The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast

BEE #134: 5 Steps to Stop Overeating

• Kristin Jones

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Discover 5 Simple Steps to Stop Overeating and Embrace a Healthier Relationship with Food

Are you constantly battling with overeating and restrictive diets? Do you find yourself feeling guilty after indulging in your favorite foods? It's time to break free from the cycle of deprivation and binge-eating.

In this episode of the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast, you'll learn how to:

  • Eat to Satisfy, Not Deprive: Discover the power of enjoying the foods you love without guilt or shame.
  • Harness the Law of Reversed Effort: Learn how trying too hard to control your eating can actually backfire.
  • Cultivate a Mindful Eating Practice: Implement three simple strategies to eat with intention and avoid mindless munching.
  • Stay Hydrated, Stay Satisfied: Understand the crucial role of hydration in managing hunger and cravings.

By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with the tools and mindset to nourish your body and soul without the stress and anxiety of restrictive diets. It's time to reclaim your health and happiness, one bite at a time.

Connect with me online:

1. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breakthroughemotionaleating/
2. You Tube channel, Kristin Jones Coaching: https://www.youtube.com/@KristinJonesCoaching44
3 . Website: https://www.kristinjonescoaching.com

If you want to learn more about a non-diet approach to weight loss, get my FREE Stop Dieting Guide. Go to https://go.kristinjonescoaching.com/stop-dieting-guide

Needing more specific and direct support for your emotional eating and overeating? Check out my online course, Stop Dieting Start Feeling, and my personalized coaching program, Breakthrough To You.

If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to leave a review on the platform you used to listen and share it with your friends on your Instagram stories. Also, be sure to follow me on Instagram @breakthroughemotionaleating, and don't hesitate to slide into my DMs to share your thoughts and feedback. Your support means the world!

Speaker 1:

Hi and welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. My name is Kristen Jones and thank you so much for joining me this week. Now, one of the things that is most difficult for anyone I think it's difficult for anyone to do who has any type of issues with food, who has any type of concern about their weight or anybody who thinks a lot about food is it's it's hard to know when to stop eating, and I preach about eating dissatisfied, and eating dissatisfied is is an acquired skill. It's something that needs a lot of practice. But and because eating dissatisfied leads you to not overeat, over the course of two or three weeks, you don't overeat and you only eat to satisfied You're going to lose weight because you're eating the right amount of food for your body, either to maintain your weight or to lose your weight, and so eating to dissatisfied is one of those things that's really important. Eating to dissatisfied is one of those things that's really important.

Speaker 1:

But there are the whole idea of overeating and how do we put ourselves in a position to not overeat goes beyond what we do and how. What happens in the moment when we are sitting down eating our food. It a lot of it has to do with what happens in those moments, but it also a lot of influences on how much we eat happen way before we ever sit down to eat, and there are things that we can start doing immediately to start to curb that desire to eat more food than we need, because really, the whole key to losing weight whether you're an emotion leader or not is to not overeat, is to eat enough or just a little less than enough food over the course of a sustained period of time, and you're going to naturally lose weight. It's not going to be dramatic, it's not going to be something that you've done and strictly deprived yourself or restricted yourself. It's just going to be something that happens more naturally. So the entire process really does have to be looked at as a basic like how do I not overeat, how do I come down to, how do I sit in a meal and be presented with food, and how do I eat so I don't eat too much? That is that's really the key. That's that's the part to figure out, and so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're gonna talk about how do we do that.

Speaker 1:

So, um, there are five steps, five steps to um steps, five steps to um, to reducing or eating more slowly so you are able to not even more so, excuse me eating. Eating. Five steps to eat, to stop overeating, and there are five things that you can do and you can do them. Start doing them immediately, absolutely Immediately. And so we're going to go through what those five steps are and we're going to make sure, or I'm going to make sure, that you know that these are all things.

Speaker 1:

There's nothing that is crazy, different, extraordinary. It's really kind of common sense, but we just have to be reminded of it. So if you, if I say something that you're like, oh my gosh, I do that all the time, oh my gosh, that's terrible. Nothing's terrible. All you need to do is just make the commitment to yourself that you're going to start doing things just a little bit different, just a little bit different, not dramatically different, just a little bit different. So let's get to our five steps to stop overeating.

Speaker 1:

And the first one is one of my all-time favorites and it's one thing that I will always, always preach as long as I'm a coach, as long as I'm helping people lose weight, and that is you have to eat what you love, what you enjoy, the foods that you like, not the foods that are diet foods, not the foods that you tell yourself that you like merely because you just want to lose weight and the only reason you eat them is because you're eating them to lose weight. That is not going to work. It's not going to work and it kind of connects it was one of the one of the reasons last week with our, our episode on the three things you need to do in order to sustain your weight loss, and this is one of them. You have to eat what you love and you have to lose weight by eating what you love. So part of not overeating is eating what you love and being honest with yourself about what those foods are and allowing yourself Because when we don't do that, we set up an automatic restricted mindset and a deprivation mentality and that just causes us to want to do a lot of rebounding, a lot of secret eating. We want to um.

Speaker 1:

Anytime we're exposed to food, we want to eat as much as we can. That's where the overeating comes, because maybe we're presented with foods that we actually do love. We allow ourselves to have a little bit. It's forbidden, we tell ourselves we're wrong, we get angry at ourselves, we feel guilty and then we just figure well, I might as well eat the rest of whatever the thing is.

Speaker 1:

When you have given yourself permission to eat whatever you want, there's never, you're never wrong. You're never in a place of, oh I did, I ate, that that was wrong. Now I need to feel badly, so I'm just going to eat for the rest of the night and then I'll start over tomorrow. There is no starting over tomorrow, it is all in. It's all in the moment. We take it one moment at a time, and so you really have to be present with the idea of I really want to be able to eat what I love, because I don't want to restrict and then get freaked out, either if I've eaten something or if I'm around it that I feel like, oh my gosh, I never may have this again. I've got to eat all of it. We can't keep going back and forth between that restrict and binge mentality, because that will always lead to overeating. And so allowing yourself and giving yourself that permission now, does that mean you have to eat everything in sight? Heck, no, and most and usually you're not interested in it. You're not interested in doing that because you know that it's it's not something that is a bad food or it's not something that's going to be taken away from you. So it's just reminding yourself of that reminder, then actively doing the thing, actively eating the foods that you truly do enjoy, and kind of dovetailing on that.

Speaker 1:

The next one, number two, step number two is to let go of any kind of guilt that you feel connected to number one, connected to the first thing that we talked about, which was eating what you love. There are so many people who have so much guilt, who cannot let go of that, and guilt is such a strong emotion and, unfortunately, what always goes hand in hand with guilt is shame. And when you feel shame, what always goes hand in hand with guilt is shame. And when you feel shame, it's incredibly overwhelming and it's consuming. And when you feel consumed by something, you just want to get away from that feeling.

Speaker 1:

And for those of us who are emotional eaters, the thing that always takes that feeling away, but just for a brief moment, is eating. And so it's allowing yourself to, you know, and not allowing yourself, but reminding yourself no, I don't need to feel guilty. The thought your brain will give you those thoughts, because it's it's made you feel guilty for decades and it's going to keep doing it because it thinks it's normal. But if you're going to try and change that behavior, you have to be prepared to counter that and say no, that's not what we're doing, that's not what I'm going to talk, that's not how I'm going to talk to myself, I'm not going to feel guilty, there is nothing. I didn't do anything wrong, everything's fine and I just need to relax and be okay with whatever I ate and I stop and I take a deep, take a few deep breaths and I'm going to be okay. But being consumed with guilt is only going to make the situation that much worse because again, it's going to spurn all of these feelings within you.

Speaker 1:

So what do you do when you start to feel that, that sense of that sense of dread and that sense of fear and guilt, overwhelming guilt, because you ate something, because you might have felt like you overate, and you come home and you're like, oh well, if I already feel, if I already feel like I'm overeating, I might as well just go all the way in. To stop yourself from that we need to absolutely have. The first and foremost thing that we show ourselves is compassion and awareness and just being aware. Now I want to be really clear on what self-compassion is. Self-compassion is not saying it's okay, you're okay, don't worry, it's okay, you ate those cupcakes, it's all right. People do that all the time, everybody does it, it's okay. I want people to stop saying that to themselves, because that just is another justification for why you did something.

Speaker 1:

What really needs to happen is there needs to be accountability, and it's accountability between you and you, and accountability of yeah wasn't a good choice. That's not beating yourself up, that's owning it. It wasn't a good choice. I am going to do A, b and C and I am going to not do that because I love myself, because I care about myself and because my goals matter and I want to reach my goals. That is not being mean. That is not beating yourself down. That is making yourself be accountable and then coming up with a plan and committing to it and the follow through is the next time you're presented with something like that, you make a change. That is what self-compassion is. Self-compassion is not blowing smoke up your rear end. Self-compassion is owning what happened and then coming up with a plan for how are we going to avoid that again? Because we have goals and they're important, and we're important and we're going to reach our goals. That is what we need to have happen. That is the important piece.

Speaker 1:

And so I really want people to work on appropriate self-compassion. And appropriate self-compassion is not saying, oh you know, I know, I know I didn't do it, so I just ate another cupcake, or I just ate, you know, more brownies. That's not self-compassion. That's actually being cruel to yourself, because you're setting yourself up for more disappointment and then because the next thing that you'll say is, well, I might as well just eat for the rest of the night and I can restart it again tomorrow morning. That's not helpful either and that's never going to be helpful.

Speaker 1:

So again, self-compassion and awareness. And what I think is really helpful is that you make a list of like, what do I need to tell myself when this happens? And have the list handy and then tell yourself okay, we got to go read that list because we just did this and we got to go read this list and we've got to own up to it. That is what is really important. That is how you can help yourself and that will create change in your behaviors in the future, because you are making yourself be accountable and then following through with coming up with a plan and then actually committing to execute, and that is huge, huge. But I don't want the general oh, whatever. Okay, you know everybody does it. No, no, we're not. We're not jumping on the bandwagon, all right, number three. Number three is an interesting one.

Speaker 1:

This is the law of reversed effort, and what this law of reversed effort is is it states that sometimes, when we try hard to achieve something, we actually end up hindering our efforts, and a perfect example of this is when you can't sleep. You can't sleep, and so you start to get more anxiety about not being able to sleep, and so then you look at the clock and you're like, oh, there's only four hours left. Oh my gosh, I probably, even I probably shouldn't even go to sleep because that's not enough time. So you create more of the problem because you're so focused on trying to sleep, and that actually creates more instances of insomnia. And that's one of the reasons why counting sheep was created, because it's so random, it's so different, and it takes out, it distracts your brain and takes your brain away from its sole focus of oh my gosh, got to go to sleep, got to go to sleep, got to go to sleep. That's not what we need to be focusing on. We need to be focusing on something else that takes our mind away and let it relax, and then it will go to sleep. So you really want to.

Speaker 1:

When you get in those situations where you feel like you're obsessing and thinking about food all the time, like you're obsessing and thinking about food all the time, you have to tell yourself I know this is going to work, I know I'm capable, but I've just got to take a deep breath and I've got to live my life. And living my life cannot be about losing weight. That's not everything about you. It's even it's probably the most boring thing about you. And so don't make it your name tag Hi, I'm losing weight. Don't do that, because that just turns the power over to the law of reversed effect, because then we're putting so much focus on losing weight that we never get to where we want to be. So allow losing weight to be a part of your life, but don't make it your life. Okay, law of reversed efforts. Put your energy towards something else. Allow the weight loss to happen and you will be golden, all right.

Speaker 1:

Number four there are three things, three things that changed my life and changed my eating and changed just every way I interacted with food. And I'm going to share those three things with you today. And if you can start saying these on a regular basis and then especially use them when you want to overeat, and when you want to overeat at night in particular, or at a family event, or at a dinner with friends or whatever you know weekend away, camping and all the food sitting out how do you handle that? I want you to tell yourself these three things regularly and they will make a huge difference. So, number one food isn't going anywhere. Food isn't going anywhere.

Speaker 1:

You have to relieve your brain, let your brain relax and let it know that it's not going to be denied, it's not going to be restricted from anything. Food isn't going anywhere. It's always with you if you need it. Number two it's always available to me. Takes away the restriction, takes away the deprivation again results in your brain relaxing and allows you just to be able to connect with yourself, connect to the situation, recognize what you're doing and then decide what your next steps are going to be.

Speaker 1:

And the last thing is I don't have to eat it all today. I can have more tomorrow or the next day, and that, for me, was the key. I don't have to eat it all today. I can have more tomorrow or the next day, because I always thought that if I ate badly and I ate more than I should have, well, then I'm going to start over tomorrow. So it could be a really long time before I eat anything that I like and anything that I enjoy. So let's just try and eat as much as we can and that absolutely always backfired.

Speaker 1:

So giving yourself the permission that you know you don't have to eat it all. You don't have to eat everything. You don't have to finish your plate, you don't have to. You know if there's only a tiny bit left and you don't know when you're going to have it again, you don't have to panic. You get to be calm, you get to be in control and you get to decide what you're going to do. So that is huge. And again, your brain responds to what you tell it. If you tell it that food isn't going anywhere, if you tell it it's always available, your brain will calm down and over time it will start to change those beliefs. So allow that to happen, but make that a regular thing. Allow the primal brain and your prefrontal cortex to relax, to stay regulated, knowing that everything it needs it has, it has access to and it doesn't need to try to make anything different happen. It just needs to go about living and the weight loss will happen. All right. And number five number five, this is one that kind of seems a little random. It seems a little like kind of comes out of left field, but in order for you, for you to stop overeating.

Speaker 1:

Part of overeating oftentimes is because our stomach doesn't feel right and so we think that if we eat something, it's going to calm our stomach down and and and. Partially that is true, but it doesn't apply to food. It actually applies to water that if we allow our stomachs to have both food and water at the same time, it's going to allow our food to be more easily digested, it's going to move through our system quicker, we're going to feel less full, less bloated. It'll be, it'll be a much better situation. But if you don't stay hydrated and your body is constantly feeling thirsty, it skin for your body, for your digestion and from a mental standpoint, it is something that really allows you to be able to feel focused in and allows you to be able to make sure that when you're eating, you're not eating.

Speaker 1:

When you eat an empty stomach and you don't have any water in your stomach, you are absolutely going to have a tendency to eat more food because it's gonna be filled up. You're gonna be. You're not gonna be filled up as quickly because you're only gonna be relying on food to take up all the space in your stomach. So it will. If you're not hydrated and you're not drinking water regularly, you will have a tendency to eat more food. Studies have shown that we eat less food overall, and especially at particular meals, if we are drinking water and we're hydrated. So be fully hydrated makes a huge difference and it will allow you to cut back on food without you even realizing it and without there being any feelings of deprivation or that you're so hungry or that there's anything else going on. It's just going to be much healthier for you, but it's also going to allow you to be able to feel satisfied, to feel like you're eating what you want, you're having your water with you, your overall body health is so much better and it will allow you to be able to start losing weight in a way that is going to be something that's going to be sustainable and that you're going to be able to not only reach your goal but maintain your goal as well. Okay, I hope these five steps have really kind of opened your eyes to the things that you can start doing right now to help you when it comes to reducing the number of times of reducing the frequency of your overeating and different things that you can say to yourself to make sure that you stay focused, you stay on task with what your goals are, and you will reach your goals by committing to yourself, giving your brain what it needs, giving your body what it needs, and then following through and honoring yourself and holding yourself accountable. I hope this podcast has been helpful and holding yourself accountable. I hope this podcast has been helpful. If it has, I'd love for you to leave me a review. On whatever platform you are listening to this podcast, I would love for you to give me a review. Give me some feedback. That would be amazing. I would so appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

If you have any interest in being a part of my Facebook group, it's breakthrough emotional eating stop overeating for good it. The uh link to sign up is wwwfacebookcom. Forward slash groups. Forward slash food. Breakthrough. You get a free stop eating guide when you when you join, and you also can find me on Instagram at breakthrough emotional eating. You can find me on YouTube. Kristen Jones Coaching is the name of my YouTube channel, and there are tons of videos on strategies that you can use for overeating and emotional eating, and you can also go to my website and my website. You can learn all about the coaching programs that I offer, and there's all sorts of freebies on there as well. There's a whole resource page that gives you all sorts of free things, so go in, get those things and start using them and start changing your relationship with food. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast and I will see you next week. Bye.