Sarah, a woman in her 50s, eats sweets and chocolate between 7:30 and 11 pm while preparing lunches in the kitchen. Three fixes: use a smaller plate, clean the kitchen right after dinner, and move to another room for exercise instead. These replace sugar's pleasure with endorphins and better sleep.
Over the past couple of weeks, we've had so many conversations about emotional eating in our SlimPod community. It's a really big deal, so I thought I'd share with you one of the conversations I had with a lovely lady last week and explain how I'm helping her to get to the bottom of her emotional eating. I'm sure that you might relate to her story. For the purposes of sharing her story, I'm calling this lady Sarah. She's had a really difficult relationship with food for many years and is now in her 50s. She got a couple of chil— she's got a couple of children with learning difficulties and they're very demanding of her time, plus her physical and emotional energy. She gets overwhelmed with the stress of caring for others and eats for comfort. Sarah finds the evening time the hardest because she has her dinner and then while she's in the kitchen for the next couple of hours she just snacks. But her brain has made the association that this is her relaxation time and relaxation equals sweets and snacks. Sarah's developed a love of sweets and chocolate when she was around 16 and has found it really difficult to stop eating them. Despite being on every diet and eating plan under the sun for most of her life. She craves food, and then when she eats it, she hates it and continually feels guilty. Food dominates her thoughts, and she doesn't want this anymore because it's having a terrible effect on her health. She's diabetic, and she knows that she has to stop consuming the rubbish for the good of her health. But the emotional eating is so ingrained, she doesn't feel like she will ever— it will ever be possible to stop because she uses food to numb the stress of everyday life. So where do we begin with this one? Well, I like to break the problem down into manageable parts, and I work from the basis that we all have the answers within us. We just get a big bit bogged down in life and can't see the wood from the trees, especially when we don't seem to have any control over the behaviour and it really stresses us out. So I asked Sarah this: if there was just one action she could take which would move her towards her goal, what would that be? She said straight away that the snacking in the evening is her biggest problem. So we started unpacking what happens in the evenings and it was a goldmine of information, and I know I know this part is going to be totally relevant for so many people because evening snacking is such a major issue, so please take notes. Now, Sarah's danger time is between 7:30 and 11:00 in the evening, a very big window of time there to do a lot of damage, and she has been doing a lot of damage. So dinner happens at around 7:30, And while Sarah says her food is mostly healthy, she puts far too much on her plate because she has a love affair with it. So the first tip is for Sarah to get a smaller plate and listen out for her full signal while she's eating. She watches the television while she's eating, so is totally oblivious to anything her stomach is telling her brain, like, "Stop eating, you're full now." Now the next bit is the big problem area, the time spent in the kitchen after dinner from 8:30 to around 10:30 or 11. This time is when Sarah potters in the kitchen making the packed lunches for the next day, etc., etc. It's become for her me time or chilling time, and her brain has associated chilling out with picking at snacks. This has been going on for years and years, and what originally started as a reward and relax connection with sugary snacks is now— has now become a hugely disruptive habit. But when this happens, we need to disrupt and break this cycle by stopping this habit loop from controlling our lives. These habits hijack our brains and we just don't know that they're going on, or if we do, we feel powerless to do anything about them. But when you're aware it's happening, you can change it. So Sarah is now going to do the clearing up quickly each evening and move to another room to do some exercise exercises on YouTube, like a Lucy Wyndham-Reed for 10 minutes or something. She's going to go to bed earlier, which is something she also wanted to achieve. Then she's going to make the sandwiches in the morning. So what we're doing here is training the brain to get its pleasure from nature's happy drugs through exercise instead of getting it through sugar and the snacking. So if you have something like this going on in the evening, I would really urge you to stop and think about your routine and see what you can do to change it. It's estimated that at least half of what we do every day is habitual. Even emotional eating becomes a habit, but it can be unravelled. We get such a range of people on our Slimpod programme, some who have no emotional connections with food and others whose emotions and habits have been running side by side for many, many years. Slimpod helps to unravel these habits and emotions, but sometimes it takes time, and you can give it a helping hand by being more aware of the danger times and driving a wedge in the habit loop so that it doesn't keep repeating itself over and over again and causing the same destruction. I hope that's been really helpful today, and I'll see you next time.
