3: Help, I can't stop eating

0:00:00
 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the No Wellness Wankery podcast. I'm your co-host, Lyndi Cohen. I'm a dietician nutritionist known as the New Nutritionist. I promise you it's all awesome content where I call out wellness wankery, call out dieting for what it is, something that makes healthy eating a whole lot harder than it has to be. And today I'm joined by the lovely co-host, Jenna.

0:00:55
 Hello, my name is Jenna D’Apice. I may not be a nutritionist or a dietitian, but probably very similar to Lindy until she got onto the path of intuitive eating, I've been on a diet most of my life. And that's kind of where my knowledge stories and questions for Lindy come from. So we're going to be talking about some maybe myths, things that we all think about in the wellness industry and decide like, is this wellness? Is this wankery? What can we do? How can we stop dieting? And yeah.

0:01:23
 Yeah, because I mean, a lot of wellness advice that's actually wanky, it really flies under the radar and we get all of this healthy eating advice that's really just eating disorder advice in disguise. So it's like, firstly, you have the confusion of the overwhelm of information, and then it's like, well, is this actually messing with my mental health? It's hard to tell, isn't it?

0:01:44
 This is the thing, and you have so much information coming at you at all times, people saying things, people commenting on your food, your body, your clothes, your weight, anything like that. And then maybe this is why it sometimes causes you to overeat in the first place, because you're so fixated on it. And that is what we want to talk about today, help a can't-stop-eating, because it's a problem that so many people have. I know I have suffered from this massively in the past.

0:02:12
 It's something that's so relatable to so many of us. We've all gotten to that point where maybe you come home after a busy day and then you feel like you just can't stop eating.

0:02:22
 Yeah, or maybe you're home alone and you feel like you can't stop eating. There is so many situations where this happens. I feel like a big thing that happened with me is a lot of the time, maybe I wasn't exposed to, quote-unquote, bad foods or cake or junk food or situations like that when they're around me. Even if there were other people there, I feel like I couldn't stop. Or even if I wasn't eating them because there was people around me, I couldn't participate in the conversation as well because I was just fixating on could I have another piece, should I have another piece, I've had enough. So it's like consuming all your thoughts because it's like, oh, I want to eat it and then it's all you're thinking about.

0:02:59
 Yeah, totally. And then the guilt that comes as a result of that is quite overwhelming. So let's say you ate way more than you planned, so you ate the quote-unquote wrong foods, then you lie in bed at night calculating how good or bad you were that day. And maybe if you didn't eat as much as you normally do, you're delighted by it. Or if you did end up eating in front of the TV and feeling a bit out of control, you're like, I am terrible. I need to do a whole lot better tomorrow.

0:03:26
 The biggest thing that you have taught me so far, which I think we should talk about now, is that it's not your willpower. It's not that you have the control to say, no, I'm not having any more. That's actually not the problem, which I think most people think that that is the issue. If I'm just stronger, if I just stick to my diet, then everything will be fine and dandy.

0:03:45
 Yeah, well, this is one of the big problems with dieting. Diets make us feel like we're the one who failed as opposed to realizing that diets failed us. They're the ones who get us stuck obsessing about food so that we come home, we feel emotionally or physically restricted, and we end up eating and feeling quite out of control with food. So it's actually not your willpower that you need to work on. We're going to be talking about a few of the things that you might not be realising are impacting on the situation where you feel like you can't stop eating. So one of them, which is really quite an environmental cue, is eating in front of the TV. Now, when I speak to clients, this is a very common situation. It's something that I used to do a lot of. It's almost like you get to the end of the day, you're tired, you flick on the TV, and what ends up happening is you condition your brain that every time the TV switches onto your favorite shows, this is time to eat. It's very smart because this is when a lot of food companies end up marketing us with these delicious food ads. But basically what happens is if you've ever heard of Pavlov's dogs, a Russian scientist

0:04:53
 Oh yeah, like the thing they talk about with the poker machines?

0:04:57
 I don't know. It's a research experiment that a Russian scientist did where he'd ring a bell and his dogs would start salivating as soon as he rang the bell. Yeah, this is why there's bells on slot machines, poker machines. Oh wow, so it's conditioning. So the exact same thing is what's happening when you're flicking on your TV. You have conditioned your brain that every time the TV goes on, it's time to eat. And we get into this real habit around eating in front of the TV. So just recognizing if this is a pattern for you is can be quite a good one. This is often why a lot of health professionals will say things like try eating in front of the, at the table as opposed to in front of the TV. It's something that I try and do. Now I'm not about food rules and I reckon like if we're creating blanket terms like never eat in front of the TV, like I don't think that's healthy either. So for me, I generally try and eat at the table, especially for like my main meals. And then I might occasionally eat while I'm watching TV, but I'm aware of it while it's happening. So a question for you, when you feel like you can't stop snacking, is it often happening in front of the TV? Do you think there's some conditioning that's happened for your brain where you feel like, ah, it's eating time?

0:06:10
 I feel like I don't probably suffer from that as much because I actually don't watch that much TV. I feel like I have a massive issue with just procrastination in my entire life, so I feel like I have no time for TV because I'm procrastinating all the other tasks that I should be doing. I'm still watching Game of Thrones, that's how far back I am. I think I'm like at season four. But in terms of my mom definitely suffers from this, and she like gets to the point where she'll allow herself to have a certain amount of snacks, because she knows that she wants so many as you sit there. TV is one of those things where you're not even really paying attention to eating.

0:06:46
 It's like when you go to the movies and you've got popcorn, which I'm a big fan of getting popcorn by the way, and you eat it at a really rapid pace where like you're still chewing the popcorn and you already got more popcorn in your head ready to come in for landing as soon as you swallow. It really can be quite mindless eating. You're like, well did I just eat all of

0:07:06
 that? But would you maybe recommend like how if someone finds that they're in that pattern, do they pause the TV, go make a snack and then resume the TV

0:07:16
 after they finish eating? Yeah, I mean in an ideal world, I mean I'm going to be a realist and say that doesn't always happen. One of the things you really want to be doing is checking in with your hunger. Do you notice you come home after a busy day and that's when you're over snacking happens? There's a chance that you're going to be quite hungry by the time you get home. What we often do as dieters is we wake up in the controlled snack in the afternoon, and then we get to the afternoon. Now we are tired and we're hungry because we've eaten not nearly enough during the day. And so we get home and there is physical hunger at play. So one of the things you've got to note is, am I physically hungry? Is that one of the reasons that this is happening, especially if you feel like you're over snacking in the afternoons and it feels like quite out of control, this is a very common one, it's under eating during the day. So one thing to do, make sure you're eating enough for lunch and make sure that you're eating enough for that afternoon snack. I've seen all these articles that are like, here's the perfect 100-calorie snack to eat in the afternoon, that's not going to touch the side.

0:08:25
 I was going to say my idea is 100 calories for all snacks, dessert, morning tea, afternoon

0:08:31
 tea. Such nonsense. I mean, if you find like you get into this habit where you have a handful of nuts and then you end up having like 10 handfuls of nuts and then you end up just continuing to eat from there, that's a clue that you didn't eat enough to start with because you had this idea of how much you were allowed to eat and your hunger was like, no, we need more than that. And so you think about your hunger, it's this primal reaction to try and get your body to eat enough energy. So when you're trying to under eat, it's going to come back very powerfully and say, no, we need more, especially when you're tired by the end of the day. So we need to break this idea of the 100-calorie snack. In fact, I don't want you counting calories at all. Some snacks that are a little bit more substantial, of course, this is all relative, you might have a piece of toast, some whole grain toast maybe with some avocado on it or maybe some peanut butter and honey on it. And in your diet or brain, you're like, but surely I should be eating carrots and hummus. And no, you need to pick something that's going to be satisfying enough for you. Maybe it's a sandwich. Maybe that's what you need. So if you ate a sandwich, yes, it's going to be more calories than 100 calorie serving size, but if it's going to prevent you from doing this over snacking thing where you feel completely out of control of food, it's well worth it. It's a great choice. So making sure that you aren't too hungry is a really big thing. Giving yourself permission to eat enough food that your body is asking for is going to be a huge one as well.

0:10:01
 Yeah, I actually, again, like you, probably spend a little bit too much time on TikTok. And I saw this TikTok about sometimes you do feel very out of control if like this pizza or that type of food is on offer. And I wonder if you agree with this. This lady was saying like, put more pieces than you would probably want to eat on your plate to show you that you can have as much as you want. You can order another pizza if you really feel like it because I always always feel like I'd put like two pieces on my plate and like salad or something to bump it up because I could really only have two pieces but who's really gonna have two pieces and then you already feel like you got to go back for more and then you feel like you've already failed because you've gone back for seconds.

0:10:41
 This is my gripe with portion control advice. You know when we're told this is the allowed portion size and then we finish that portion size and we're like, that wasn't enough. It makes us feel like our body is wrong and that the silly packaging that tells us how much you're allowed to eat is right. Now let's just think about that. So if we look at something like a chocolate bar, that's like, I'd say like a normal size chocolate bar, it's gonna be like, this contains 2.5 serves. That's nonsense. You know, the manufacturers know, people who are sitting down to eat that, are not cutting it up into two and a half different pieces. That's ridiculous. So you have to understand that food manufacturers, when they're saying how many portion sizes are in a certain food, they're really trying to juggle that nutrition information panel to tick certain boxes. I know this because I worked at a food company for a few years and I know how the game works. They've got boxes to tick, they've got claims they're trying to make and if they just reduce that portion size down enough, the serving size, then they're going to be able to say all the things that they want to say. So the back of pack serving size is not something that you should be taking on board when it comes to fueling your body. Your hunger is going to really dictate that for you. Hunger, okay. And so in terms of how do you start with that hunger? Okay, so I mean I talk about this quite often, it's the hunger scale, so checking with your hunger. If you want, you can go to my website. I've got a free download where you can get the hunger scale. So basically what we're doing is before we're eating, we're asking the question, how hungry am I? If you think about it, your appetite is your inbuilt weight and energy management system. That's its sole purpose, is to help you eat the right amount of food for your body. They've done some really interesting research as well where they found that if you simply tune into your hunger, you're able to eat within 50 calories of whatever you expended that day, which is quite remarkable. Now if I was to gamble and say, hey, this is how many calories I think you need to eat in a day, I'd be using a very outdated algorithm, which is hugely inaccurate, and it wouldn't change day to day. Now if you are in a really hot weather, cold weather, you're exercising a lot, you're barely moving that day, you're stressed, you've got your period, a whole bunch of factors are going to influence how many calories you burn each day. Now a silly algorithm is not going to be able to keep up with that. So we need to ditch this idea of how much you're allowed to eat and start tuning into your hunger, which is naturally going to change as you burn more or less energy each and every day. Let's say you come home in the afternoon, you go, how hungry am I? Am I ravenous? Am I peckish? And the hunger scale is a really useful tool where you can start to rate your hunger and try to understand it a little bit more.

0:13:23
 Say you finish the day of work and you're about to make the commute home, would you assess when you get home how hungry am I? Maybe before you leave, after your last meal, how hungry am I getting? Am I going to be really hungry by the time I get home if I leave and don't eat now?

0:13:39
 Yeah, absolutely, because you want to be checking in with that hunger before you're reaching a point of ravenous, which is what I think a lot of people do. They get home, they're ravenous, like, you're too hungry. Your body's like, I'm going to eat as much food as possible. That's its job. That's what the body's trying to do. So before you, let's say you're at workplace, you're at your school, uni, you might want to have something called a pre-commute snack. So if you notice that your hunger is building, you're like, okay, cool, I'll eat something now, something substantial, something decent, so that by the time I've commuted home, I'm not arriving home ravenous. Or maybe you're someone who's finding that on that commute home, that's when you're going and buying foods and feeling like you're making choices that feel quite out of control for you at that point. Just note, that means you have reached a point where you are potentially feeling overly hungry. Now, managing hunger is a really big one. Okay, so that's our physical hunger. I think there's another thing to consider here is emotional restriction. Now, if I physically give myself permission to eat something, like let's say I have the piece of toast with the avocado, I'm physically eating it. But if I'm the entire time while I'm eating it telling myself, I shouldn't be eating, this is bad, I'm going to need to make up for this, or whatever it is, maybe I'm eating chocolate and I'm having these thoughts. If you have these emotional restriction thoughts, you're not truly giving yourself permission to eat it. And what this does is it creates a sense of not having access to eat the foods that you want to eat. You might have gone, you lied bed at night going, well, I ate all these foods, I did it. But if your brain is still thinking that these foods aren't allowed, then they're probably going to be the very foods that you end up craving. Have a think about the foods when you feel like you're out of control snacking. What are you snacking on? Most often it's not going to be vegetables and fruit. It's probably going to be the very foods that you tell yourself you shouldn't be eating. So what we need to do is when we do sit down to eat these foods, let yourself eat them and really enjoy them. Don't put the allowed portion size on your plate and say, I can only eat this much. You know, one of the strategies that people in my community talk about is they'll put like chocolate for example, the whole chocolate bar in front of them and then they simply become curious, how much do I need to eat right now to feel emotionally satisfied? And sometimes it might be a few squares, sometimes it might be a few rows, sometimes it might be more or less, but just becoming curious about how much do you actually need to feel satisfied and reminding yourself, any time you want to eat this again, you can go eat it. It's allowed. It's not suddenly going to be off limits. So that means that you can't lie in bed at night telling yourself that tomorrow you're going to be good because you were never bad. No food or bad and you're totally fine. You can't fall off the bandwagon if there's no bandwagon to fall off. Amen, sister. What we haven't talked about are the patterns. Okay, so let's say you are overeating. One of the things I think you should be doing, try to identify any patterns to this eating, this when you feel like a little bit out of control. Very often we're going to find patterns. So let's say it's a weekday and you find I often get home and that's when all the snacking happens, or it's late at night, it's after dinner and this is when I'm snacking. So we're going to be finding those patterns, right? That's a really important thing. And if there is a pattern, that's great. It means that there are some things that we can do to try and shift that.

0:16:51
 And do you think there could be like different reasons behind why it would happen at different points? Like I feel like maybe from what you're saying, if it's in the afternoon, you're not eating enough, if it's at nighttime, maybe it's just a habit, as opposed to you could have eaten the perfect amount all day, but now

0:17:07
 you're stuck in a habit of eating. Yeah, there is also that. There's the conditioning from the TV, if you're watching TV, and there's also the fact that by the end of the day you're tired but you're also maybe had an emotional day. Maybe you were stressed that day and food is a way that we numb out hard emotions, things that we feel like are too tricky to deal with and there's something that feels really good about snacking in the moment. So I feel like that's just a really important thing to recognize. You might be in this like push-pull moment right now, you're like I hate that I snack, but actually it's also something that I do that I really look forward to doing. Now there are people who are like, oh, well, you should get a different hobby to do so you preoccupy yourself. I don't know. I mean, I've heard that that has worked for a few people, but I can't help but think that we're just trying to distract ourselves with something else.

0:17:55
 If you have a food addiction, but if you have a problem with food, it's the one thing you can't just say, I'm not having it. You have to work out how to manage having food.

0:18:06
 Yeah. So step one is like, why? Why is this happening? Am I stressed? Do I feel like food makes me feel less sad after something that's hard that's happening? Because we'll often find when we're going through a particularly tough time in our lives, some people stop eating and other people end up eating a lot more. I am the latter. So it's always like a cue for me to go, something's not right. So rather than seeing this as this really awful thing that you can't control and you have to try and double down on, maybe take it as a cue from your body. Your body's trying to tell you something. Something's out of alignment, something's too hard, something's scary, something is making you feel like this is scary. So we need to make a change and listen to your body.

0:18:49
 When I would overeat most of the time, and still probably right to this day, if I'm alone, and if there's... But sometimes it's hard because they might not be really the foods that I want that are around, but I probably wouldn't go and buy them because then I would feel like, oh, I shouldn't be going to buy that food. So it's kind of just like eating whatever's around to like feel that because maybe I didn't feel like I could eat it when other people were there.

0:19:14
 Yeah, I mean that's definitely something that happens and I think a lot of people are going to be able to relate to this idea of waiting until no one else is around to eat foods. Now, the reason that you're probably happy to eat any food as opposed to waiting for the foods you really want is this general sense of feeling like food isn't truly allowed. Now, when we have thoughts like, oh, I need to lose weight, I feel fat, these implicitly give us that message that food is limited and it needs to kind of be reduced so that when we finally get access to food, we feel like anything will do. We're not simply seeking a specific food, we just need calories, we need energy. And it comes from the body's mistrust that food is not always going to be available to us. Maybe we've been a dieter in the past and so our body's like, you know what, you've starved me before. I don't actually trust that you're always consistently going to feed me the way I need to be fed. Plus, you have these scary thoughts about the fact that you need to eat less and that's making me feel quite nervous and now that we've finally got access to food, I'm gonna eat. And it's interesting how when someone comes home, that can kind of end that overeating period. And I think it's also linked back to this idea of feeling judged around food, particularly if your parents or your family or friends have commented on how much you're eating. Are you really going to have seconds? Haven't you had enough to eat? Should you really be eating that? I think all these kinds of things can play into this in this relationship with food.

0:20:44
 Yeah, I feel like it's like if you say you wanted to eat something and someone's like, but we just ate, or we just had breakfast, or we just had lunch. It's like, well, then you feel like, oh, I shouldn't be thinking that. And you're like, oh, I thought the wrong thing.

0:20:55
 Sorry, never again. If this is happening for you and you feel like there's a degree of secret eating that's happening, one of the things we want to do is really helping ourselves feel like food is normalised. There is clearly a moment where you feel like, I shouldn't be eating this. This is what happens with the secret eating. So when you do have your partner around, your family, friends, anyone, we want to try and create active moments where we're eating the foods that we feel are forbidden and simply just knowing that we're allowed to eat as much as we need. Sometimes you might be eating dinner with a partner or something and you're like, oh, I should stop eating there, especially as we've been told our whole lives that women are meant to eat less than men. So we're like, oh, well, they'll think I'm a pig if I'm eating all this food. And so just become aware of any of those that are thinking around needing to limit your portion sizes or what you're eating or when you're eating in front of someone else. And then, like what I did when I normalized food, because I used to be a major secret eater, is I'd notice the foods that I'd binge on, and then I'd go out and find public opportunities to eat them to help me remind me that these foods were truly allowed, so I'd go get ice cream with a friend. And this is a huge difference from when I'd go out for dinner and everyone else would eat dessert and I'd be like, no, I can't eat dessert. I'm trying to be good. I would seek out the opportunities. I'd go to a cafe and I'd have banana bread and I'd order Nutella on it and I'd really enjoy it. I wouldn't tell myself, oh, you shouldn't be doing this. I would allow myself to really enjoy that process. And that can be a really helpful thing when we're learning that food is allowed, that things don't have to be restricted. You might find this helps with secret eating.

0:22:34
 If you have that diet brain, you're so conditioned to just like looking at the menu, at the things you've predetermined that you're allowed to eat.

0:22:42
 Oh yeah, that's a thing, right? Isn't it?

0:22:44
 That is a huge thing.

0:22:45
 So if you're someone who's doing that and you feel compelled to have to go to the restaurant menu and check it all out. Just let that simmer in your brain and go, that's perhaps a sign that I don't have the most healthy relationship with food just yet.

0:22:59
 I think that's the biggest part about all of this thing of getting a better relation with food, just noticing what you're doing would be the first step. Because a lot of times, like, how am I going to fix this? But it doesn't really matter that if you can have a gauge of what is happening.

0:23:13
 For sure. So that's everything. So if diets tell you what you should be eating and they're obsessed with how much you're eating, this entire process is quite obsessed with the thoughts behind the food. So how do you feel about food before, during, and after eating is way more interesting to me than what and how much you ate. So instead of lying in bed at night being like, I can't believe I ate that, or this I ate way too much here, you might want to start becoming curious about those thoughts. So a very useful experiment or exercise you can do is for an entire day or even just one meal, write down every thought you have around food before, during and after. Such as I'm hungry now but I feel like I shouldn't eat or there's no time to eat, I can't believe I ate that, I ate way more than I think I should have. Noting down everything. What we're gonna find is a whole bunch of patterns. Now all these thoughts are probably making it so much harder for you to eat healthily, to feel relaxed around food, because if you look at the notes you've got written, you're going to notice, oh, this is a confusing little land to live in, and this is my relationship with food right now.

0:24:17
 And probably why you end up saying things like, help, I can't swallow.

0:24:22
 Exactly. Now that's the full episode for today, but as usual, we like to end our podcast by talking about someone who's not doing something that's wanky in the wellness world, people who are doing good things and today I want to share one. During the pandemic what happened is a lot of us felt really isolated and disconnected from one another and there was a whole bunch of people who needed help and needed people to do simple tasks like grabbing them groceries when they were in isolation or walking their dog or someone to talk to because our mental health really suffered, I know mine did. So there's a new online platform called Crisis Heroes. I've plugged them before on my Insta channel because I think they're pretty awesome. And what they do is they're a hub for connecting people in your local community who are either in need of help and you can volunteer to say, I'm happy to provide help. So it could be anything from grabbing someone a cup of coffee or taking the dog for a walk or going for a walk with them so they've got someone to chat to. There's a whole bunch of ways, suggested ways they have indicated that you can help someone in your local community or if you're having a hard time, just knowing that you can jump on and there's a whole bunch of people who live near to you who are really keen to help. Now it started in Australia but it's actually spreading around the world now. So you can go to CrisisHeroes.com and you can sign up however you need or want to receive help right now and it's just pretty heartwarming to see some of the awesome things that's happening. I got involved with Crisis Heroes and someone in my local community, they were looking for groceries, so I went to the grocery shops. I bought a whole bunch of food staples and shelf staple items, and then I dropped it off. The whole process took me an hour. It was such a nice way that I can be involved in my community and do an act of charity and an act of kindness. It wasn't clumsy and cumbersome. It was such an easy thing, a feel-good thing to do. So if you're looking for a way to do more random acts of kindness, check out Crisis Heroes. I reckon they're awesome.

0:26:30
 Yes, we love that. That is good wellness for your mental health and helping everyone around you.

0:26:36
 And guys, if you ever want to hear a specific topic on the podcast, please reach out. You can DM, shoot me an email, hello at lizziecohen.com. I always love hearing from you and we always kind of keen to hear any feedback as well. So let us know how we're going.

0:26:52
 Please be gentle.

0:26:53
 All right, guys, thanks so much. And that's another episode for today. Do you feel like you know what you should be eating, but like you feel completely out of control with food? You're either eating perfectly or you're face planting into the fridge. Well, if you've got binge eating or you're struggling with emotional eating, I can help. Check out my program. Keep it real. I've got lots I can teach you and hey, you don't have to be a binge eater for the rest of your life. You can get 20% off Keep It Real when you use the code podcast when you check out via the website. And because I don't want this to be just another failed attempt for you, I'm offering a 30-day money back guarantee because you know what? You've just got to give these things a go, no risk. You've just got to give these things a go, no risk. Give it a try.