Episode 101- How to Stop Overeating
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You are listening to episode 101 of the peaceful mind podcast.
Welcome to the peaceful mind podcast, a place for creating the peace of mind. You need to be the best mom you are created by God to be. If you want to bring more balance, more joy and more peace to your motherhood, this is the place for you. I'm your host certified life coach at Catholic mom, Danielle Thienel. In the name of the father of the son and of the holy spirit.
Let's get started.
Well, hello to you and thank you so much for joining me. Today's episode is intended to give you a little bit more peace of mind around the subject of overeating. I haven't talked about this subject very much on the podcast to date. And the reason is because I focus on the mental and emotional health of mamas, but I am also a certified weight loss coach, certified life and weight loss coach.
And I do help my clients lose weight. And we do that by learning what I want to just give you an overview today on how to really stop overeating and none of the insights and tips that I give you here have to do with exercise and calorie counting. Really the strategy of weight loss. When it comes to life, coaching really gets at the root of your problem and.
It's not any different than any other problem in life that I would be able to help you with. So when we look at our life, I can kind of see it in. You know, seven sections, right? There's our emotional health, our physical health, our spiritual practice, time, money, our relationships, and our career and our business and all of these.
Is your mind, your thoughts, how your brain is functioning and that is all connected. It's connected to your feelings and then the actions that you take in your life and the results that you get. So this episode, though, it is on a subject that I don't talk about a lot. You'll hear the same kind of underlining.
Themes to apply to your life that are very similar to when we're talking about how to stop worrying and how to stop yelling at your kids. It is still going to come from what you're thinking. So let's just dive in to how to stop overeating. And I just want to start with a definition, a quick definition.
So overeating is eating more than our body requires for. Eating more than our body requires for fuel. That is the basic definition. But notice when you hear me say that there's so much judgment and harshness and self-criticism that we do when we find ourselves. Eating more than our body requires for fuel.
And this is what I want to help you. Let go of to just see it whenever we do overeat as just eating more than our body required for fuel. Okay. All right. So we overeat for one of these four reasons we overeat for because we have emotional. Discomfort. We just have a low tolerance for feeling negative emotion, and we want that negative emotion to go away because we don't like how our body vibrates in that feeling.
Maybe we're stressed. Ma, maybe we're worried. Maybe you're disappointed. Maybe you're sad and it doesn't feel good in your body and you want it to hurry up and go away. And we have a really low tolerance to be able to feel those negative feelings. And so we go. We go eat because the body releases chemicals and then we get a dopamine hit to feel better.
And our body then relaxes a little bit. Those vibrations kind of go with. But we get a negative effect when we overeat, right? Because we might feel better from that emotional discomfort, but we now have this even more discomfort because we overate stuffed ourselves. We feel yucky, or we just, you know, again, judge ourselves with self-criticism and we feel worse and we just get what we call in coaching a net negative.
Right. So we, we felt bad. So we overeat and now we feel even worse. Okay. The first reason was emotional discomfort. The second reason why you overeat is literally designed. You have, like what I just mentioned, we, we have desires because of the chemicals that are in our body. So hormones, and when we're in withdrawal of certain foods that have told our body to function a certain way, like for instance, flour and sugar, right.
Is something that if you overeat and a lot of it and. Go to withdrawal and try and cut it out. Then your body just has this deep desire that it has learned, right. It's learned to reward itself and. We just have this desire for these chemicals, the dopamine hit it's, it's like a little addiction, right?
That our body just wants more of it. We have sugar and then we love the dopamine hit. And then we want more of it. We have this, we build this greater desire for these foods. The more that we are eating them. Okay. The third reason why we overeat is literally physical craving. You know, your body just has physical cravings that are a learned habit.
They're a learned habit that you have. It is very similar to when I just spoke about having withdrawal, um, of eating a certain food over again, and then physically our body will crave it. The fourth reason we overeat is hungry. Right. We've got hormones that regulate whether we're full or whether we're hungry.
And when you have been in this cycle, we're going to talk about that in a second. This cycle of overeating, then the hormones and the. Hormones that I'm talking about are leptin and ghrelin, and you can go look those up and find out more about them. But one is made to trigger when we're full and the other one is made to let us know that we're hungry and they get a little bit skewed.
It gets the. Buzzy. I just think of it as being like in a fog when you've been in this cycle of overeating, then those hormones aren't regulated. So again, just to, as an overview, to just kind of understand when we dive into thinking about how much our mind plays into overeating, we realize that it is for one of these four reasons we're eating because of emotional discomfort we're eating because of this design.
That we have trained our brain to have, then there's physical cravings and then there is hunger. So how do we stop overeating? Well, we have to solve for two things in order to stop overeating. We need to solve for over hunger and over desire. And being over hungry is something that you probably understand at the level when I mentioned what it is, it's a physiological part.
It's the, when you've heard about the hunger scale, like when you, when you try and ask yourself, how hung, how are you, how hungry are you or how full are you? And it has to do with hormones and the body composition. And it has to do with how stored fat in our body gets used through glucose. And when you exercise and then when you have more calories than you've burned, what stores in your body, and that's not where I want to concentrate today.
Because we here at the beast. Well, mind bod gas want to focus on your mind, peace of mind. And we want to look at stopping overeating from the psychological part. So that is where we're going to focus on today. The over desire that you have for food that causes you to overeat. So if we want to stop overeating, we want to concentrate and solve on your over desire for.
So in order to do this, you want to understand that we have, um, a certain amount of, I'll just say willpower, right? When we decide we're not going to eat, we're not going to eat any more. We're going to stop, or we're not going to eat the cookies in the car. We are not going to go to eat the ice cream.
That's in the freezer right now. And we can to a certain point use that willpower, what we can resist, but willpower will ultimately run out. You want to be able to learn to be the person who can do the long withstand. Um, solution to overeating, and that is these three steps you want to allow urges and urges are literally a strong, like, thought that you, that comes to your mind.
Compels you to take action to eat. And it is a thought that then creates that desire, that feeling of desire in your body. And we want to learn to have that thought comes, that says, you need to go eat that cake. Now you want to allow that thought there without taking action on it. And it, it sounds very simple and it is, but it isn't.
And again, how to do that is something that, you know, I work with my clients on, in my, uh, personal coaching. However, I just wanted to give you the overview today, this understanding that becoming more aware of these urges, these spots that are having you go to overeat and to eat more than really, that you want to for your body is a skill to learn.
You can learn this. And in allowing urges, we also. Solve for over desire by processing our emotions. So earlier I talked about how one of the, you know, one of the reasons why we overeat is because we can't handle emotional discomfort. We have a low tolerance for these negative emotions that vibrate in our body.
And so we, there is a way to be able to actually feel those emotions instead. Eat and cover them up and avoid them and react to them. And we want to learn how to process our emotions to actually feel stressed, to actually let it pass through you because it's literally coming from a thought you were having.
And if we can slow down enough and pause in order to process the emotions it does pass. And I do have a step by step away to process emotions that we learn inside my coaching program. The last thing about over desire, which is thus solution solving for over desire for you is the solution for you to stop overeating is decisions ahead of time.
Deciding ahead of time with the part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, that is your planning section of your brain, planning ahead, what you're going to eat and then following through on that plan. Helps lessen that over desire, you become someone who's more in control. The more you learn how to do that, as opposed to not deciding ahead of time, we just kind of go at the whim of our urges of what we feel like in our brain is always going to tell us to be seeking pleasure.
And most of the time that can be in the form of a bag of chips or a pie or a whole pizza. Right because our brain is, has this part in it that also wants us to seek pleasure, but that one is the one that can get us into trouble sometimes when we're trying to stop overeating. So just to recap, how to stop overeating and how we need to solve for over desire, which is first understanding that willpower exists.
And that willpower is really having you in resistance. Second is to learn how to allow her. Third is to process your emotions. And fourth is to make decisions ahead of time, because I want to show you how having over desire, perpetuates a cycle for overeating. So you get an urge, you get this desire in your, in your, um, it starts in your mind, right?
And then it moves into your. And then that body has you taking and that vibration in your body, that feeling has you taking action to overeat? So then when you overeat, we become overweight because we are having too many, um, you know, calories, then our body has used up for fuel. And then when we are overweight, we have low self-confidence and low self-esteem about ourselves.
And so that feels. And so then it perpetuates a need for you to have comfort and pleasure. And so that is when you go that desire for pleasure and comfort. Has you going to overeat again? So this is the cycle you have over-designed. That has you overeating, which has you going to be overweight, which gives you low confidence and low self esteem, which perpetuate the need for you to have seek more comfort and pleasure.
So to stop this cycle, here's four things. Number one, you learn how to feel instead of eating you delay the gratification. And you actually feel your feelings. Like I mentioned before, number two, you got to take full responsibility for your emotions. Nothing outside of you causes your emotions. It's your own choice of thought and the, what you're choosing to think over and over again, that's creating your feelings and where you're focusing your brain on.
So want to take responsibility that it's happening because of what you are choosing to do. Number three, we have to plan our food again, use the prefrontal cortex to plan it out, make decisions ahead of time, what we're going to eat. So we're not at the whim of this over desire. And number four, I'd like you to know that you can create positive comforts.
So have a list, a plan for yourself that instead when you don't feel well in your body is telling you. You know, to, to seek comfort, to seek pleasure. What are some other comforts besides food that you can go to? Is that a bath, right? Is it a conversation with a friend? Is it lighting a candle and just.
Closing your eyes and breathing or praying or meditating or something like that. When you have this over desire in this urge and your body's telling you to seek pleasure right now, we're just on automatically, perhaps going to food to give us this release and to give us this relaxation. But you could in your, you know, in your planning for not overeating, decide on what you are going to have.
Alternative positive comforts for yourself. So if you are someone who learns how to feel your feelings, instead of eating, taking responsibility for your emotions, if you plan your food ahead of time and you have negative, I'm sorry, when you have positive comforts there, when you aren't feeling so great, then you're going to create a new.
And this is you, the person who has stopped overeating, you will then feel in control. And from here, you will then manage your overeating. And when we manage overeating or when we don't overeat, we just eat enough. That is fuel that our body needs. Then you will get to your desired body weight when you're at your desired body.
You'll have tremendous self-confidence and self-esteem, and this will perpetually have you feeling more in control because you will be able to see that you're applying skills in, in all the areas of your life. And so you will feel more in control and again, the cycle will then repeat itself. You will feel in control, you will manage your overeating, which will give.
To your, get you to your desired body weight when you're at your desired body weight, you'll have self-confidence and self-esteem. And then when you have self-confidence and self-esteem it perpetually, has you feeling more in control in all areas of your life? Not just eating. So this is what I would just like you to commit to today.
If you're someone who has the desire to stop over. I first want you to talk nice to yourself. I don't want you to beat yourself up. If you overeat. I want you to see that that's not going to help it. Right? I want you to realize that there is a cycle that happens from the desires that are going on in your brain.
And I want you to spend some time appreciating the efforts that you make have made in the past are going to be making them. And really just, if you're talking nice to yourself and you're spending some time appreciating all the efforts that you're going to, let's just say, even for the fact that you are listening to this podcast, I appreciate those efforts, but you should be appreciating that you care enough about your mental, emotional, and then for this episode, your physical health, right.
To listen and apply some of that. How about, we just never allow ourselves to be mean. I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago about best friend and bully, and it was the same kind of thing. And when it comes to food and when we eat, I want you to also commit to not beating yourself up. It doesn't help you in your desire to stop overeating and then no self.
Instead, I want you to work towards compassion and curiosity. When I applied these to my life, when I wanted to lessen my desire for sugar, I came from a place of curiosity because I wanted to know I had tried so much my whole life, um, to stop eating as much sugar at night time after dinner. And I used to believe and have these thoughts that I would call myself a sugar addict.
And when I decided to apply the principles of life coaching and the concepts that I had learned and what my coach was offering, I came from a place of curiosity. Like everything I had tried up until then hadn't worked. So I'm like maybe there is something to this I'm telling you now there absolutely is something to this.
It is. Is missing from today's sort of, you know, diet lose weight, the mindset part isn't there in a lot of ways. And, but it is the root always of the actions that we're taking and the results we're getting in our life. So get curious about what this kind of way. We'll help you to stop overeating and to lose weight.
And we can't, I can't in one podcast go into the detail that I do with my clients on this subject. But if you're interested and, and struggle with overeating, please bring that struggle to a free peace strategy call. And let me help you get some peace over the subject of overeating and. I hope that some of the things that I mentioned today were helpful to you, or at least piqued your curiosity, that you might look into this side of overeating and how to stop, and essentially resulting in weight loss or more at your desired weight range.
If we come from the mind part first, it is everything we must solve for over design. If we are going to stop overeating. Okay. Everyone. That is what I had for you this week. A little bit different, but I know so many moms struggle with it and I wanted to offer you my help here today. All right. I will see you next week.
Have a great one. Peace and love to you all. Thank you for tuning into today's episode of the peaceful mind podcast. Are you ready to take everything? I teach you here and put it to work for your own. To really learn how to have peace of mind, no matter what is happening around you. If so, I'd love to have you as a client, as your coach.
This is where you'll get personal and focus time on your own mind using life coaching tools, concepts, and proven life, transforming wisdom all through a faith-filled lens to learn more about how we can work together. Come on over to Daniellethienel.Com. There you'll see how to sign up for a free coaching consult and learn how to get started until next time.
Peace be with you always.
