BEE #161: Why Food Obsession Is NOT The Real Problem

If you can follow the meal plan for a couple of days and then suddenly feel like everything unravels, this episode is for you.

So many women think the problem is a lack of discipline, but that is rarely the full story. In this episode of the Breakthrough Emotional Eating podcast, I discuss the deeper issue underneath the all-or-nothing cycle with food: the loss of self-trust that gets built over years of chronic dieting, pressure, restriction, and harsh food rules.

If you have ever felt like cravings get louder the moment you try to be “good,” like food takes over your thoughts, or like you keep ending up back at square one, I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with you. Your brain is responding exactly as it should, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept it.  Food obsession is often a predictable response to deprivation, not a sign that you are weak or incapable.

Inside this episode, I walk you through the restriction-to-deprivation-to-preoccupation cycle and explain why chronic dieting often creates the very struggle women blame themselves for. We also talk about how the belief “I can’t be trusted around food” becomes an identity trap that quietly chips away at self-worth, confidence, and hope for lasting change.

I share the framework behind my free 3-Day Lose The Food Obsession Challenge, happening April 27th-30th inside my Facebook group, Breakthrough Emotional Eating: Change Your Beliefs & Lose Weight. In the challenge, we focus on small wins, moderation without punishment, and rebuilding trust in yourself one choice at a time so that sustainable weight loss and a healthier relationship with food can finally begin to stick.

Click the link here to sign up for the free 3 Day Lose The Food Obsession Challenge.

I hope to see you inside the challenge. 

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 and fee...

Transcript

Welcome And The Hunger Trap

SPEAKER_00 0:02

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. So I am so excited to talk about something that I know so many people, so many women in particular, are holding on that are carrying. And honestly, it is so much bigger, and it's always been so much bigger than food and how they interact with food. Food may be the thing that you think about all day. And yes, emotional eating may be the thing that you feel frustrated by. And your weight, let's be honest, might be the thing that is the most visible and it's most painful. It's right there in front of you. And you really wish all of those things could be could be addressed and dealt with. But underneath it, there's also something that is deeper, that is oftentimes going on with us that we don't even recognize, we don't even realize, we don't see it. But it honestly is the thing that is driving all of the thoughts, the compulsions, the things that we're doing, the pain that we're feeling. And that is a loss of trust that we feel in ourselves. And it's that feeling of why do I know what to do and I just can't do it? Or why can't I be consistent? Why am I good for two or three days? And then it just goes away. And there is that ongoing discouragement that you feel that you have to start over again and again. And secretly, I know I felt this way, that it was like, can I really even do this? Can I can't, is there, is there something wrong with me that I can't figure this out and that I can't stick with it? Why do I have to get so sad and so upset? And then I'm committed to doing something, but then I do it for a very short period of time. And then it's like, forget it. I'm it's out the window, and I'm right back to where I started with the frustration, with the disappointment, and with the anger, the anger that I that I feel towards myself, that I have felt towards myself, that you might also feel towards yourself. And it's just, it's this horrible, horrible cycle that just can't feels like it can't be broken. And when we have spent years, for me, decades, of chronic dieting, years trying to feel better about myself and thinking that losing weight was the answer. And I've done it so many times, and I'm sure you have to, using pressure, restrictions, extremes, self-loathing, self-criticism. It really makes total sense that by now we're all exhausted, we're defeated, and we are so disconnected from ourselves and what we truly want. And honestly, this is what I want to talk about. Because I don't think that the biggest issue for women when it comes to their weight is that they need to find a better plan or a better system or a better coach to work with. The bigger issue is that women have been taught to pursue weight loss in a way that makes them more obsessed with food, more unhappy with themselves at their core, and less able to trust their bodies, their choices, and their own ability to create change. And if that sounds like you, I'm so glad you're here. And I want you to stick with me for this whole episode because I also want to share something that I have just created that I'm gonna be doing very soon that will help with this. So I about two years ago, I closed my Facebook group and I was like, that's it. I'm off Facebook. I left Facebook, didn't post, uh, didn't even go on it for almost two years for a variety of reasons. But the reality is that I've I've kind of missed it and I've missed the connections that I get to have with women who have been in the same shoes that I have walked in and that are feeling the same feelings that I have felt. And so just about maybe two or three weeks ago, I kind of re-evaluated my place on Facebook. Um, actually, probably three or four months ago, I started posting again, but re-evaluated about about two weeks ago that it was time for me to come back to having a Facebook group that was exclusively for women who were going through the same things that I have gone through, but my my perspective has changed. I now realize that the thing that I struggled with and the thing that was really causing me so much pain and just unhappiness in my life, was this constant pursuit of happiness through my weight and through the means that I needed to get to my weight being where I wanted it to be. I was and have always been a chronic dieter, thinking that the next new diet, the next thing, the next time I lose weight, that's gonna be the time that I do it right. That's gonna be the time that it's I finally get it right and I actually feel good about myself. And that was my mistake. That was the thing that has that drove me for so long, and it was the thing that kept me stuck for decades of just this relentless pursuit of maybe this time it's gonna work, maybe this time I'm gonna do it, and then the weight's gonna stay off, and I'm actually gonna feel good about myself. And what I realized was I needed to work on how I felt about myself and how I felt about who I was, and the fact that for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, I didn't trust my decisions. I didn't trust decisions that I made. I always needed someone else to tell me what to do because I didn't trust myself. And that is something that I've just very recently come to through work with a coach and through my own personal just endeavors that I have had to go through down the rabbit hole of personal development, that my issues have always been that I don't trust myself. And that is very, very deeply ingrained. And it's something that I have had to work on and I constantly am working on it, and I know I will have to work on it probably for the rest of my life. Um, it is not something that just goes away. So that has been why I have wanted to take this different direction, this different path, this different focus and perspective on weight loss and really getting to what the real problem is. And so I just recently created, and I'm doing it next week. I've created a new free experience called the three-day lose the food obsession challenge. And I today want to tell you what it is, what I'll be teaching in it, and why I believe it can be an important first step for you and for anyone tired of chronic dieting and ready for something more sustainable. Because it doesn't just address the number on the scale, it addresses all of the things behind it and the deeper issues that really lie in why we aren't happy with ourselves. But before I get to the challenge itself, I really want to slow down. I want to talk about what the real problem is. So many women have spent years trying to lose weight and trying to feel good about themselves by being strict, by being controlled, and by trying to be in air quotes on track. And they've believed that the answer is finally finding the right set of rules and the right set of conditions and then doing them perfectly. And they tell themselves that if they could just stop eating the wrong foods, stop emotional eating, stop craving foods, and just be more disciplined, then everything would finally click. But you know what happens is that we do find some motivation. And if you're like me, you feel hopeful, you feel determined because you're so low and you feel so badly, there's no way to feel but up. So you feel determined, you tell yourself that this time it's going to be different, and you get maybe two or three days in, and then the restriction starts. And sometimes it's a physical restriction when you start telling yourself what you can't eat and cutting out certain foods. And sometimes it's a mental restriction where you're constantly telling yourself what you should and should not eat, what you need to avoid, what you've quote unquote ruined, and then how you need to make up for it. And the more restricted you feel, the more food starts to take up more space in your mind. And you think about what you can eat, what you cannot eat, whether you've been good, whether you've been bad, whether you need to make up or compensate, whether you start over tomorrow or Monday or after the weekend. And let's be honest, y'all, that mental load that we carry is exhausting. And eventually the cravings, the overeating, the emotional eating, or the falling off track happens. And what do you do in that moment? You say, I'm the problem. There's something wrong with me. We don't say, maybe this approach is unmaybe this approach is unsustainable. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. No. We say, I'm the problem. And honestly, that's the part that I've done so many times and I've torn myself down. And it breaks my heart that I've ever done that to myself. And I've done it more times than I can count. And it's it's something that I've personalized. I've made it about me. And if you're like me, you've made it about you. And you haven't made it about not having the not being told the right information. Not that this is a response to restriction. It's a response to a pattern of behavior that is not sustainable. If you're like me, you've turned it into a character flaw. You've turned it into there is something wrong with me. And then you decided that you don't have any willpower. You're too emotional. You sabotage yourself. You cannot be trusted around food. I mean, how many times? I don't know how many times I've said, I'm not eating sugar because I can't be trusted around it. Y'all, that is just a bunch of crap. We can't that's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. There's nothing that we shouldn't be able to eat. And it's not that we can't trust ourselves. But what we've done is we've created that we've created this story that has held us back and now we make it personal about us. And so now food isn't the only struggle. Now we're struggling with our identity. We're struggling with who we are as a person and our value and our self-worth. And we're struggling with our belief in ourselves. And we start looking at do I even deserve this? Maybe I don't. Maybe I don't deserve this at all. And that, y'all, is no way. That is no way to live. That is no way for any of us to treat ourselves. And it is not something that I want to be a part of. And I feel like the diet industry does that over and over and over. And that's why I wanted to create something totally different. And I've been doing this for years. I've known that there was a psychological component for years. And it has taken my own exploration and me really digging deep into my own issues to realize that there are definitely things that I can be doing differently for people that I can be presenting in a different way. And I feel like I'm always going to be evolving, that this is always going to be a program and process. And that each time I figure something out, I'm going to share it with you. So in this three-day challenge that I'm going to be doing, I don't want to just give you information about food. I want to create something that is actually the beginnings of addressing this deep wound that we have all had as chronic dieters. And I want us to start to heal that wound. And so this is kind of where my free Facebook group comes in, because it's where the challenge is going to actually take place. So if you're not already in my new Facebook group, it's called Breakthrough Emotional Eating, Change Your Beliefs and Lose Weight. And this group was created as a place where women can begin approaching the journey of weight loss and the journey of rediscovering themselves and valuing and trusting themselves, not from a place of shame, not from a place of rigid rules, not about pretending that we don't care about weight loss because I'm so tired of people saying, no, you shouldn't, you know, it's it's wrong to pursue weight loss. That is not true. I want people to be happy in their bodies. And if that means losing weight and being healthy, then I will fully support that. But it really is about changing your beliefs, your patterns, and your emotional habits that are keeping you stuck so that weight loss and health aren't able to be sustainable. I want them to be sustainable. So I want you to learn how to be able to do that. And that's why I created this new group and I'm taking a really different approach with it. And it's why I'm hosting the three-day lose the food obsession challenge within my group. So this challenge is for you. If you are a woman who is tired of thinking about food all the time, tired of starting over, tired of swinging back and forth between being good, being bad, beating yourself up, then overeating, and then honestly, just being tired of all of the things that go along with really trying to make change in our lives and then finding that they're not lasting. And then we just, we just beat ourselves up. If you're tired of that, this is the challenge for you. So the purpose of the challenge, I want to make sure you know, because I'm gonna be honest. I am not planning on fixing you in three days. I'm not. Um, you know, this has been an ongoing journey and a journey for me that has lasted years. And I think that's so oftentimes people are overpromised. Women are told, like, oh my gosh, just do this, and it's gonna be magical and you're gonna be totally good. And that's a lie, and I'm not gonna tell you that. But the purpose is to have you experience something important. And what I want you to experience is I want you, I want to help you stop blaming yourself. I want to help you understand what is actually happening beneath all the noise and the obsession and the food struggle. I want to help you be able to create small, small, they gotta be tiny, small wins that remind you that honestly, there's nothing you can't do in your life. There is nothing you can't do and that you can make change. That's what the challenge is about. So let me just tell you a little bit about a little bit more about what we're gonna be addressing in these three days. So, day one, I'm gonna be talking about why food obsession is even a thing in the first place. So the first day is really important because you uh have to know that food obsession and thinking about food doesn't mean that you're weak. It doesn't mean that you lack discipline, it doesn't mean that you lack willpower. And honestly, food obsession is not the real problem. It is actually a totally predictable response to restriction, deprivation, scarcity thinking, and all or nothing that we do when we're dieting. So on the first day, I'm gonna help you understand that soul cycle, and we're gonna talk about how restriction creates deprivation, how deprivation creates preoccupation, and that this happens in our brain and it does it as a survival mechanism. It does it to keep us alive and how preoccupation intensifies cravings, and how that leads to overeating, guilt, and then having to start over again. So, in reality, I just want you on day one just to feel like, oh, God, it's not me. It's not that I'm doing something wrong. It's not that that I just am like that I'm just not smart enough to do this. But the the struggle and the struggle that so many women go through is actually quite normal. It's normal because we haven't been taught the right things. And that's where I want you to start to know that trust in yourself can be rebuilt and it can be rebuilt very, very quickly, and it can be rebuilt by you doing and learning things that are actually gonna make a difference. So then, day number two, we're going deeper into what actually is driving your urge to eat. And we're gonna talk about the difference between physical hunger, cravings, emotional eating. Because not every urge means the same thing, and not every urge needs the same response. And we are building an awareness in you and a powerful empowerment within you that you're gonna be able to know what to do when those urges come up. Many women feel like they're constantly reacting automatically to food. Like there's no, they have no, they have no choice as to how they're doing it. They feel like once the craving hits, it's over. Their brain tells them they need to eat something and they do it. But there are so many other things that we can be doing. And I want to be able to empower you on day number two to help you learn how to pause, how to notice what's happening, and then how to respond more intentionally. Absolutely not perfectly, because this is not about perfectionism, but how to respond intentionally. And the distinction between intentional and not perfection is really important because again, our goal is never perfection. The goal is to help you experience what you can do to stop those automatic autopilot responses and how you can make conscious decisions and constant choices and to respond differently and to be empowered by the responses and the decisions that you make. And it's again another step towards you trusting yourself. And then finally on day three, we're gonna talk about moderation without deprivation. And there's all sorts of buzz about moderation and how moderation, you know, moderation means like eating half of what, you know, measuring food and then eating half of it and being disappointed and feeling badly about yourself. And that's just part of what you need to do, and always having to be in control. And real moderation is not punishment. Real moderation is eating with intention, satisfaction, awareness, and feeling good about yourself and feeling worthy and knowing that you are enough and that that always is the case. It is learning about how to make choices that support your goals and doing it in a way that serves you without creating obsessive thoughts, rebellion, and frankly, more misery and pain. So on day three, I'm going to help you practice a calmer, more satisfying, more grounded way of eating that can begin to show you how healthy choices do not have to come from a place of fear. And we don't have to be afraid of doing without food. We don't have to be afraid of being denied things. I want you to walk away saying, I feel calmer, I feel clearer, I have more clarity about where I need to go. I'm not ashamed of myself. And for the first time in a long time, I actually might be able to do this. That's what I want you to be thinking after day three. That's my goal. Because again, this is so much bigger than food. This is about how you really feel about yourself. You don't need more nutrition. There are so many of you out there that could tell me the exact calorie count and how many grams of protein and what they should be eating and what they shouldn't be eating. And that's not what you need to have more of. You need to heal your relationship with yourself. You need to stop using unsustainable ways to chase weight loss. You need to stop believing that the only option is to go super restrict and to give up. And you need a new experience, a new way of dealing with food, of dealing with your body, and dealing with your own internal dialogue. And that is exactly why I created my Facebook group and why I created this challenge. So if you've been unhappy with yourself, unhappy with your weight, tired of being getting strategies that leave you feeling obsessive, discouraged, more disconnected from yourself, from who you are. I want you to know that I'm here for you. I'm here and I'm doing this for you, and I want you to be a part of this. Because it's okay for you to want to lose weight. And it's okay to feel good in your body. And it's more than okay to feel confident, to have energy, to have better health. But you don't get those things through sacrifice and through extremes that eventually make your life worse than it than you feel like it is right now. You cannot keep hating yourself into changing. That is no way to live. You've got to stop thinking that you have to prove your worth before all this happens. You're worthy no matter what. You're worthy right now as you're listening to these words. There is a sustainable path, and it begins with understanding your patterns, changing the beliefs that lie underneath those patterns, building trust with yourself. One small little victory at a time. So please, if this all sounds like something that you need, I am with you. I'm there, I'm gonna be in there doing it with you. I really would love for you to sign up for my upcoming three-day lose the food obsession challenge. It's in my Facebook group, Breakthrough Emotional Eating, Change Your Beliefs and Lose Weight. And I'm gonna leave the link in the show notes to sign up for the challenge. And as once you sign up for the challenge, if you're not a member of the group, there's gonna be a button that you hit, and that's gonna take you over and you can join the group. This is gonna be super supportive. It's practical, hands-on, absolutely implemented. I'm gonna have you implement things right away. It's gonna be a powerful three days where I help you understand the deeper cycles, help you respond to eating differently, and begin rebuilding trust with yourself. So if you're tired of thinking about food all the time, tired of starting over, and ready for just frankly, sustainable, peaceful, you know, relationship with food, relationship with yourself. Because y'all, when it comes time down to it, the only person we are ever gonna be with, the only person that we can ever rely on totally to be with us for the rest of our lives is ourself. You darn well better like that woman. You like, you better like who that woman is because you are with her for the rest of your life. So I really hope that this has given you some inspiration. I hope it inspires you. If this episode resonates with you, I would love for you to subscribe to my podcast. I'd love for you to share this with someone that you know who needs it. Because you know, y'all, I remember when I first posted that I was starting a Facebook group. This was uh eight years ago, when I first owned that I was an emotional eater and I started my Facebook group, my first Facebook group. There were so many women who were like, oh my God, like I didn't even know what to call this. Like, like you're describing me. And when I wrote my book, um, When Food is your drug, I had so many women say, Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm finally seen, like this is this is me. Somebody finally gets what I've been going through. So, y'all, I've been there. I have been there and I'm still there, and I'm still I work on it constantly because I know this is something. This is always, it's an evolution, it's a work in progress, it's something, but but I know that together we can take these things that we've done, these patterns that we've established, and we can put them, you know, land them on their ears and we can do different things. We can make our lives exactly what we want. I know it because I've done it myself, and I'm continuing to do it every day. So always remember the problem is not that you are incapable of change. The problem is that you're trying to change through methods that were not intended to ever be kind to you, create trust, or to be sustainable. And I want to teach you how to do that in a way that creates love, creates trust in you, and that you can do for the rest of your life. So I hope to see you in the challenge next week, and I will see you on our next episode. Take care, y'all. 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.