"I get a tremendous urge to eat something sweet when I'm not busy. Help!"

If we are live on Facebook, ran into a little bit of technical difficulty. Here we go. All right, perfect. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Hey y'all, hey, happy Friday. This is Jennifer Live. I'm answering your weight loss questions and answers that you guys have been— or your questions and your struggles that you have been submitting to me. All right, perfect. I gotta like double check. Now if my audio goes in and out, it is a— we are aware of the problem and it is simply as we understand it, a Zoom to Facebook Live connection thing. So just know that they'll come back in if it goes out. All good, not a problem. Alright, so this is what I like to do, half an hour spending some time answering your questions. For those of you who are new to me and are not familiar with who I am and what I do, I'm going to tell you who I am and what I do. I am Jennifer Dent-Brown. I am a life and weight loss coach, and I help women learn to stop dieting forever with the Stop Dieting Forever process, where I teach you how to learn, lose, and live your life at your forever weight. Okay, so what I've been doing, because I get so many questions in my DMs and emails, my boot campers ask very Specific questions, and I'm starting to see trends and patterns. I'm like, you know what, instead of me just answering the questions one-off, let me take time to do 30 minutes, right, to just go through the questions, the challenges, address them from my perspective using the Stop Dieting Forever process. Okay, now you can go research the interwebs and do all of the things that you want to do to find different answers to the questions, but if you want to know how the Stop Dieting Forever process works for you in this particular situation, you're in the right place. Okay, so today I have a couple of questions, um, that I want to go through. The first one is— doo doo doo doo— was submitted to me by Sharon. She sent me an email. Sharon says, I believe with my exercise and activity that my food intake may be too low, thereby causing my body to retain weight with no success with weight loss. She says, I don't like a lot of food, and I find my stomach is much more comfortable without. I am not underweight by any means and would like some suggestions on how to proceed. Eating only when I'm hungry isn't a solution, as I'd rather have coffee at 10 and nothing till supper. Any recommendations in this regard would be appreciated. Thank you. Okay, Sharon, love the question. The first thing that struck me when I read your question, it was like, she says, um, eating when I'm hungry isn't a solution, as I'd rather have coffee at 10 and nothing until supper. My question to you is, what is wrong with that? Not hungry? Why do you eat? This is the problem that a lot of us have, and I— we talk about this in depth in the boot camp, but a lot of us come to believe that we need to be eating all of the time. We need to be eating 2 to 3 hours. We need to be eat every 2 to 3 hours. We need to eat as soon as we wake up. One of the boot campers was talking about a diet that she had done where she said you had to eat immediately upon awakening. I was like, oh yeah, I did something similar, right? And that is not true. What I teach in the boot camp is I teach you about this thing called your apistat. It is your body's natural appetite, appetite regulator, and it sits in your brain. Everyone has it. Animals have it. Babies are born with it. Everyone has it. We just stopped paying attention to it somewhere along the way, and we end up eating more than we need to when we're not hungry. So the fact, Sharon, that you recognize that you're good with coffee in the morning and you can go all day without eating and you're fine, that is just telling me that your apistat is working. When you don't have that innate physical hunger, you don't have the hunger signal. Your body is just using the energy on your body from carbohydrates and basically the food on your body for energy. That's it. Okay, so our appestat lives in our brain. It is the reason why we don't see overweight zebras. It is a reason why we don't see overweight penguins. It is the reason why bears know exactly how much to eat to hibernate for the winter. They build up their fat stores. Your apat— your apistat tells them to eat, eat, eat, eat during the season when it's warm out. They fatten up, they bulk up for the winter. They eat just as much as they need to, and their body burns off the fat during the winter because they're not eating for energy. Our human bodies do the exact same thing. Perfect example, babies. Okay, if you try to feed a baby when a baby is not hungry, a baby will like, they will just shut their mouth. They will not take that bottle. They would not take the spoon. They will not take the nipple, nothing. They're like, done. But as soon as the baby is hungry, their appetite is like sending them the hunger signal, they cry. Okay, we have lost our connection to our own our body's own natural hunger signals. It just shows me that we, because we're so educated now and we followed all the diets and all the research and we believe in all the research has told us back in the day, we need to be eating all the time, that that is good. But we know from eating all of the time, our insulin levels are constantly spiked, our blood sugar crashes and raises, it crashes and raises, and it puts our hormones in a tizzy and our body doesn't know how to function. Our body doesn't know how to tap into the fat stores to burn fat for energy. Our body gets all backed up with all of the carbohydrates that we're consuming because we're eating too often. And that is simply because we don't know how to pay attention to our apistat. Okay, you guys have questions and you're on Facebook and you're listening, go ahead and type them in the chat. And if I have time at the end, I will absolutely respond to them. Okay, so Sharon, my question to you is, why is it a problem that you can have coffee at 10 AM and not eat until suppertime? If energetically you feel fine, you're not what we call on the hunger scale, you're not hangry— hangry, hungry plus angry— you're not faint or feeling like you're going to pass out. Then it is okay. You're— and you say in your email that you are not underweight by any means. That just means that your body is tapping into its fat stores for energy, which is what we want when we're trying to lose weight. Okay, so Sharon, just keep paying attention and eat when you are hungry, and don't let the clock freak you out, like, oh my God, I haven't eaten for 6 hours. Don't let the clock freak you out. I did a, I did a podcast. I forget which number it was, but it was like, um, your fake hunger is keeping you overweight. And it was all like 5, 4 or 5 different ways that we believe that we're hungry, but we're not really physically hungry. We've just created these habit external, these external cues, and we just eat from habit. Like, perfect example, 8 o'clock breakfast. 10 o'clock, mid-morning snack, 12 o'clock lunch, 3 o'clock afternoon snack, 6 o'clock dinner. And if you're like building muscle, you gotta have that protein shake at night before bed, right? So those are external cues. The clock is what we're looking at to determine whether we're actually hungry or not. And most of the time you will find that we are not. Okay, so thank you for that question, Sharon. The next question I want to answer is— okay, so it's not a question, it's actually a struggle. And this is from one of our boot campers. She says, I have an unhealthy emotional relationship with food and don't prepare for my busy lifestyle. And she's now in this cohort of the group. So I'm so excited that she joined. But I think a lot of us have an unhealthy— can say we have an unhealthy emotional relationship with food, and we just don't prepare for a busy lifestyle. What you guys are learning in the boot camp, and if you decide to join the boot camp and you're learning the Stop Dieting Forever process, one, you're going to learn how to plan. And what happens is when, like she says, I have an— this is Candice— I have an unhealthy emotional relationship with food simply means that you're eating more emotionally versus intentionally. Right now, if you go back over your week or over, even over just over your day today, how many times did you eat emotionally versus intentionally? Okay, eating intentionally means that you are hungry, you have a plan. This is what you're deciding to eat. These are the energy foods that you're going to consume to keep your body feeling good and light and buoyant. That is eating with intention. Eating emotionally means standing in front of the refrigerator going, something to eat, what is exciting me right now, right? Or standing in front of the pantry and looking to see what snacks jump out at you, or you just start tasting different things like, what do I have a taste for? Been there, done that. That is eating emotionally. That is using food as a distraction from your life, right? Whenever you find yourself looking in the refrigerator, staring, looking for something to eat, you're eating with emotion. Your emotions are driving you to eat. I just had the pleasure of coaching one of my private clients on this exact same thing. She was dealing with overwhelm, feeling very overwhelmed with lots of things that are happening at home, their kids. With work, and it was just kind of like compounding on top of each other. So we noticed a pattern over the week. Every time that she noticed that she overate or she ate off plan, we're like, what's happening? She's like, oh, I felt overwhelmed. And she said, when I feel overwhelmed, I feel like I gotta go do something immediately. And so she can't like sit with the overwhelm, she can't think through the overwhelm. She's like, oh, I gotta go do something. And so for her, going to do something is going to eat. Okay, we didn't even talk about what she ate, but she was going to eat, wasn't on plan. And what she found was the eating, which used to be like pleasurable at that before, it wasn't so pleasurable anymore. It was literally just a distraction from whatever the thoughts that were causing her overwhelm. And then what would happen is she would eat, temporary distraction, we call a false pleasure, finished eating, and guess what happened, y'all? The overwhelm is still there. It hasn't gone away because an overwhelm is literally a feeling. It is caused by your thoughts. And if you're allowing your thoughts to compound over and you're rolling them over, over and over and over in your head, the feeling of overwhelm gets really intense. And it gets really big. I am a chronic sufferer from overwhelm. I have done so much work in this area of dealing with my feelings of overwhelm. I thought overwhelm just happened to me. Nope. Overwhelm is simply caused by, oh my God, I have so much to do, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough resources. And all the other things, right, to compound. This is my thinking, compounding thoughts, creating this huge feeling of overwhelm. And like my client, I used to deal with the overwhelm by, oh, let me go get something to eat real quick. Oh, let me just like step away from my desk because that's where the overwhelm was and go find something to eat in the kitchen, right? Temporary distraction. It's a false pleasure because it is a distraction. Like, oh, I can spend 3 minutes trying to like eating something when I'm not thinking about the overwhelming thoughts. I'm eating, but the food doesn't even taste good. I'm not even like consciously consuming it. I'm just eating as a distraction. And as soon as the food is gone, I'm either looking for something else to eat, like my client, or you go back and like, dang, overwhelming thoughts are still there. Okay, so the solution to that and what I coach my client on is one, recognizing when you're feeling overwhelmed, what that feeling feels like. I think most of us can agree we know what overwhelm feels like. But then pausing and thinking about like, okay, what are— why am I overwhelmed right now? What's happening? What's going on? Knowing that overwhelm isn't just like falling on top of us, it literally is because of what we're thinking about whatever is going on. Okay. And in that moment, once you— when you're pausing and you disrupt that pattern, you can decide, all right, am I gonna like indulge in a false pleasure right now, go find something to eat, knowing at the end of the chips, the bottom of the bag of chips, or the bottom of a glass of wine, the overwhelm is still going to be there? Or am I going to sit here with it and just work some things out in my head, like be a big girl, work some things out? And then we went through this with my client. We actually went through like how to, like, literally on paper go through what happens when you— what do you do when you're feeling overwhelmed, right? Writing all the things down, etc., etc. So that is— I went down a little bit of a tangent there, but I think it's really important because a lot of us deal with overwhelm and a lot of us deal with overwhelm by eating. Okay, so that would be considered, as Candace wrote, an unhealthy emotional relationship with food. And she doesn't prepare for her busy lifestyle. I can imagine, because she said busy lifestyle, she's got so much happening in her life that she's feeling overwhelmed. And so the overwhelm leaks into, I can't deal with the overwhelm, let's go eat something, let's go find something to eat. Hey, all right. Hey, Tiffany. Oh, hey, Sharon, answered your question. I hope you saw it was the first question, um, that I got to today. So if you didn't see it, make sure you go back and watch the replay. But thank you for submitting the question. All right, the last question I want to answer is from a boot camper, and I think this is super common too is— actually, I'm gonna take some of my tea first. Um, she, she wrote in. We have this, um, thing— I can't think of another word— a thing within the boot camp called Ask a Coach where you can like submit a video or a text question to me and I answer it with a video. So this is a question that came through like before the boot camp even started. She's like, when I am busy, I have no problem controlling what I eat. When I am not busy, just sitting, relaxing, reading a book, watching TV, hanging out, suddenly I have the tremendous urge to eat something sweet, mostly chocolate. And I struggle with this. What are some steps I can do to avoid this urge for something sweet? Sweet-suede. Okay. To eat, y'all, is real. It is real, and so many of us struggle with it. So I'm so glad she asked this question. And what I teach, again, because I'm answering these questions and these struggles as it relates to the Stop Dieting Forever process, you may learn some other thing you can do with another coach. I don't know if that's gonna work for you forever to get you here to maintenance, to living your life at your forever weight. But for me and my people in my house, this is what I teach. I teach a strategy called PAUSE. I just talked about it a little bit, um, in that last answer to the question. So notice how she said she has a tremendous urge to eat something sweet, right? It's like that— again, it's like that overwhelming feeling of like, ooh, I just want to eat. So when she has a tremendous urge to eat something sweet, that is just causing a feeling, and the feeling is a tremendous urge to eat, right? It's an over-desire. So something in her head has linked to her thinking to like, when I'm not busy, when I'm just sitting reading a book, watching TV, something in her brain, she's linked doing that activity to eating. And so when she stops, like she's trying to eat intentionally, and she doesn't know how to deal with that emotion just yet, what is happening is she's got this tremendous urge because her brain is like, oh, we're sitting and relaxing, we're supposed to be eating something right now, we're supposed to be eating chocolate. And now she's trying to fight the urge to eat because she's like, well, this isn't going to help me lose weight. So because she's a new boot camper and because she is brand new to the Stop Dieting Forever process, one thing that I teach the boot campers is there's no food that is off limits, right? I teach to think of like permission granted. Give yourself permission to eat the food. Just because in the beginning stages you are learning how to deal with these urges, you're identifying what are the thoughts that are causing the urge. But when you're trying to like force yourself not to eat something off of willpower, it feels terrible. It feels awful. So in the process, in the Stop Dieting Forever process, what I teach is like, okay, no food is off limits, but we're just going to eat intentionally. So if you know in the evenings after 7 o'clock, from 7 to 8, that's when you like sit down and you like to watch Entertainment Tonight, whatever, but you're just going to plan, have your chocolate, go ahead, eat a little piece of chocolate. Hey, Miss Trish! And you eat that intentionally. It just relaxes your nervous system. It relaxes your brain. It takes the pressure off of you, like sitting there like you can't even relax. Because all you're thinking about is eating the chocolate. Okay, so my new boot campers, the people who are new to this process, give yourself permission to eat the food, but you're eating it intentionally versus emotionally. Okay, once you get in the rhythm of understanding, oh, I understand exactly why I'm feeling this way because I'm thinking that it is— when you begin to understand and break down that these feelings just aren't coming from outer space. They're actually being caused by what you're thinking. When you understand that, then you can logically both think and pause and be like, oh, okay, is this— I want to do that is going to intentionally help me reach my goal or not? You get to decide, but you get to decide it ahead of time. Eating intentionally versus eating emotionally. Okay. So I answered that question in the group and somebody was like, okay, great, what if I don't have time to plan? And she's like, it's Tuesday night and I'm sitting there and I have this overwhelming urge to eat the chocolate, what do I do? I was like, perfect, so glad you asked that question. What do you do? Very simply, at some point in time, your brain, your logical brain kicks in and you're like, oh, I feel a very strong urge to eat. Oh, I'm putting chocolate in my mouth. Oh, this may not work for my weight loss plan. I didn't plan for this. This is an emotional eat. At any point in time during that process, you can give yourself permission to pause. Pause doesn't mean stop eating. Pause doesn't mean like throw the food away. Pause just means stop for a moment. What happens when you just picture my hand when you stop for a moment, you're just disrupting that thought pattern, right? So the example that Ellen has is like, look, when I sit down to watch TV, all of a sudden I get a tremendous urge to eat. Like I said before, her brain has connected that activity with eating. So in the pause, you— she is disrupting that thought pattern. Her brain is like, ooh, I really want to eat the chocolate. Pause. Oh, disrupt the thought pattern. And in the pause, at that moment, you can decide if you want to go eat the chocolate or if this is something that you can delay and you choose to eat later tomorrow or whatever. Okay, but the pause is so powerful. Now, some of y'all, when you're new to this, you're gonna be like, well, I just like— I don't even recognize what's happening. Like, it's just like I have the thought thought, and the chocolate's in the hand, and then it's in my mouth, and it's like, oh my God. One thing I want to give yourself permission to do is like, if you find yourself in the middle of eating the chocolate, you can still stop. You can still pause. Not a problem, right? At any point in time in that whole pattern, that thought— we call thought, feel, act pattern— you can still pause. And if you just like completely miss the moment, it's okay. It's not a problem. Chocolate bar is gone, and you're like, oh, what happened? Chocolate smeared all over your face. Okay, it's not a problem. But afterwards, we do these evening assessments. You can like look back and be like, oh, and get really curious and be like, oh, what happened? Chocolate bar, how did that get in my mouth? Oh, okay, right? And you just write that, write down those answers, and you're just collecting your own data. You're just noticing, oh yeah, the chocolate bar thing happened because I got really upset with my kids. They wouldn't go to bed, and so I felt like I needed something, and so I ended up eating the chocolate bar, right? You have that awareness after the fact. Awareness is the first key to transformation. Now that you know, when your kids again, two weeks or two days later, they don't want to go to sleep and the same thing is happening and get the tremendous urge to eat, you can be like, oh, right, something happens here, right? You get to pause then at that point in time. Okay, it is a skill. It is something that you learn to do over time. But this is why my process— I can take you through the entire process. I erased it with the Learn, Lose, Live, but you learn the Stop Dieting Forever process within the 30-day container of the boot camp. And then you, you learn to lose the weight by learning what you've met— what you've learned in the process to master in the Stop Biting Forever program. And then you reach your forever weight. And then I teach you how to create your maintenance mindset. So this literally is the last time you lose weight. Okay. All right, 4:27. Got any questions? I don't think we do. If we do, go ahead and type them in now. I answered 3 questions today. I answered the question about not being hungry. I answered the question about, or the struggle of emotional, unhealthy emotional relationship with food and not preparing for the busy lifestyle. And we also talked about emotional eating and what do you do when you have a tremendous urge to eat something sweet. Okay, so if you have a question or a struggle that you want me to address in a future Jennifer Live, go ahead and send me an email, jennifer@jenniferdent.com, or just hit me up in the DMs and we'll grab your message, grab your question, put it in my spreadsheet, and I will answer it on a future live. Alright, my friends, I love you all. I wish you all the best. And look, stop dieting forever. Possible. Possible. There's so many women who have learned this process, have lost weight without dieting, and they're keeping it off. Like, that is priceless to be able to do that. Alright, my friends, I will see you in the next Jennifer Live. Bye-bye.