Dr. Sarah Stombaugh:
This is Dr. Sarah Stombaugh, and you are listening to the Conquer Your Weight Podcast.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Conquer Your Weight Podcast, where you will learn to understand your mind and body so you can achieve long-term weight loss. Here’s your host, obesity medicine physician, and life coach, Dr. Sarah Stombaugh.

Dr. Sarah Stombaugh:
If you have ever had a day where you are particularly stressed or maybe you’re bored or lonely and find that you are eating in response to some of those negative emotions, this episode is for you. I am Dr. Sarah Stombaugh, obesity medicine physician, and today we’re going to talk about the role of emotional eating and how addressing this in our weight loss journey can be so, so important. Whether you are on a GLP medication or not, working through the behavioral piece of your weight loss journey becomes so important to finding long-term weight loss success to make sure that as you are losing weight, that you are able to tackle all of the different tools so that you feel confident in your weight loss journey, that your GLP medication is just one of the tools that you’re using in your journey, and that you feel like, “Hey, I am really reconnecting with my body, understanding what I’m eating and why I’m eating it. And that why I’m eating is such a big thing that comes up, especially in the context of emotional eating.” So join us for this week’s episode as well as some of the upcoming ones. Next week we’re talking about food noise, which is a very common conversation in the GLP medication space, how these medications work to reduce food noise. And we’re going to talk about how, whether it’s with a GLP medication and your own tools, how you can really tackle this in a way that will support your long-term weight loss goals. Now let’s talk about emotional eating because sometimes it’s very clear and other times it’s a little bit more subtle. We’re going to talk about what it is, how it presents, and most importantly, what do you actually do about this and how do you work through those emotional eating episodes? So emotional eating, I define as eating for any reason beyond true physiological hunger.

So when we think about hunger that comes up in our body, we have true physiological hunger. We also have cravings and urges and what is more of a emotional hunger. Now, it can be normal that those two things coexist in some ways and not even in a bad way. They can be a very normal day-to-day experience that we have. So let’s say you haven’t made a plan of what’s for lunch, you have a one-hour lunch break, your stomach is rumbling, you’re like, okay, I’m physiologically hungry. You’re experiencing those hunger cues. If you go into your kitchen, you open your refrigerator and you say, what sounds good? You are tipping over into emotional hunger territory because you’re answering that what sounds good question. So it’s okay for those two things to go together. The problem becomes when emotional eating is the driver, especially when we feel really out of control and feeling like we don’t know how to manage when that is coming up.

So a lot of times it’s in the context of negative emotions like boredom or loneliness or stress or overwhelm, but it can also come up in the context of positive emotions. A lot of times when we’re celebrating, when we are on vacation, very positive emotions can also drive emotional eating. So it’s important to recognize it comes up in a lot of different settings. And I think one of the biggest challenges is that it’s very culturally accepted for us to eat for reasons beyond hunger, even to overeat or to eat foods that are not in line with our goals in response to negative emotions. And you can probably think back at times in your life where you’ve had, maybe you didn’t make a sports team as a child and your mother took you out to get ice cream. Even you get a shot at the doctor and they give you a lollipop or your boyfriend broke up with you and one of your friends brings over a bottle of wine or a pint of ice cream maybe.

We have a funeral, maybe someone very close to us has passed away. People bring over food. They’re not bringing over vegetables and lean protein. A lot of times they’re bringing over really rich casseroles and pot pies and these heavy, fatty, really comforting type foods. They’re called that. They’re called comfort foods because they do provide that role. And certainly in terms of our societal expectation, we are normalized to eat in a lot of these situations. So when stress eating is coming up or that emotional eating is coming up, a lot of times it’s very easy to see, okay, I’ve been doing this for a while, probably even for many decades I’ve been practicing, I’ve been taught that it’s okay to respond to my emotions in that way. So what I want to offer to you is that all emotions are part of the normal human experience.

It is normal to have days where you are happy and days when you are sad and to have frustration and to have anger and to have excitement and all of these emotions make up the normal human experience. And I think a lot of times this is where we are not always taught how to manage some of our negative emotions. Now, I am not talking about if you are dealing with the deep despairs of chronic depression, absolutely, I want to make sure that you are getting the help and support that you need through that. But a lot of times in our day-to-day normal human emotions, we are not taught that it’s okay to have those negative emotions. A lot of times you will ask a parent, “What do you want for your child?” And they will say something like, “I just want my child to be happy.” And it sounds really good on the surface, but the reality is it would be weird to be happy all the time.

Now you can have a bent on life where you see the good in things in that you’ve practiced that type of behavior, but it is normal. If you have a flat tire in your vehicle, it is normal to feel frustration about your flat tire. It would be weird to just be happy about your flat tire. It is normal if you have a altercation with someone that you love or a negative interaction with your boss. It is normal to have a moment or a few minutes where you’re feeling very negative about that type of situation. It is normal. It is normal to feel sad when someone dies. Imagine if someone close to you died and you felt happy, that would be incredibly, incredibly weird. You should feel grief, you should feel sadness. That is the normal response to that type of situation. And it’s through these negative emotions that are normal that we experience the full joy of some of the positive emotions in our life.

And it is a normal human experience to be able to experience all of those, the good, the bad, and everything in between. But what happens is a lot of times we’re not taught how to process those negative emotions. We’ve taught that we need to escape or that it’s bad to be feeling those negative emotions, and we don’t always hold space for those emotions in the way that we need to. So I often will share this picture with my patients looking at this circle as the full range of human emotions. And you could ignore this kind of blobby area here. If you’re listening to the audio only version, make sure to check this out on YouTube video. But I’m looking at a circle here and it’s divided in the middle where half of it is positive and the other half of it is negative. And so if we imagine that this circle is all of the human emotions, half of them will be negative human emotions and half of them will be positive human emotions.

And this is the normal expectation. Maybe it’s a little bit more, maybe it’s a little bit less, but some will be positive, some will be negative. The challenge is a lot of times when we’re having a negative emotion, we desire not to be. We’ve not been taught how to cope with that, how to manage it. And so we find ourselves in this blobby territory out here, this part that looks like a fried egg, where we are not just having a negative emotion, but we’re trying to escape from that negative emotion. We think it brings us to a positive space, but we’re often escaping from this negative emotion. So a lot of times this is what happens with emotional eating. So imagine you’re feeling bored. So boredom, I think we can all agree is a negative emotion. There might be more intense negative emotions, but boredom is a negative emotion.

And when we’re feeling bored and we’re desiring not to be, maybe we’re walking through our kitchen, some food cravings start sneaking in and we go and we eat food, even if we’re not really hungry. So we’re snacking, maybe we’re choosing sweet treats or more processed foods because they are meeting a need that is not physiological hunger. They’re meeting that emotional need. So we’re seeking this dopaminergic reward. So our brain is tipping into the reward system, we’re looking for that escape, and that’s exactly what it provides us. It provides us this escape. So we escape from that negative emotion. And the thing is it actually works. If you look at the reward pathway in the human brain, we can escape from these negative emotions into a reward pathway. So we get this dopamine hit from sugary foods, from processed foods. We get that dopamine hit. The problem is that it wears off really quickly and it actually drives us further away from our positive emotions.

So we were feeling bored. Let’s say we went and had some cookies. It brings us out here to this escapism territory and it actually brings us both further away from our positive emotions as well as a lot of times further away from our goals. So this looks like someone who’s on a weight loss journey, they’re trying to eat healthy, they are experiencing a negative emotion, whether it’s boredom or otherwise. They eat foods in response to that emotion and they are now further away from their goals of eating healthy, for example, or their weight loss goals. And so it feels really good, but it’s an incredibly, incredibly temporary fix where it doesn’t last long, it doesn’t actually convert us to positive emotions and it brings us further away from our goals. Now, one of the most amazing things is a lot of times people talk about the role of GLP medications in supporting them, and we’ll talk about this even more in depth next week as we talk about the effect of food noise and how that’s driven in our body and how GLPs help suppress that.

But GLPs can be helpful in emotional eating as well. And as you recognize where emotional eating is coming up, tackling that in conjunction with something like the GLP medications can really be a phenomenal recipe for success. So we want you to think about how is my body feeling? Am I hungry? Am I full? Is there an emotion that’s coming up? When we’re finding ourselves wandering around the kitchen trying to tease out, okay, what’s really going on here? Am I hungry or is it something else? You might recognize that there’s other emotions coming up and you might think about, are there other things I can do besides food that will help to address those more specifically? So let’s say you are bored. Is there something that can address your boredom more than just eating, for example? Or let’s say you still want to eat because this is a habit that you’ve practiced over and over again.

Instead of just trying to replace it with going for a walk, maybe we even do those two things together. You have a cookie and you go for a walk or you’re feeling lonely, you call a friend and you go out for ice cream. It can be these two things together, but starting to recognize where emotional eating is coming up so that we can work to address some of the root cause of it. And recognizing sometimes too that life is not always going to be positive, that these negative emotions will come up. And what’s impressive is that a lot of times they actually pass within seconds. A lot of times within a minute, within two minutes, those emotions have passed or at least the intensity of it. And if you find that they’re lasting a lot longer, working with someone like a licensed mental health professional can be an incredibly powerful thing to do to support you in your weight loss journey.

This is something that every single day we’re tackling not just the physiology of weight loss with things like GLP medications, but we’re tackling the behavioral piece as well. And it is so amazing to see how my patients get some of that long-term support when we combine these tools together. If you are looking for someone to support you in this way, I would love to work with you. If you live in the states of Illinois, Tennessee, or Virginia where I see patients by telemedicine or in person in Charlottesville, Virginia, you can learn more at www.sarastambamd.com. You can also follow this series that we’re doing where we work through these different behavioral pieces of the weight loss journey. Next week, we are tackling food noise. We’ll talk about how GLPs can play such a profound role in this as well as how to work through and support yourself in your weight loss journey. Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode. We’ll see you all next time.