The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast

BEE #156: How Gratitude and Journaling Help You Break the Emotional Eating Cycle

• Kristin Jones

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In this week’s episode of the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast, Kristin's unpacking two of the most powerful (yet underrated) tools for lasting change — gratitude and journaling.

She explore how your thoughts set off emotions that drive your actions — and how you can interrupt that loop before it leads to emotional eating. You’ll learn how simple daily routines can calm your nervous system, reduce food urges, and help you build the consistency and confidence that diets never deliver.

Inside this episode, you’ll discover:
 ✨ The TEA-Cycle that links your thoughts, emotions, and actions — and how to interrupt it
✨ Why gratitude raises dopamine and serotonin, helping you feel more content and in control
✨ How to retrain your Reticular Activating System (RAS) to notice the good instead of the negative
✨ How journaling empties your mind, reducing urges and anxiety around food
✨ The power of tracking your wins to build self-trust and momentum
✨ Three simple daily practices you can start today to reset your relationship with food

This episode blends all three parts of my 3 R’s to Food Freedom™ framework — Routine, Rewiring, and Radical Accountability — to help you create real emotional freedom with food.

🎁 Bonus Gift: Want my 20 Journal Prompts for Emotional Eaters
 Head to my Instagram [@kristinjonescoaching].
 If you already follow me, send me a DM with the word “GRATITUDE.”
If not, follow me first and then send the same DM — I’ll send your copy right to you! Or just click here to download your copy.

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 how to stop nighttime eating, get my 3 Day Nighttime Snacking Reset: https://go.kristinjonescoaching.com/nighttime-snacking-reset

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 ...

SPEAKER_00:

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're 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. About 20 years ago, I took a road trip with my mom and my sister, and we went to Oregon, to Eugene, Oregon, to visit my cousin and her partner. And we were staying at their house. And one of the one of the evenings, they were really excited to show us this video. And the video was a documentary, and it was something I had never seen before, but it was something that honestly, looking back, it absolutely has changed the trajectory of my life. And the video was titled The Secret. And the secret is about uh the law of manifestation and the law of attraction. And the premise is that we are what we think, and that we uh whatever we are thinking that we put out into the universe, all of that comes back. It's almost like a boomerang, it comes back to us. And one of the concepts that I learned on that trip and that evening watching this video was the idea of gratitude and the importance of gratitude in our lives. And from that point forward, I have used gratitude or the law of attraction in various aspects of my life and have always believed in manifesting things into my life and have seen those things come to fruition and come and, you know, and be created in my life basically because of the thoughts that I wanted to think. One of the um most clear and it wasn't a um, it was a benefit to me, but it wasn't, I wasn't asking for a car, I wasn't asking for um anything uh tangible, I wasn't asking for more money. But when I was a teacher, I had a student that was really, really problematic. And he just pushed every button I had and every button that everyone had. And he was just a real, he was really tough to deal with. And we had him in the afternoon. I was teen teaching at the time. So one morning, when I was doing my gratitude before school, I specifically thought about how I wanted this student to come in to class and how I wanted him to behave that day. And I thought about, I visualized him coming in, him saying hi to me, him sitting down, him interacting positively with the other students around him. I mean, I just laid everything out and I not only visualized it, but I also was grateful for the fact that I had this student in my class and I was grateful for the teacher that I was teaching with, and I was grateful for every student in the room, and I was grateful for my job, and I was grateful for the opportunity to possibly be able to change this child's life. And don't you know that afternoon he walked in and he was as close to perfectly behaved as as we could have ever asked for without us saying anything. He came in, he was, he just was calm, he came in, he sat down. We had an amazing day. And I remember telling my coworker, the person I was teaching with, I remember telling her about this ahead of time. And about five minutes into class, she looked at me and she said, What did you do? I said, I didn't do anything. I said, Well, I didn't do anything, but I just kind of put it out there. And so I've always been a believer that the gratitude and visualization and uh, you know, just just focusing on what we have, focusing on the positive things in life is always going to get us farther than than being negative. And it's always been something that I have included in every program, every uh different, different iteration of my one-on-one coaching or my group coaching, um, my membership, you know, groups, anything that I've ever done, I've always had an element of gratitude and an element of um just you know visualization and and positive thinking and all those things. And so one of the things that I include in the um in the three Rs, which is the uh signature framework that I use within my breakthrough to you uh signature one-on-one program that I that I take individuals through to help them manage their emotional eating and change their relationship with food. The first R is routines. And one of the routines that I that I always introduce and that I always encourage, I never force people to do anything, but I I encourage them. This is something I strongly recommend that they do. And journaling and gratitude are the two elements that I think are especially important when it comes to a daily routine. So I wanted to, this is part of our series on um presenting the three Rs. And we're on R number one, which is routines. And so this week's topic is gratitude and journaling and why it is so important and how it connects to emotional eating. Because you you can think, well, yeah, gratitude's great, and uh everyone says you should journal. Well, but how is that gonna relate to emotional eating? Well, there are direct ties to emotional eating and ties to your emotions and your emotional responses that are absolutely triggered by gratitude and that are triggered by journaling as well. So we're gonna go through those and you're gonna understand why this is so important. And I'm also gonna give you some very tangible hands-on things that you can start doing immediately after you listen to this podcast, and you can start to see a change in your life almost immediately. So I'm excited for that. That'll be really fun. So there is a connection between emotional eating and your thoughts and the thought patterns that you have. And there is something that I call a lot of people have a lot of names for it. I call it the T cycle. And the T cycle, the T is T-E-A, kind of like T that you drink. So T-E-A, the T cycle, and the T stands for thoughts, the E stands for emotions, and the A stands for actions. And what that cycle represents is it represents how we move through our days. Our thoughts come first. We create our thoughts, our brain creates our thoughts, and we create our thoughts together with our brain. Those then, those thoughts then create the emotions. They cause the emotions that we feel. So I want to make sure we we understand that. That thoughts, our own thoughts, cause emotions and how we feel. It's not what someone else does that causes us to feel a certain way. It's someone else does something, we have a thought about it, the thought then causes us to feel either happy or sad or angry or you know, mad, whatever it is. But it's not what the other person does. It's what we choose and we choose to think about it. So we choose a thought, the thought creates a feeling within us, and then that feeling drives us to do an action. Every action known to man are always driven by emotions, always driven by emotions. So instead, if we don't like the actions that we're doing, we don't need to change our our our how we feel. We need to go back and we need to figure out what are we thinking that's causing us to feel a certain way, and then in turn react and act subsequently, and then have whatever that that result is that we get based upon our actions. So we always want to look back at what is the thought that we have. That's that thought cycle, that that T cycle. So what happens is there can be a negative loop or a negative thought pattern that can develop. And if we get into a negative thought loop where all we're looking at is what we don't have, what we don't have enough of, what we aren't, what we wish we were, all of those negative thought patterns, we can get into that loop that is very, very challenging for us to change. And that negative loop and those ensuing negative emotions that are that are caused by those negative thoughts, those negative emotions can lead us to the actions that our brain is actually automatically going to do because it wants us to feel better. So when it wants us to feel better, it's gonna have us do something that's gonna make us feel better. What's gonna make most people feel better? Eating. Eating is something that distracts us, it distracts us in the moment, it makes us feel good in that very brief moment, and that is ultimately what our brain wants. When we're in that negative thought pattern, it doesn't want us to stay there. So it goes about changing our thought patterns, creates different emotions, and then results in a new action that it wants us to take. So we have to be very aware of our thoughts and our actions, our thoughts and our feelings and our actions absolutely directly link to emotional eating. And so understanding that there's that connection and understanding that when we don't harness our power and we don't take control of those areas of our brain and those things that we can control, because with 100% certainty, we can control our thoughts. Many people do not understand that and don't believe that, but it is absolutely true. We get to control our thoughts. Our brain will keep giving us those thoughts that we don't want to have, but we get to keep saying no. We get to keep saying no, that's not what's gonna happen. That's not what we're gonna do. And we can can continue to push back against our brain and against what our brain wants to naturally do. And that can help us get out of that thoughts, that thought cycle. But it's very challenging when people don't understand that they actually, in reality, have the ability to be able to make those changes themselves and to be able to control how they think and feel. So, what gratitude and what journaling does is it interrupts that negative thought pattern because it activates the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is directly involved and directly responsible for making decisions as well as for selecting and choosing mindfulness as a way of going about your day. And so when we know that we can tap into that prefrontal cortex by journaling and by looking at and being grateful for what we have, we have an easy and quick way of breaking that negative loop pattern and creating a pattern of thinking that is more coming from abundance and not from a place of scarcity. So why gratitude works? Gratitude, I like to say gratitude is the gateway drug to happiness because when we can be grateful, there is nothing that we can't feel that's going to be positive. There's nothing that we can't do that is going to help ourselves ourselves move our lives in a more positive direction. So gratitude shifts our focus from lack to abundance. That means from scarcity to abundance because so many people walk around in a scarcity mindset. And it's very easy. And I know for me personally, I have to fight that scarcity mindset all the time. And I really have to try and come from a place of abundance, and it can be very challenging depending on the circumstances and what aspects of my life that I'm that I'm involved in. But I have to always remember that scarcity comes from me and comes from my thinking. And when I realize that, then I have much more motivation to want to change how I am looking at the world and how I am the perspective that I'm taking. So I get to have control of that and I realize that. And I realize that I need to embrace that power uh wholeheartedly. So from a neurological standpoint, gratitude increases dopamine and serotonin in the brain, and that improves your mood and it reduces the emotional triggers that often cause people to overeat and to eat when they're not hungry. So that's the first step. There are very basic neurological reasons for gratitude and why you would want to partake of it. The second reason why you want to really turn to gratitude and have gratitude be a regular, routine, uh, daily occurrence in your life is gratitude activates and retrains the reticular activating system within your brain. It's it stands for RAS. RAS is what it's called. It's the reticular activating system. And what that system does is that system is a filter for your brain. And naturally, what it does is it kind of, if we remember back to some of my other videos where I talk about the brain and that the brain automatically does worst-case scenarios, while the the RAS is always looking for doom and gloom to be prepared for it. So it can, it can kind of like be on the lookout because again, it's uh its whole objective is to keep you alive and safe. And so the reticular activating system is always looking for threats. And when we can retrain it and have it look for the positive things in our lives, our lives are gonna take a very different turn and we are gonna be much more receptive to the good that is out in the world because there is so much good in the world. But if all we're doing is looking for the negative, I promise you we're gonna find it. And so, really changing that reticular activating system to start looking for things that are more positive, that's what we want to start doing. And gratitude on the regular does that. And so that's something that is very, very helpful for your brain to be able to start to regularly incorporate gratitude, because then gratitude begets more gratitude and begets more positivity and better things and more abundance to come into your life. So when we talk about emotional regulation and meaning emotional regulation, meaning that that even keel of emotion, and I will tell you that for many years of my life, that was never a way that anyone would describe me. Not anyone in my family would ever describe me that way. Um, I was like a pilot, I was like a powder keg. I mean, it was like you never knew what was going to set me off, what was going to trigger me. Um, I was so emotionally fragile, and it almost always had to do with how I felt about myself, how I felt about how I looked, how I felt in my own body, all of those things. So when, so gratitude helps you build kind of a regulation system within you for your emotions, because gratitude makes you feel good. So when you feel good, you are much better equipped at dealing with the little challenges that come up in our lives at all times. I wasn't feeling good about myself. I didn't like how I looked, I didn't like how I felt, I didn't like who I was, I didn't like where my life was. When I didn't like all those things, and that was the tape that kept running through my head, I couldn't handle any, any hiccup. I couldn't handle any bump in the road without losing it, either in just sobbing tears or complete howler monkey screaming and yelling. And so I didn't have, I was emotional, I was emotionally dysregulated and I needed the regulation of that gratitude. And it wasn't a few years later until I found it. But for many years of my life, and that was why I was so relieved when I found something that was able to actually help me remain calm and give me the emotional balance that I needed to in order to be able to just address all the things that come into our lives because we all have them. We all have these various, you know, uh things that that pop into our lives. And and we just have to be able, we have to be able to learn how to handle them. And and I didn't for the man for many years know how to handle those things. And gratitude was a huge piece of it. So when you're grateful, you are more likely, when these emotional dysregulations happen, you're more likely to pause, to reflect, and then to choose rather than just to react, rather than going from zero to howler monkey, you can actually be calm and choose and select how you want to respond. Now, journaling, on the other hand, I have always known, and many of you don't know this, I don't talk about it very often, but I was um I was a resource specialist when I was a teacher. I was a resource specialist for uh for nine of my 17 years as a teacher. And in that process of becoming a resource specialist and getting my credential as a resource specialist, I also got my master's degree in special education. And so I had a very um extensive education on the brain and how the brain worked. And I also understood how it was very challenging for my students, for many of my students, almost most of my students, to get the thoughts from their head down through their body, through their mind, through their arm, and then out through the pencil onto the piece of paper. And these were not emotional things, these were things that they were trying to remember. These were facts, these were, these were what they wanted to write. This was, these were all the just very basic, basic things. Um, nothing, nothing deep like emotions, but I knew a great deal about the struggles that came from getting your thoughts that were in your head out onto paper. But what I also knew was I, and I also learned tenfold in life coaching school, was the importance of emptying your mind as frequently as possible and getting your thoughts out as frequently as possible. And for people who have a learning disability, it is very challenging because thoughts get jumbled, thoughts get trapped, they get stuck in your head, and you don't have a clear pathway to get them out through your hands, you know, onto paper. And so it's very, very challenging for people to not who are not able to do that. But for those of us who can, it is absolutely so cathartic and so important because our brain can only handle so much information. And when we have too many thoughts in our head, this was the visualization that I was uh I was taught in life coaching school. It was it was that every thought is like a ball. And when there are thoughts that aren't positive, that are negative thoughts, and you have them inside your head and you don't get them out and you don't externalize them onto paper, they just keep knocking around in your head. And every time they hit another thought, they multiply. And so the thoughts get bigger and bigger and more powerful. And soon one thought that you thought was was was detrimental to you becomes a thousand thoughts that are life-threatening to you, and that you really, for your own health and your own peace and your own ability to be able to move through your your life, you have to be able to remove and get those thoughts out of your head once so you can have more thoughts because we have over 60,000 thoughts a day in our in our head. But otherwise, they just it it becomes overwhelming for a person who doesn't know how to handle those thoughts. And so getting thoughts down on paper almost takes their power away. And it and it does in fact humanize our power. It puts our power, it puts the the the thought or the belief or the the horrible thing that we're thinking onto paper where we're much more equipped to deal with it because we see it and we can look at it and we can see that on paper it's not gonna hurt us, it's not gonna do anything, it's not gonna, it's not gonna destroy us. And so getting those thoughts, positive and negative, out onto paper and externalizing them outside of your body is so very important to allow each individual to feel emotionally stable. And when we know that emotional eating stems from emotion, emotional dysregulation and not feeling emotions and not expressing them and keeping them bottled up and then having them explode, you know, just bottle up and brew up inside of you. It makes sense. Why wouldn't you journal? It's it's five minutes a day, and that can keep emotional eating at bay and it can keep it from stop from happening, and it can help you feel more even-keeled and better equipped to deal with the emotions of a day. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you do that? So the other piece of it is it allows you to be able to track your growth as you are moving through whatever process you're moving through. And sometimes it's just your daily life. You can go back and you can look at a journal entry from three months ago, and when you aren't when you aren't really sure if you're making progress, and you can see how far you've come. And it no longer then becomes just about the data that you get from the scale or the data that you get from other people. Now you have this tangible product that you can refer back to. And I always tell people having a journal is so important because if things are going well, we always want to reproduce that. We want to say, okay, how can we do that more often? If we're having really great days, we want to know what exactly we're doing to create those great days. If you have a journal, you know exactly what's happening, you know exactly how it's going down. So why not? Let's let's do that. Let's have a record of what it is that we want to have happening and what it is that we want to um reproduce in our lives. So now we know the specifics of both journaling and gratitude. And so now, how do we integrate these two practices into our daily lives? So I'm going to give you um some suggestions, but the most important suggestion is to start small. Don't try and do anything big, don't buy a big, huge journal and say, I'm gonna fill these a page every day. No, just go small, very small. So the my first suggestion is to just focus on, because you can kind of kill two birds with one stone, is just focus on gratitude first. Because that's a that's an easy one. So in the morning, three things you're grateful for. And I always say three things you're grateful for in the last 24 hours, three things that have happened to you or that you realize in the last 24 hours that you're grateful for. That's morning. Your evening routine is writing down one win from the day. What's one win? It doesn't mean it matters if it's big or small. One win, what is it? What is it and why did it happen? Um second thing is you can also, if you don't want to do journaling, you can do journaling. You can also connect journaling to emotional eating and ask yourself these questions. So they could be a question each day. It could be one question for, you know, every three days. And the first question is, what am I feeling before I want to eat? And that's just, and you just write, you just a couple sentences, three, a paragraph. It doesn't have to be, you know, it's not a it doesn't have to be a pull of surprise, it doesn't have to be a book. It's just what emotion am I feeling before I want to eat? Second question, it could be on a different day. What do I actually need right now when I'm feeling like I need to eat? What do I need right now? And then the third question what's one thing I did today that I'm proud of? Those are simple questions like that, simple journal prompts like that that can really, really help you. Now, I have a journal, I have a uh 30 journal prompts for weight loss that I'm happy to share with you, and I will uh drop that in the um in the show notes, and you can get those 30 journal prompts, and that can take you through um a month of journaling. And if you could do consistency over perfection, over length, over quantity, just or quality, just trying to get yourself into the habit of journaling. Two sentences, three sentences, some days it's one, some days it's a couple of words. That's fine. But just get your journal out. Get your journal out and do something. Just get some of those thoughts, feelings, emotions down on paper and let your brain get a little bit of a break. A little bit of a break. So now gratitude and journaling support the first R in the three Rs to food freedom. And that that R is routine. And so remember the three R's routine. And again, this routine builds consistency, emotional stability, fewer urges, fewer binges, you know, ability to to uh eat less food and to lose weight naturally without needing to diet. Um the second R is that rewiring of your of your mindset, and that supports you that this the journaling and gratitude absolutely rewires everything. When we come from a place of gratitude and abundance, we are automatically already rewiring our thought system. And then that that third's that third R of radical accountability is journaling increases your self-accountability. Because when you write something down, you are being accountable to yourself. You are acknowledging what's happening in your life, you're acknowledging what you're doing, your role in it. And that is the first step to real radical accountability because radical accountability is really being accountable fully and completely for yourself, your actions, and everything that you do. And over time, all of these things compound and they build and they they create a stronger foundation for you to be able to deal with the ups and downs that are inevitable in life. We can't get around them. We can't, we can't avoid the inevitable ups and downs, but we can absolutely create systems and routines in place to allow us to be able to handle them in a much better way that actually serves our lives. So, three simple steps that you can implement today. Morning gratitude, those three things that you're grateful for in the last 24 hours, your evening reflection, what did I do today that I that honored my body? What did I do that? I'm proud of myself. What's one thing that uh what's one win for the day? So you have some evening piece that you do. And then you also a third thing that you can do through journaling is noticing when you have urges and writing them down and asking yourself, so how was I feeling before? Did I actually eat? Did I give in to the urge? If you did, you don't give any shame. But if you did, you give into the urge. What did you eat? How'd you feel afterwards? How do you, how'd you, how'd you move past it? And you just, again, those midday, it doesn't have to be just be at morning at night, it could just be any time. It could be you get an urge and you pick up your journal and you start writing about how you're feeling. And that can be the thing that can help you sidestep that journal, that gurge, and sidestep that desire to eat when you're really not hungry. So all of these things can be kind of incorporated in. So those are three very simple things that you can do. You don't have to do all three of them. You can just do one. You don't have to do any. When you're ready, you have things that you can pick. So those are three ways of really getting yourself to start moving in the direction. Gratitude changes your focus, journaling changes your awareness. And together, they change your relationship with food. If you would like a copy of my 30 journal prompts for weight loss, go to in the show notes or click on the link to my Instagram. If you follow me, great, send me a DM. If you don't, start to follow me and then send me a DM with the word gratitude, and I will send you a copy of my 30 weight loss journal prompts that you can use, and they will be great ways of starting and your journaling routine and see how that changes your life. I hope this podcast was helpful. I think journaling and gratitude are so very important, and I hope that you've learned a lot and I hope you really embrace the idea of changing your relationship with food by incorporating one or both of these very important routines. All right, we'll see you next week. 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 eating, including the use of hypnosis to uncover the root cause of your eating, go to my website, Kristen Jones Coaching dot com.