Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. And we are talking about people pleasing and weight loss. Being bullied into eating when not hungry. I could have called this partners in crime. You may be familiar with this type of thing. This may end up being a 2-parter because there's a lot here, but I'm going to start with this. The episode came into being when a client who is doing so well, really listening to her hunger, changing the way she thinks about eating and food, had an interaction with a friend of hers.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:32]:
The friend wanted ice cream and was used to suggesting this when she saw her friend, my client. And she did this time when they saw each other. And my client said she wasn't hungry, so she wasn't going to have any, but she would be happy to go with her to the shop while her friend got some. How do you think that went over? The friend was not happy with this scenario. And she said so. Coming up with ways to try to influence her friend, my client, to eat with her. Things like, this might be familiar. It won't be fun if you don't eat ice cream.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:08]:
It won't be the same. I won't go then. Fine. And this was really hard for my client. She instinctively wanted to ease her friend's discomfort and she was used to just going along. Even if she wasn't hungry. But with this work, she's no longer willing to continue to eat food when she's not hungry. That would be a form of overeating.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:33]:
And that doesn't serve her goals, which are weight loss right now. So she had to watch her friend deal with her own discomfort. And she didn't do it particularly well, the friend. It wasn't graceful, shall we say. And my client was dealing with her own discomfort at the behavior of her friend. This was new and she did such a good job of handling it. My client of handling it. She let her friend struggle through her feelings and my client noticed all of it, her own thoughts, her own feelings, her friend's behavior.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:12]:
And then she brought it to me on our call. She could see how easy it was to overeat. In a scenario like that and why she might have in the past. It was to avoid uncomfortable situations. And it's so good to see this sort of thing, to see when and how we overate and why. And it was so clear to see when we only eat to solve hunger. We see all the places we used to use food to solve everything else. This is so Valuable, because then we start to know what we actually have to work on.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:51]:
Once we have the food figured out, we can see everything else that's causing unrelated issues, usually having to do with some sort of feeling. Food and guilt are so intertwined in our culture that we can easily not notice when it pops up. Starting to lose weight by using the hunger scale gives us so many opportunities to find these hidden places. It's one thing to comfort our own guilt with food, right? That's like a classic emotional eating, but we can see that we comfort others by eating food too. There are so many of these scenarios. This is a version of people pleasing that is so valuable to see. Now, I don't think all people pleasing is bad or wrong. I think we can make kind, conscious decisions to please people.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:42]:
If we like our own reasons for it. There, I always think of an elderly relative. Sometimes we just decide we're going to, whatever they say, whatever inappropriate thing they say, if it's not all the time and we feel abused, that's a completely different situation, but we may decide to visit them once every whatever feels comfortable. And then we know they're going to say something inappropriate. And And we're either gonna figure out how to deal with it or just let it roll. And of course it depends on the situation. But my point is we don't always have to confront. We get to decide who and how we're going to interact with people.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:26]:
But when we're trying to lose weight, we definitely wanna be aware of these ones where we're overeating as a people-pleasing technique. What we don't want to do is people-please unconsciously, especially if it has consequences we're not okay with. And in this case, eating when we're not hungry or overeating and therefore not losing weight, which is one of our goals. So this is— it's so valuable to be able to see this. Now someone, a friend who understood all of this, may have been able to handle the situation differently. So if the friend was, oh, self-aware, which again, not everyone is, but let's say the friend was, a graceful way to handle the situation where my client said, oh, I'm not hungry, so I'm not going to have any ice cream, but I'm happy to go with you. A graceful way to handle that would have been to say something like, oh, that makes sense. Maybe later or another time.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:22]:
Or she could have said, great, thanks for coming with me. Or Boy, it's interesting that I'm having feelings about you not wanting to eat ice cream with me. I wonder what that's about. Now that's an ideal situation, but you never know. People can surprise you, especially if you have open conversations about it. Now that my client's aware of this, this is potentially something she could bring up with a friend. I don't know. It may or may not be worth it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:47]:
It depends, but there's an opportunity for that kind of openness. Usually people get upset when one, they're expecting one thing and get another. And that's fair to be disappointed. If her friend always brought up eating ice cream and her friend always ate ice cream with her, it makes sense that she might expect that. And when she changed sort of the rules of the relationship, she was disappointed. Fair. Now it's not fair to lash out or anything, but she certainly can feel disappointed and she could say, oh, I'm disappointed. I'll get over it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:24]:
Just give me a minute. That kind of thing. So they can get upset in this scenario when they're expecting one thing and they get another, or they wanted a partner in crime, thinking of themselves doing something bad. I'm putting that of course in air quotes, but somehow being absolved if someone else is doing it too. So that's the really interesting piece. Right? That's when you get someone who bullies you a little bit. That's why the title is when they're bullying, they're trying to manipulate you to get what they want. But so a quick search on the interwebs helped me get the social psychological mechanisms associated with this phenomenon of the partners in crime.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:07]:
Social justification is one of them. So the examples, I know this isn't really the choice I should make, but If you do it too, I'll feel better about doing it. That's social justification. The other person's participation acts as a social permission slip. And you may be familiar with this. You may have done this with someone, or you've had this done to you. The important part is that the other person's behavior changes your perception of your own behavior. So you may think it's bad, but if the other person does it, then you don't think it's as bad anymore.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:41]:
And it can work through a couple of different mechanisms. Normalization. So if someone else is doing it, maybe it's not so bad. Shared responsibility. I'm not the only one making this choice, so it's okay. Social permission. You're essentially giving me permission to do it. Or reduced guilt.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:02]:
I won't feel like I'm the only one breaking the rule. The reduced guilt really to me is this whole thing. Guilt feels so terrible that we want to mitigate it. We want to ease it and we'll do anything, obviously not anything, but we'll do a lot of things to help ourselves feel less guilty. And there's a related process called social comparison. I'm sure if you've ever scrolled on Instagram, that it's something our brain does. We constantly use other people's behavior as a reference point for judging our own behavior. If someone we see as comparable to us does the same thing, then our own behavior can feel less excessive or wrong.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:46]:
So the thought becomes, if we're both doing it, maybe what I'm doing isn't really that bad. And the last concept that sort of fits in here is diffusion of responsibility. The idea is, the thought is, I feel less guilty because I'm not the only one doing it. It's subtly different than the social comparison. And the responsibility for the questionable behavior is psychologically distributed between the participants, reducing each individual's perceived personal responsibility. I bring this up to show the lengths we will go to ease our guilt. That's often the main thing that's happening when someone asks you to join in an indulgence or something they wouldn't normally do. We can even question whether ice cream is an indulgence, but we'll just say it's something they don't normally do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:37]:
But why feel guilty about food? This is my question. This all stems— all this, this whole interaction stemmed from the fact that the friend was feeling guilty for wanting to eat ice cream. And that only happens if we divide food into good foods or bad foods. And then if we do that and we eat any of the ones that we've deemed bad, we think we should feel guilty about it. We've set ourselves up. If we divide it into good and bad, we do something bad, guilt. That's just the setup. And guilt feels terrible.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:16]:
And it leads to behaviors that try to mitigate that feeling. Remember that we talked about it's guilt is asking for soothing because it just doesn't feel good. And often the soothing of the guilt is with food, especially if that's what we use for comfort. But if we dissolve the judgment of foods, so no good foods or bad foods, just food, then we release our feelings of guilt no matter what we eat. Isn't that a great way of doing it? It solves the problem. And it makes so much sense. It's just so much better to do it that way. Diet mentality has us dividing foods into good and bad.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:58]:
We don't do that because it doesn't work. Because this is just one tiny example of how it doesn't work, of what it leads to. We are grownups and we can decide whatever food we want. Feeling guilty about it is wasted energy and causes Just causes a whole bunch of problems downstream. We get to decide how we want to feel after we eat. So if we are hungry and we eat 12 donuts, we're going to feel one way. But, and we can decide if we want to feel that way, but we don't have to say it's bad food. We could say it's food that doesn't make me feel good when I have 12 of them.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:41]:
That's fair. And then we can decide, oh, I'm not going to do that again, but not because it's bad or someone's telling me I can't have it. I use my body to tell me what foods feel good and what don't. And then that's all I'm saying about the food. When I have 12 donuts, I don't feel good. When I have 1 donut, it's fine, especially if I have eggs and bacon, let's say. And then I don't need a whole donut. I just actually have— it's very sweet and that's all I need.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:08]:
Not because I'm forcing myself to have a quarter of a donut. Because I shouldn't have a whole one. It's because that's what feels good to me. We want that to be the default because then when I'm not having guilt, there's nothing to soothe and I don't have to act weird with friends. We just get to make decisions about the foods we want to eat. Do I want ice cream? Yes or no? I don't need anyone else to eat with me for social justification. I can just make my own decisions and eat my food. And if we make our food decisions based on whether we're hungry, then there really is no guilt.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:46]:
We are hungry, we choose a food, we eat the food, we stop when we're satisfied, not full, done. And as we practice doing this over and over, we don't need to get anyone to eat with us when we want a sweet, let's say. It doesn't matter if they want it or not. We want it. And so we get to have it. It's so much cleaner that way. And what I mean by cleaner is it's free of guilt and the contortions we go through to ease that guilt, to avoid that guilt. Like my client's friend.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:21]:
If we take judgment and guilt out of the equation when deciding what to eat, we won't need to rely on concepts like social justification, social comparison, diffusion of responsibility to feel okay about eating something. It's so many mental gymnastics that we just don't need. It makes our interactions with others so much more straightforward, cleaner, not clouded by judgment or guilt. And when we know this has the potential to happen, this whole scenario, we can be sensitive to it and avoid people pleasing and overeating just to deal with uncomfortable feelings. We get better at recognizing our thoughts and feelings, and we have understanding about others' feelings and behaviors. Getting better at this is a superpower, not only for weight loss, but for relating to humans in any capacity. Removing judgment removes guilt, makes decision-making clearer, makes our thinking clearer, and then our decisions can be simpler. This all helps with weight loss, permanent weight loss, as you can imagine, because this is just what you'll be doing forever.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:41]:
But it also helps with the rest of life too. These skills translate to all parts of your life. If you want help with this, lose weight with me. Just go to my website, stephaniefeinmd.com, hit the lose weight with me button. You can also always find me on Instagram. @StephanieFeinMD. Until next week, I am sending you so much love. Mwah.
