you're in the middle of eating, just like I did with the cake. Or even use it as a reflection, as a non-judgmental way to reflect after you have your eating episode. With the PAUSE strategy, you regain control over food, and emotional eating doesn't become this automatic thing anymore. You stop battling the guilt, you stop battling the shame, and you can start to trust yourself around food. And when that That changes everything when you begin to trust yourself around food. This is why I was not freaking out because I'm like, oh my God, there's cake on top shelf of the refrigerator. Like, no, after I had the birthday cake on my birthday, it was delicious. I put it away. I was like, I'm not going to throw it away because Kevin may want some, or we may have— oh, my in-laws came over and they had some cake. Like, I didn't throw the cake away. Because I trust myself to exist in a household where there is delicious birthday cake and me not being emotionally tempted to eat it all the time. Okay? So when you— again, you stop battling that guilt and shame around food and you regain control around food, it's a game changer. So I want you to just imagine what it feels like for you to pause in those moments when you're having that back and forth dialogue in your brain and you're rationalizing all the reasons why you need to keep eating this thing. I want you to imagine what it feels like to pause in the middle of that moment, in the middle of the train wreck where it's— the train is going 800 miles an hour and you're able to stop on a dime and choose something else. And you can end that day feeling proud of yourself instead of defeated because you lost the battle with food again. Y'all. This can be you. This can be your life. Now, if this strategy resonates with you, the pause, you're going to love my free training in January. It's called Lose the Self-Sabotage: 4 Things You Can Do to Stop Struggling and Start Losing the Weight You Want. Now, this is why I want you— I want to help set you up for success in 2025. There are 3 times and 3 days for you to choose from because I'm offering this free training 3 times because I have received feedback and I know that I have listeners from all over the globe and not everyone operates on Eastern Standard Time. So when you go to sign up for the free training at jenniferdent.com/freetraining, you will see there are different times and you're going to pick which you want to register for, and that'll be your time. But during this free training, I'm going to go even deeper into the tools and the mindset shifts that you need to break patterns like emotional eating for good. I really want you to think about, as we go into this new year, instead of just thinking of like, how can I lose weight? How can I lose weight? How can I lose weight? I want you to start asking yourself the question, how can I change my identity? How can I become a healthy person? How can I start thinking like a healthy person? Because that is when you will learn how to lose the weight for good. Okay? So go to jenniferdent.com/freetraining. Get yourself signed up for the webinar. Share this episode with a friend. Invite your friends to sign up for the free training. It's going to be so much fun. And if you try this strategy today, even if you just try it just once, I would love to hear how it went for you. Send me a DM on Instagram. That's where I've been spending most of my time these days on IG, or just email me your story and tell me what happened. I would love to celebrate your win with you. All right, y'all, live luxe, and I will see you in the next episode.