Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous. Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. And today we are talking about emotional eating. I feel like we talk about that often, but not this specifically in a little while. So that's what we're doing. And emotional eating, you may remember if you've been here a little while, is overeating. Overeating is emotional eating.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:25]:
Any eating when we're not hungry is overeating. And so if we're eating emotionally, not because of physical hunger, but because of a different reason, then we're overeating. Any overeating will lead to weight we don't want. It will be hard to lose weight because we're eating more than our body needs. Emotional eating is just a habit, and a habit can be changed. We can train our brains away from it. We can rewire our brains. And that's what we do around here.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:57]:
We find the places where the wires got crossed a little bit, and then we work to change it to something that serves us. And we can learn how to comfort ourselves without food. Because we all need comfort. We learn to comfort ourselves as children, thank goodness. Often that was with food. It was what our parents knew. And they offered us food. If we were crying, they would— often that's how it would happen.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:32]:
It was literally shown to us to eat our feelings. And it's because that's what they knew, right? They just pass it down. And I saw the whole inspiration for this episode was I was spending time with my cousin, my 4-year-old cousin. She's like a niece, but technically a cousin anyway. So cute. So she's 4. We went to a birthday party. It was a birthday party for her, a good friend of hers.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:03]:
And I was watching her navigate the party. Now, this is why I love spending time with kids because they're, transparent. They're just— they don't know how. They haven't been completely socialized yet, so they don't know how to hide things or subvert them. So she has a lovey, and that's something that brings her comfort, like especially when she's going to bed. Often that's what we'll see is ways that kids learn to comfort themselves as they're going to sleep or that sort of thing. And she doesn't typically have it outside of the bedroom, but she had it and she ended up needing it. And her amazing mother, who I adore, who's also a cousin, gave it to her when she was asking for it, which worked out well.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:52]:
I was able to see this whole thing. So let me show you, let me tell you what happened. So she was at this birthday party and it just made me think of how it's amazing that we navigate parties and social situations too. There's like landmines there. So the first thing is she gets to the party and the birthday girl comes running over and my cousin runs to give her a hug and they do a hug and then my cousin says, are you my best friend? And they are very good friends. They spend a lot of time together. But then another girl came and she never answered the question. So it was just left hanging there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:32]:
So that was One sort of rejection. My cousin goes running off with them and all the rest of that stuff. Then I saw later my cousin like wanting to join a group and they ran away. Now it wasn't clear. It didn't seem like they were running away from her. It just seemed like they were in the middle of a thing and she just joined them. It was amazing. But there was a moment where it was like, wasn't clear.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:57]:
Another moment was You know, she wasn't the birthday girl, my cousin. So the birthday girl gets all this attention. That can be really challenging. The birthday girl goes first. The birthday girl gets the singing and all that stuff. All that can be really hard on a 4-year-old heart. And when they were like picking out colors of wands, she didn't get the color that she wanted because it was taken by other kids. Now, I have to tell you, she handled this amazing.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:27]:
But at one point she wanted a turn, but she didn't get a turn. And so she went and got the lovey and she held it close to her. And I was thinking, oh my God, that's brilliant. There were so many times when it potentially could have been painful, like a rejection, a sting. Now I have to tell you, my cousin was amazing. She was having the best time. She was not like over in a corner moping, but I was just seeing this What it's like to be a kid on a playground. It's not easy emotionally.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:01]:
And then I was thinking of us as adults at parties. Is our friend distracted and not paying attention to us? We're not the center of attention. Maybe there's so many things that can be hard. It's a boring conversation. You wanted to meet this person and they were rude. There's so many things. I don't know a lot of these people. I'm not sure what to do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:20]:
There are so many. And it was just, clearer watching the 4-year-olds, but really it happens. And often we'll find ourselves at parties eating at the table. But I'm telling you, it's likely because of these— they're not even micro moments, but we can call them that— that are difficult to navigate. They're normal. We can talk about them, but they happen and we can feel them. So when my cousin took the moment with her lovey, she was regulating her nervous system so that she could go back out and try again with her friends. And she did this seamlessly.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:03]:
Like it wasn't— clearly it wasn't a thought-out thing. She, as far as I know, doesn't know these principles, but it was a beautiful thing that she was able to comfort herself. And she did not comfort herself with food. That is not something that she has set up in her brain yet, or I'm thinking maybe never, because her mom has a different way, has more skills than the generations before. They're aware of talking about feelings and that sort of thing. As we grow up, hopefully we gain some skills in dealing with the emotions. Ideally, we process the feelings as they come. If we're ever taught how to process feelings, which a lot of times we're not.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:48]:
So I'm actually gonna take the opportunity right this minute to remind you of how to process a feeling. This is one way to do it. It is to feel it in your body. Where is it? So be with yourself in the moment that you're having an uncomfortable emotion. I actually suppose you could do this with a fabulous emotion too, but sometimes those are easier to feel. And the reason they're easier to feel is we, They feel good, so we allow them to be there. The uncomfortable ones, we often stop or dampen down or try to avoid. But if we get in the habit of being able to process them, that means we locate in our body, we narrate to ourselves in our brain how it feels.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:32]:
Is it hot, cold? Is it sharp? Is it dull? Is it round? Is it— what color is it? All that sort of stuff. We're narrating the the physical sensations in our body. As we do that, it moves through us. It does not take long. It's a matter of seconds, literally 30 seconds, 60 seconds, somewhere around there. And then it's gone. And then what we're left with, once we've processed, once we're not distracted by trying to avoid it or looking for ways to to deal with it. And really what that means is not deal with it, right? We're looking for ways to avoid it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:11]:
Once we process it in this way that I mentioned, then we're left with the situation. So if the situation was, I say, are you my best friend? And you turn your back on me now, and I feel rejected and I process that. Now I can deal with the situation in front of me. Oh, Maybe she didn't hear me, or maybe we have a bigger problem that I didn't know about. Both good to know. Now I can be in my life and deal with the reality of my life rather than avoiding the uncomfortable feeling that I had and really then not letting myself even understand what's going on. Because if I'm just looking to get rid of it and find some cake or cookies or alcohol, something to distract me. And food is such a good distraction.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:07]:
That's why we do it. It works in a couple different ways. The crunch of crunchy things is actually distracting. The sweet is actually pleasure, especially when we're not feeling pleasure in some sort of uncomfortable emotion. And then we get to have that different feeling. It's literally a distraction. It's going down a different road. Okay, I am in control of how I feel because I am crunching on this thing or I'm having something sweet.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:36]:
But then the predictable guilt or physical discomfort comes in and we're on a completely different road from the original rejection at the party. Now we're beating ourselves up and now we're thinking we're terrible. We're on a just a totally different uncomfortable road and we've successfully distracted ourselves from the original inciting incident. That's what I mean by it's effective. But of course, the problem is it gets us other problems that we don't want. First of all, we don't get to deal with the original problem. And second, we have weight on us that we don't want. And of course, not only do we want to avoid that whole scenario, but the reason we don't want to push down the uncomfortable feeling is that it stays with us until we do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:24]:
Deal with it. So now we have unprocessed emotions with us, and that is sustained discomfort rather than just dealing with the discomfort at the time. So my little cousin regulated herself, and I'd say she was processing it to the best that she could. Again, she's 4, and for her age, she was dealing with it. Now, I don't know what she was saying to herself. I don't know if she was saying some version of, it's okay, She's a friend, it's her birthday. I don't even know if that, or she could have just been saying, I'm okay. Just reminding herself she's loved, she's okay.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:03]:
Maybe not in words, but just in the having the little blanket with her that she feels comforted by that. And then once she regulated her system, she was ready to attempt the connection again. And sometimes it worked great. And sometimes it was like a little awkward and sometimes it didn't work and she just tried again. She, it was really amazing. All the kids of course were doing that. I was just more connected to my cousin, but parties are quite, like I was saying, they have landmines in them. And as adults, we can feel these things too.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:42]:
And it's just good to be able to see Now she's growing up in an age when discussing feelings is more common because we've learned over the years that stuffing down and avoiding feelings doesn't work particularly well. So part of what we're doing here is teaching ourselves how to deal with emotions without food. And we're doing that not only so that we can not overeat anymore and be at a weight we're happy with forever because we're not— we won't have to deal with that issue anymore. But I want us to do it so that we can feel better. So part of what we're doing now here is teaching ourselves to comfort in a different way, not with food, not only so that we can feel better, in general, but also so that we can pass on a more productive coping mechanism to our kids. Because if we are emotional eaters and we don't change it or notice it or do anything about it, then we will pass it down to our kids. And we know that there's some suffering there when we're emotional eaters. And so it's such a nice thing not only for us to be able to change it for ourselves, but then to change generations going forward.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:07]:
It's a really big deal to deal with emotional eating this way, to change emotional eating this way. We need comfort. We always will, because there will be things that happen that are uncomfortable. So we're not going to take away comfort, but we're going to deal with it in a different way. As a bridge, as we're learning how to process our feelings, there is something, a technique I call comfort list, and it's like a bridge step. And that, if you want details for that, is in episode 10. And it's a way to have a behavior like a lovey that you can swap out for the eating. As we are learning to deal with feelings more directly, processing them, because as we learn to identify and process them, what we're doing is we're knowing, we're learning, we're labeling the feelings we're actually feeling.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:18]:
And when we're labeling them and knowing them and understanding them and being able to process them, then we know what they are. Am I bored? Am I— was I rejected? What am I sad? Am I just uncomfortable? Am I feeling awkward? When we know what the feeling is, instead of just distracting ourselves from an uncomfortable emotion, we're willing to understand what it is, find out what it is, then we can address it. We can see the reality of our lives and our situation. So when we identify the feelings we're feeling, we see patterns. We notice things in our lives that are actually going on. If we distract ourselves with food, we could be bored forever and not even realize it. But if we're not going to eat our feelings, then we're stuck with the actual reality of our life. And then when we notice, oh my gosh, I'm bored in the evenings.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:17]:
That is such good information because then we can decide to do something different in the evenings. We'll take a class, we'll play cards. There's a million answers to that question and it's based on your desires. So if we take emotional eating out, you see what your emotions are, and then you deal with them more directly, your life is amazing. Because then let's say it was bored, you're doing something you love now. So your time is fun, not just full of eating things. And I will tell you, I have seen this over and over again, that when we see our feelings, identify them, and evaluate— we evaluate our life then. And people change jobs when they see what they're feeling around their job.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:13]:
They change doctors' approaches. They change homes. They change friends. They change the things that need to be changed, but we couldn't see it before if we were masking our true feelings with food. Eating for comfort robs you of knowing what your life really is like. And it makes your body deal with more fuel than it needs. So your body's stuck dealing with something that it didn't ask for. We're asking the body to deal with something that we were unwilling to.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:50]:
And when you think about it like that, it makes sense to develop the skill of learning from our feelings. We give our body a break when we figure out how to comfort ourselves with something other than food. So to wrap it up, emotional eating is overeating. That's any eating when we're not hungry. To reduce this, we want to start recognizing when we're having an uncomfortable feeling and need comfort. We want to practice processing the feeling And also regulating our nervous system. And that's where a comfort list comes in or comforting or figuring out a way to comfort ourselves without food, something that's comforting. And/or we can address the root cause of the feeling directly, right? If you're bored, find something to do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:44]:
If you're sad, you could cry or get a hug. If you're anxious, you can, take a walk. We can more directly deal with the feeling when we know what it is. Practicing this means permanent weight loss. Do you see how, see how that would be? Like if you have this skill, you have it. You will just always do that and you won't need to turn to food to distract you from an uncomfortable feeling because you know how to handle feelings. And feelings don't require food, only hunger does. When you do this, when you deal with your feelings, you have a more aligned life, a life you respond to and take responsibility for creating.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:29]:
And when that happens, the sky's the limit. Your life is amazing because it's tailored to you. It's based on the things that you actually want, love, need, desire. That's the best way of living life. And that's what I want for you— everything you ever wanted. If you have any questions about any of this, I am always happy to answer them. All you have to do is DM me on Instagram @stephaniefeinMD. That's F-E-I-N.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:58]:
I'm also on LinkedIn @stephaniefeinmd. The website is stephaniefeinmd.com, and there's a Contact Me button. We can go right there. And if you want to lose weight with me, there's a button for that too. I am sending you so much love as always. Mwah!
