The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast

BEE #141: Navigating Life's Challenges with Emotional Awareness

• Kristin Jones

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Ever find yourself reaching for comfort food when life throws a curveball? Join Kristin Jones as she shares her powerful and relatable journey of navigating emotional eating after a life-altering car accident. This episode delves into the heart of emotional well-being, exploring practical strategies for managing emotions during challenging times. Kristin offers insights into embracing the full spectrum of your feelings, discovering the power of presence, and learning to navigate emotions without turning to food for solace. She emphasizes the importance of building a strong support system, identifying those who truly understand, and expressing your needs honestly.

Beyond the surface of food habits, this conversation explores the deep connection between mental, emotional, and physical health. Kristin discusses how stress manifests physically, particularly during major life events like grief or job loss, and highlights the crucial role of self-care. Learn how prioritizing rest and incorporating movement can significantly impact your mood and empower you to make healthier choices. This is more than just a podcast; it's an invitation to connect with yourself and others on a deeper level, discover your inner resilience, and embark on a path toward lasting well-being.

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:

Do you want to lose weight but struggle to stay committed to a meal plan because you constantly feel hungry? Does food provide you comfort when you are bored, angry, lonely or sad? If so, you are in the right place. My name is Kristen Jones and I'm a life coach specializing in emotional eating and weight loss, and I'm also a lifelong emotional eater. I want to provide you with information, motivation and support so you, too, can learn to manage your issues with food and develop a healthy relationship with yourself. Welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. Hi and welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. My name is Kristen Jones and thank you so much, more so than ever, for joining me this week.

Speaker 1:

For those of you that don't know, 12 days ago I was involved in a head-on collision. I was going about 35 miles an hour. The other person was going about 50 miles an hour. He crossed over the middle line. He was trying to avoid running into some cars that were waiting for a person to back out of a driveway and came too fast and couldn't, didn't know what to do and was either going to run into them and crush them in their cars or he was going to swerve and crush me, and he did. He was going to swerve and crush me and he did, and so I. It was impacted about, you know, 85 to 90 plus miles an hour. Um, and my life has been completely flipped upside down and all sorts of things have happened since then. Um, so many things that you have to do, if anyone you know for those of you out there who've been in an automobile accident and one that you know totals your car there are so many things you have to do with insurance, there's so many people you have to talk to and you don't know who to trust and you don't know who you're supposed to listen to, and there's all kinds of emotions that are going on, and so what I want to talk about today is how how I worked through and being, you know, being somebody who is, who has huge tendencies to be an emotional, to maintain my focus and my emotions, as well as my food, and how I worked my way through that in the course of the last 12 days, and how I would encourage and want to share with you the things that I did in order to allow any of you to take any of these things and use them when you have a stressful, a hugely stressful situation and I don't even think it needs to be a big event like this. Um, but it it can be. You know you can use it when there's something, something happens at work, something happens, you get into a fight with your spouse I mean any of these things. They all can fall under this category of how do I do these things? How do I manage my own emotions, manage my food, get through it and get through it, feeling better about myself?

Speaker 1:

So, if you are listening to this podcast and you are not a member of the Breakthrough Emotional Eating community on Facebook you want to be. You can join the group. Request to join at wwwfacebookcom. Forward slash groups. Forward slash food breakthrough. And I give away all sorts of free stuff and I want people to use any of the resources that we have in the group, as well as the information that I send out in emails. Um, I have all sorts of of, you know, pdfs and and note guides and and checklists and all sorts of things. So listen to more podcasts, but get in the group and you really have an. You have the ability to be able to listen to podcasts as they're being recorded and, uh, and then obviously you get, you have the opportunity to listen to it live and interact with me and ask any questions that you have. Um, today I'm recording this privately because the internet that I, where I am staying, is not very good. So, um, I I will just record it and then put it in the group for people to see and then I'll upload it to my podcast platform.

Speaker 1:

So back to what we're going to talk about today how to manage your food during a stressful life event. So one of the things that I think and I think this is is super important for any, for any event, as it's happening, is you. I needed to stay very, very present, and it was probably the hardest thing to stay present as, as as the events and the unfolding of, of being in such a such a huge type of accident, um, and all of the things that I had to do, and, and as a result of doing those things, um, you know, again, my life was kind of turned upside down. So one of the, the first thing that I think is really important is that, um, you own what happened and you're just, you have to kind of be like, okay, that happened, and then you've got to say how you're feeling about it. You've got to use the words. I'm not going to use the words that I used, but I'm not here not here Cause I don't want to make this a explicit podcast but you've got to use those words in describing how you feel, because when we keep that stuff inside, that's when we start to have a problem.

Speaker 1:

So you have to express and share your emotions and you have to share them with people that are appropriate to listen, and I say appropriate to listen. There are people that want to support you and you, and not everybody wants to support us. We have to be okay with that. We have to be okay with sometimes people only want to be around for the good times. They don't want to be around for the bad times, and that's okay. But you have to remember that that that's their choice, they get to choose that and that you then get to decide okay, I can either have this you know, I kind of know who my people are that I can talk to, but you have to be and you have to talk about what happened. You have to talk about what happened. If someone has passed on, if someone has died, if someone has lost a job or there's a breakup, you have to talk about it.

Speaker 1:

You don't you being stoic and holding onto the emotions, only they. We carry everything in our bodies, everything that happens to us is carried in our bodies, and so we have to try to get as much of that energy out of us as possible and so communicating and talking about how you feel as soon as it happens, and not just wait, don't hold on to it, because when you hold on to it, then things start to fester. So you've got to address, address what happened, address the emotions that you're feeling, name them and be okay with it. You especially if, especially if something is not, you're doing like I. I will be completely honest. I mean, it was 100%. The other person is 100% liable for every single thing that happened to me. They are responsible for it.

Speaker 1:

And what I have had to go through is I've had to go through these stages of, at first, just being happy that I was alive, just being happy, and then the next was okay. Now I've got these physical, I've got this, this physical pain that I'm going through. How do I deal with that? How do I deal with those emotions? How do I deal with that fear that I have about how I'm feeling and the fact that for the first three or four days I couldn't I had a struggle to put sentences together and there was a lot of fear attached to that. There was a lot and there was a lot of people telling me what they wanted me to do about it, and there were things I wanted to do and there were things I didn't want to do, but I had to feel all of those emotions, and so that is really important to feel it, to have people feel it, own the emotion and then share that emotion with other people, share their emotion with people that are safe.

Speaker 1:

Because if you don't and you just bottle it up and push it down, what we push down goes out, because when we have those emotions inside of us and we're not dealing with them, those feelings are going to need to be either hidden away or they're going to need to be fed. It's like they're actually like a living being inside of you. So you have to make sure that you are addressing and dealing with those emotions as they come up, owning them, naming them and then dealing with them. Dealing with them by sharing and talking to them. Talking about it with someone else, um, the next thing is you need to remember that this is just a snapshot. This is just one aspect of your life, and if you have been working on you know a weight loss goal and you have been working towards certain things that you want to have in your life, you have to remember the bigger picture. This is just a moment in time.

Speaker 1:

The my accident was a moment in time, and I had to realize that the rest of my life still had to go on. My business still had to go on. I still had people that needed me, that needed me and that I was accountable to, and there was also another job that I was accountable to, and so I had to. I had to know, I had to realize this wasn't going to be the way, it was going to be forever. I wasn't going to feel this out of control. I wasn't going to feel these things all all at once, and so I had to remember what's my goal, what are my bigger goals outside of this event. That's happened that I had no control over reminding yourself of all the things that you're working towards, that are important to you and why they're important to you, and to keep moving forward.

Speaker 1:

Don't let yourself fall in because it's so easy, especially with any type of of of accident, whether it's a car accident, whether it's a you know it's an accident at work it's so easy to find yourself falling into this pit of despair and I, I will tell you, I was there. It was about the fourth day and I had talked to somebody about the, the, the accident, and I, I started getting these really bad feelings like, oh my gosh, I'm not going to be taken care of, this is going to be really bad, like I, this is, this is going to go in a way that is not going to be good. And and I had to just stop myself and be like, nope, this is not your, this is not going to become your identity, this is not who you are. This is a snapshot and you get to move on from here. So I just had to remind myself of that a lot.

Speaker 1:

Um, next thing is I needed to, not the one thing for me personally, that is always the thing that gets me that, because it makes me feel better is to snack, because and I, I, you know, there was a day or two that I was like I'm not eating any meals. I don't want to eat any meals, I don't. I was, I was kind of nauseated. I didn't really want to eat meals. I didn't want to. You know, I wanted to. Just I wanted to just snack because it made me feel better. And then I had to just be like, wait a minute, that is not the direction, that's not going to help you, it's not the direction you want to go go in. And so what I had to do was I had to remind myself what are the things that have gotten me where I am, and those are the things I need to do. So I still needed to go to Trader Joe's and I needed to buy all my food and I needed to plan what I was going to eat and I needed to make sure there was good food in the refrigerator so I could stay nourished, because my body was not going to heal if I didn't keep myself nourished in the way that I always have, and that would be, you know, planning my meals, eating them in a timely way, making sure I was drinking my water which was really hard, by the way, um and I, but I, but I had to keep reminding myself. I had to keep reminding myself of that.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is you have to listen to your body, even if this is a stressful event like you know a family member passing on or a job loss something that doesn't physically impair you, it emotionally and mentally impacts you and that in turn, impacts you physically. So you need to let yourself take naps. You need to realize that you're going to have a hard time having energy. It's going to impact you, it's going to impact how you move through your world and it's okay that that's happening. And you have to listen to your body and say okay, you know what? I don't usually nap, but I'm napping now. I'm taking a nap, I'm going to bed early, I'm sleeping in a little bit later. You have to listen to your body and you have to do what your body is telling you that it needs. We have to start listening to our bodies and we have to give our bodies what we need.

Speaker 1:

For me, it was taking naps whenever I could For the first, taking naps whenever I could. For the first I would say days, days three and four. I spent both of those days in bed. The first day of the accident and the second day I acted like everything was fine. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks and all of a sudden it was like, oh my gosh, all I want to do is sleep and I just and I knew I realized right away I was like, oh, this was such a bad decision. I really really need to give myself time to really really like just just heal, heal mentally, emotionally, all of those things. So allow yourself to do what your body needs to do in order for you to feel the best that you can feel.

Speaker 1:

And I would say the last thing is, you need to try, and this was the hardest thing for me is, if you are someone who is, um, you know, if you're physically active, even if you're not physically active, you need to move your body. You need to get oxygen into your, you know, you need to get. You need to oxygenate your brain, you need to oxygenate your lungs, I mean everything. You need to move your body, even if it's just going out and going for a walk you know, 10 minute walk after, after each of your meals, or just walking outside and standing in nature and just taking some deep breaths. We need to move our bodies in some way, because it elevates your mood. If you just sit, and you, you know, let yourself be absorbed in the emotion. You sit, you get absorbed in the emotion. What do you want to do? You want to turn and eat because you don't like the way that necessarily feels.

Speaker 1:

So making sure that you really get yourself out and whether that's going for a walk in the shop, in a shopping mall, or or you're just meeting a friend for coffee, and making sure that you take your coffee and you walk a little bit and I'm talking five or 10 minutes but just get yourself out where you can feel you're alive. You're alive, you're blessed. You're blessed to be, you're blessed to have awakened in the morning. Sometimes we forget that, that that is every morning when we wake up. That's a blessing. We get to be happy that we got to wake up this morning. So taking those blessings in and really, really valuing and appreciating them and giving yourself that gift is so beyond important, so incredibly important.

Speaker 1:

So I would encourage you to get out and move your body as much as you can, especially in my case. I needed to do that because my body hurt and it it there was. I had been checked out twice and I and I, you know the doctor said you're going to be sore, but you do need. You need blood flow. You need to get those, keep those muscles moving, and, and so I really tried to do that and that elevated my mood, made me feel better, and then it elevated my mood and allowed me to make better decisions about what I wanted to eat, when I wanted to eat, how I was going to go about doing it, so I really had to keep it.

Speaker 1:

I think when stressful events happen, big stressful events that create a lot of emotion, we have to deal with the mental piece first, and then the physical piece will fall into place. But allow yourself the time and the energy and the focus to be able to deal with the mental and emotional piece and then the physical piece. You won't you, you won't find yourself turning to food as as much as you would if you just tried to just plow forward and just like I can just do this, I can just tough it out. We don't need to tough it out, we don't need to tough anything out. We need to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves, especially during these stressful times, and allow yourself to be able to heal mentally, emotionally and obviously physically as well. So I hope that helps.

Speaker 1:

I hope, if anyone and please, I would love to you know. I'd love for you to to share um in any of the comments, whether it's uh, you know, on the in the YouTube video, whether it's um on, you know, in on my podcast platform. Um, if you've, if you've experienced something like that, if you've had a major accident, if you've had, you know, a huge death in the family, and and how, how, how you responded to those things, because everybody's a little different but having some guidelines about, about allowing yourself to feel certain things and allowing yourself to really to to really take care of yourself as well, is so very important. It's going to make it so much easier to move through and do what you need to do and take care of yourself as well is so very important. It's going to make it so much easier to move through and do what you need to do and take care of yourself, because that's ultimately always the most important thing you have to take care of you.

Speaker 1:

All right, have an amazing rest of your week. This is a Tuesday, so have an amazing rest of your week and I will see you all next week on the podcast and take care and be safe out there. All right, bye-bye. Thank you for listening to this week's episode, if you would like to learn how to lose the weight you want and understand and manage your emotional eating, sign up for my free Stop Dieting 5-Step Guide. Go to wwwKristenJonesCoachingcom that's K-R-I-S-T-I-N-JonesCoachingcom, and click the Stop Dieting Guide button.