The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast

BEE #155: Eat To Satisfied - The Simple Shift The Changes Everything

• Kristin Jones

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Your body already knows how much food it needs—your job is simply to listen. In this episode, I break down one of the most powerful mindset shifts for ending emotional eating: learning to eat until satisfied, not full.

You’ll discover why this one change affects everything—your cravings, your energy, your sleep, and even your ability to trust yourself around food. Through my Three R’s to Food Freedom framework, I’ll show you how to build daily routines that reconnect you to your body’s natural cues, helping you slow down, savor your meals, and stop before autopilot takes over.

We’ll explore how to identify satisfaction in real time, balance blood sugar for steady energy, and release the old “clean plate” mentality for good. You’ll learn practical tools—like the one-bite-left practice and mid-meal check-ins—that help you retrain your brain and create calm, confident eating habits that last.

If you’ve ever struggled with overeating or second-guessing your hunger, this episode will help you find peace at the table—and freedom beyond it.

🎧 Listen now, try it at your next meal, and share this episode with a friend who’s ready to stop eating on autopilot.

Connect with me online:

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

3. You Tube channel, Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@breakthroughpodcast-44
3 . Website: https://www.kristinjonescoaching.com

If you want to learn more about how to stop overeating at meals and lose weight easily, get my How To Stop Overeating At Meals Guide: https://go.kristinjonescoaching.com/stop-overeating

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...

SPEAKER_00:

Do you want to lose weight but struggle to stay committed to a meal planet because you constantly feel longer? Does it provide you comfort when you're born? Yes. My name is Kristen Holmes, and I'm a life coach specializing in emotional eating and weight loss. I want to provide you with information, motivation, and support. So this is a message issues with a healthy relationship with yourself. Welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. This is the second in our series of looking at the elements that I use to coach my clients through my 12-week Breakthrough to you program. And as a part of that breakthrough to you program, there is a signature framework that I use that's called the Three Rs and the Three R's to Food Freedom. And if you're not familiar with it, I did a podcast on it last week. So you might want to stop this and go back and listen to that podcast so you have a complete reference point of what that program or what that framework entails. This framework is what I take through my clients to get them the transformation of feeling out of control with their emotional eating, carrying extra weight because of the excess eating that they've been doing, that has been stemming from an emotional component. And I take them through this process, and the transformation that they receive by the end of the 12 weeks is really only the beginning. It gives them a base, a starting point to really start to work on their emotions, on how to address emotions, how to feel uncomfortable, and how to not use food as their coping mechanism. And in during that process, as part of what they do, they're going to lose weight. And this component that we're going to talk about today, this part of the three, one of the three R's, the first R, which is routines and habits, this R is eating dissatisfied. And eating dissatisfied can really help a person avoid overeating because our bodies are so amazing. We know exactly, our body knows exactly how much food it needs, but we don't listen. And so if we can just slow down, if a person can slow down, not be driven by emotions, but be driven by their rational brain and being able to stop and slow themselves down and allow themselves to recognize when they are actually feeling satisfied. Stop and listen to your body's experts gauge at knowing exactly how much food to eat. You will eat the right amount of food and you will either maintain your weight or lose weight. So this is really a pivotal part of my program. And it also teaches a person to be present. So we're going to talk about all of the benefits and the reasons why you want to start to incorporate eating to satisfied, not only if you're trying to lose weight or as you're if you're trying to deal with emotional eating, but it is so important to your overall health. And there's going to be there's a lot of reasons why eating to satisfied is so important. And trying to avoid overeating will really, really be helpful from an overall health, um, health standpoint and health span standpoint as well. So the first reason why you want to eat to satisfied is it allows you to be able to tap in to the natural cues that your body gives you when it is approaching the right amount of food that it needs. And by listening to your body and listening to hunger cues and stopping before overeating, again, you are listening to your body, you are taking in all of the cues, and you are stopping at a place where your body gets enough food where it's able to do all of its other functions that it has to be doing, other than digesting all of this extra food and storing some of it as fat. In order for us to be our healthiest, our body has so many, it multitasks all the time. It has so many different things it's supposed to be doing. And so it's really essential for your body to not have excess food that it has to process, because then it can do all the other things that it needs to do. And those are things that we're going to talk about. But the first thing is just listening to your body cues and and recognizing that your body knows exactly how much food you need to eat and it will tell you if you just get quiet and listen. And so the body cues, those are the things that I teach in my program is how do you actually go about listening to those cues? What are they? What are the cues that your body sends you? And how do you know when it's time to stop? And it is something, it is a practice, it's not something that comes naturally to people. We actually do have it naturally in our DNA, but over the course of years and years and years of ignoring and overriding that natural tendency to stop when satisfied. We have to reteach ourselves and we can. So that's the exciting part. Uh, the second thing is it supports balancing your blood sugar. When we overeat, our blood sugar spikes really, really high and then it crashes back down, and that causes us to get very lethargic. It causes us also then to crave more food and we go on this emotional blood sugar roller coaster. And so eating a satisfying amount of food and keeping at a level that is appropriate for our bodies avoids the significant blood sugar rises and the crashes that also ensue. Um it keeps your your mood also more stable when you're not having those significant um crash elevations and crashes. Next thing is it helps break the clean plate club mentality when we are able to stop. And it's one of the things that I really teach people is leaving a little bit of food on your plate, even if it's just a tiny bite, even if it's one bite, a little piece of pizza crust, leave it on your plate. Don't feel like you have to finish because that is an it, that is a mental and emotional and learned behavior that does not serve most people. And so you have to really go into it thinking. I always tell people, go into it thinking, I'm going to leave some of this food and I'm going to be okay with it. And practicing that and practicing the mental gymnastics that go on, because so many people hear their parents saying, No, we have to eat, you have to clean your plate, you have to, you have to finish all your food. And you don't have to. You don't have to. And if people just stopped eating instead of feeling the guilt that they feel like they need to finish food, a lot of people wouldn't have weight issues. So it would, it definitely would help a lot of people. So break that mentality, break the the clean plate club. We don't need it anymore. Next, it improves digestion and reduces bloating. So many people complain about you know be feeling so bloated all the time. And that bloating can come from a distended diet, from a distended stomach that when we eat too much and we eat too quickly, we take in too much air with our food, and that causes gas bubbles and that causes uh a disruption in our digestion process, digestive process as well as bloating that people feel. If we just eat the right amount of foods, we won't feel bloated, we won't feel like our stomach is distended, it'll feel nice and comfortable, we'll know exactly how much, again, our body knows how much food to eat, and it does that because it wants to keep digestion in a regular, a regular um uh standard procedure, the standard procedure that it always does because it knows that's healthy. We need to have the digestive process being as regular as possible. And overeating is never good for our digestive system. We always want to give our digestive system the best possible way to process all the nutrients that we need and get rid of the things that we don't need. Overeating and eating too quickly can and can absolutely derail that. So it's really it's it's absolutely important to stop it satisfied to help with the digestive process. Next thing is it helps rewire your brain's reward system. So many people find reward in food. So that dopamine kicks in and it kicks in oftentimes because people will tell themselves, like, oh, it feels so good to be full. And really the reality is there's a very, very, very small window where people feel good and they soon, quickly, if you give enough given them enough time, they can then cross over into that place where they feel very uncomfortable. And that reward system then shifts into shame, shifts into guilt, shifts into feeling um badly about what you've eaten. We food should never be something that that evokes guilt, that evokes shame, and that evokes disgust. And it usually those feelings rise up when people overeat. So learning to eat and dissatisfied will train your brain that you are going to eat the appropriate amount of food. And the reward system doesn't need to be stimulated by the excess because then it's a learned behavior that, like, oh, overeating allows me to get more dopamine. I get a better dopamine hit, so I feel better for that very brief moment, but then the shame and the guilt come in. So we rewire and re-re and we change our reward system so we can actually eat the proper amount of food, feel good, and then get the reward there. Next, it builds self-trust. Most of my clients that I see come in and are very, very distrustful of themselves. They do not trust their food choices, they don't trust how much food, they don't trust themselves with food, they don't trust themselves away from food, they don't trust themselves to make the right choices. And so there's a lot of negative talk around food and about not believing in yourself. And that just erodes a person's self-esteem, their self-image, uh, how they present themselves, their confidence. And so all of those things can be alleviated when we're able to eat to satisfy, we're able to stop to stop ourselves, not overeat. And that allows us then to be able to feel really, really positive about the decisions that we're making in our lives about not only our food choices, but all the areas of our lives. And that will permeate and that will spread and help you feel more confident in all areas of your life. Um, it also helps you feel consistently nourished. You don't go through those excessively uncomfortable feelings of I've totally overeaten and then force yourself to not eat and then you become starving. That's it's never, never good for us to have those big, huge fluctuations of either being starving or completely stuffed and full. Our stomach, our stomach and our psyche just does not need that. We need to keep ourselves at a nourished level where we are able to gonna get, we are gonna be able to get the nutrients we need, but we're also emotionally gonna feel good about the decisions that we've made and how our body feels. You know, oftentimes when you overeat, all you want to just lay on the couch, you're not gonna be as productive, you're not gonna feel as good about yourself. And again, it's gonna it's gonna impact your confidence and your productivity. Um, it also cultivates a mindset of feeling good and presence and mindfulness. When we are present, we are able to stop when satisfied. It's when we are not present, when we let our mind wander, we think about things that we're upset about, we're thinking we think about things from our past, we worry about the future, we're not present in the moment. So being present is a key aspect of eating dissatisfied. And I teach my my clients how to approach a meal, how to behave during a meal, and then what to do after a meal so they stay fully present and they are able to stop when their body needs them to. But that takes awareness and it takes that presence and that mindfulness. And it is again a learned behavior, and it is something that is so valuable when it comes to your ability to be able to manage your emotional eating and lose the weight that you want. And lastly, it greatly impacts sleep and hormonal balance. When we are when we overeat, when we eat past satisfied, our body has to spend so much time digesting food that it is not able to rest, to rejuvenate, and to renew cells. And that's essentially, and that oftentimes happens during sleep. When you uh eat and then go to bed, your body is so busy doing all of the digestive, um, the digestive activities. Your body can't settle in and you can't deep you can't dip into a deep REM sleep. You will not fall into that deep sleep because your body is too active, spending all of its energy. Its energy is being redirected towards the stomach, towards digesting the food, and it will be a disruption to your sleep. Sleep disruption results in hormone imbalance, results in you being tired the next day, results in you craving sugar. Um, and that's an as a natural reaction of someone being sleep-deprived, is they naturally crave sugar because your brain is so intelligent that it knows sugar is going to give it a quick pick-me-up. And when you're tired, that's what you need to have. So the it all goes back to eating to satisfy, eating just the right amount of food, being able to sleep, being able to settle, being able to get a good deep night's sleep, and be able to come away in the morning feeling rested and not feeling full and be able to get up, be as productive as you can, and move on with your day, as opposed to feeling sluggish and guilty and sick and full of regret. So eating dissatisfied is such an important element to my program. And it's something that that I teach and it's I encourage people to practice every single day. Practicing that ability to be able to stay present in your meals, to eat what you want. That's also part of only eating dissatisfied. When we are eating what we love and the foods that we love, and that's going to be our next topic. But when we eat the foods that we love, it allows us to be able to be satisfied both mentally and physically. And the physical and emotional satisfaction that you receive from food is just as important as the physical satisfaction that you receive. So all those things go together. You must have all of them in order to be able to have eating dissatisfied become the habit that you do for the rest of your life. I hope this uh podcast was helpful. I hope that I gave you some insights as to why eating dissatisfied isn't so important is so important, and the things that you can do to be present, to be calm, to really pay attention and to stop eating early, leave food on your plate, don't eat to full, eat to satisfied, and recognize that it does so many things besides weight management, does so many other really important things that impact your body and impact your health for the long run. Thank you again for being here, and I will see you all next week. Take care. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you are interested in learning more about how I can help you understand and manage your emotional needing, including the use of hypnosis to my website, Christians.