By Lisa Schlosberg

About This Session:

How do you feel when you get on the scale? How do you feel when you look in the mirror? How do you feel when you can’t stop eating? While these experiences occur on the physical dimension and involve our bodies, they also influence the way we feel mentally and emotionally. And, because eating and dieting can be used to regulate our emotions, how we feel internally affects the way we behave externally. Simply put: human beings are mind-body systems. However, when we struggle with weight management, over- or under-eating, yoyo-dieting, and/or body image issues, we tend to consider them physical problems requiring physical interventions (such as diet and exercise), without considering our mental and emotional (invisible) markers of health.

There are many reasons why 98% of dieters gain their weight back, obesity rates continue to climb, and Weight Watchers just partnered with a meditation app: the mind-body connection is our key to sustainable, holistic, long-term health. Connecting the dots between trauma, stress, emotion, coping, eating, food, and dieting, this workshop will be a launchpad for audience members to understand themselves in a new way and move forward with practical knowledge and skills for establishing their healthiest and happiest lives.

• In this workshop, you will learn:
• Why diets don’t work long-term
• Why you eat (and can’t stop) when you’re not hungry
• Why you keep turning back to diets, even though you’re sick and tired of them
• Why you feel defeated, hopeless, confused, and stuck in your relationship with food AND what to do about it

Okay, here we are.
So the way I would like to begin is first just telling you kind of an agenda.
So we're going to be here for a couple hours.
I don't plan on a break of any kind.
It's totally okay.
If you want to get up and use the bathroom or something, all of this will be recorded.
Everyone who's here will get a recording of this.
So if you have to just pop out at some point or something, that's totally cool, you will be able to get
the whole thing.
So the agenda really is the title of this workshop is how did you get here?
And also, how do you get out? So.
So everything that I know about emotional eating and how we got here, how we got out.
So that's kind of the overview of what I'm teaching and the way that I'm teaching it.
But then also I would love to practice some skills.
So we're going to be practicing some stuff together, and then we'll do a Q and A toward the end.
So that's kind of the agenda.
And what I would like to do just to get started, is first, even though I kind of already did this, is just
say thank you for being here.
I'm so amazed about how many people on a Saturday, in the middle of the day, for some of you at
night, for some of you in the morning, for some of you are here.
And there's one thing I want to share with you that is this African philosophy that I learned a few
years ago called Ubuntu.
And what that means is really humanity and connection and space speaks to kind of the oneness of
the collective.
But the reason that I bring it up now is because the way that I learned it, the translation I learned
was, I am here because you are here, and we are all here because we are all here.
And I just mean that so deeply because it's so true.
I am here because you are here.
And thank you.
This is what I want to be doing on a Saturday.
So I just so appreciate it.
Okay, so who am I, and why am I qualified to talk about this?
My name is Lisa Schlossberg.
I am a certified personal trainer.
I'm a holistic health coach, and I'm also a licensed social worker.
And why am I qualified to talk about this is not just because I have titles and experience as a
clinician in a few different ways, but also because I've lived through much of what I want to talk to
you about today.
So my story, very briefly.
Sorry, here we go.
My story, very Briefly, for those of you who are not really familiar, I grew up very overweight.
And as a kid, I was what I refer to as the strong one.
I was always fine.
Nothing was an issue.
I just dealt with everything.
And I felt that that was the way to do it is, I'm fine. Leave me alone.
It is what it is, all of that.
And so I was really tough.
But the way that I was really tough was because I was using food and eating and my body as a way
to make that possible for me.
And so it wasn't until.
And I had tried many diets growing up.
Nothing ever lasted more than like a couple weeks at a time.
And then when I was in college was when I kind of took it into my own hands.
I started on Jenny Craig.
And then I just learned, the less you weigh, the less you have to eat. This should be simple.
And so I did.
I knew how much to eat.
I ate less, I knew how much to work out, I worked out more.
And I felt like I was the master of weight loss.
And then at the end of my weight loss, when 150lbs came off was when I first spoke to a
nutritionist who is in the room right now, thank you for being here.
Who said to me, you are in starvation mode.
And the reason that you can't lose any more weight and the reason that you just lost your period is.
And the reason that your hair is falling out and the reason that you're cold all the time and you
can't sleep, the reason for all of this is because you're in starvation mode and you're malnourished
and you have to stop for now.
You have to stop trying to lose weight.
And this is at a point where I was like, I have ten pounds left to lose.
Like, stop for now. What?
But that's what it was.
And so I had to learn how to go from a whole childhood of overeating and obesity and then under
eating and malnourishment to finding the balance of how am I going to live in this body for the rest
of my life?
In a mentally and emotionally healthy way, in a physically healthy way, how am I supposed to eat
and how am I supposed to cope so that I don't end up being £300 again?
And so here I am to basically teach you what I learned from all of that experience.
But also, that was seven, seven, eight years ago now.
And so I am really happy to say I am on no kind of diet.
I'm not weighing myself.
I haven't in years and this is what I want for people, is to not get so lost in this whole struggle.
What I want to do first, before we talk about emotional eating, we really, I think, have to talk about
the context within which we encounter this problem.
So the count, the context is the culture, the society, where are we?
And we as individuals, cannot be separated from the environment in which we live.
So what we have to do before we talk about emotional eating and how we want to understand this,
we do have to talk about how we understand it currently and why is it that we're not really getting
it.
So I think it's important to start here.
The cultural context.
There's a lot to consider, but first is just that we live in a world of skinny privilege or thin privilege.
And what that means is basically as someone who has been both in a thin and privileged body, but
also an obese and oppressed body, what that means is there are chairs and booths and roller
coasters and seat belts that fit people of a thinner body that don't fit people of a larger body.
So that's just the concept of what privilege and oppression means as it relates to this.
So we live in a world that's designed for thin people and not for those people of a larger size.
So we have to just look at that.
But what I think is important about this is that this is a privilege that you can earn.
You can't every day go from a minority racially to a majority racially.
You can't change just your gender.
We can't just go from oppressed to privileged.
But we do have the ability to.
To change our body.
So we also have to consider that in this whole dynamic, two is fatphobia. So just the.
Again, the context of blindly applauding weight loss, if we don't know, how did someone lose
weight?
Or why did someone lose weight?
I know stories of people who've been really sick and hospitalized for kidney liver disease, come out
a few pounds lighter, and everyone's like, what did you do?
I want some of what you have.
And it's like, you don't want that.
But we don't think because of the fat phobic society that we live in.
So again, we just have to be aware of all of this.
Three, cultural relativism.
So what that means is if we were in a different time and place, we would want a different thing in
terms of how we look, the beauty ideals and body sizes.
So if we think back to Marilyn Monroe, who was a size like 10, that is not the beauty ideal today.
In the same Place.
So that's versus time.
But then also place is there are people in other countries, Africa, some African countries, for
example, where the more fat you have on your body, the bigger you are, the better it is because
that's a sign of wealth and worth.
And so we just also have to have our eye on so much of what we value is because we were taught
to value that because of the culture we're living in.
4. Intersectionality.
So just considering, what is it to have a lot of different social identities that overlap?
So what is it like to be in a bigger or smaller body as.
As an African American versus someone who's white?
What is it like for a man versus a woman?
So just having that context on it. This is not simple.
This is not a simple thing.
So what I want to do is show us how, how deep and how complex it actually is.
Mental health stigma.
We have a society that it's easier, it's honestly easier to eat your feelings and feel your feelings.
In this kind of world, there's a mental health stigma.
What's wrong with us that we have feelings we need to deal with?
The diet industry, the $80 billion diet industry, I'll say much more about.
But it's powerful and it's the front line.
If there's people struggling with emotional eating, we also have to consider, well, where do most of
those people go?
To the diet industry.
So the front line of people who are really designed to be helping us with the physical consequence
of this are actually just making the issue worse.
And again, I'll say more on that.
The media, what do we see? What do we see?
Romanticized rapid and extreme weight loss.
Not healthy, not sustainable, not mind, body, soul alignment.
Just how did you get the weight off and how do I do it too?
The healthcare industries, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, all of these, we have
industries that, you know, the insurance companies will cover weight loss, surgery, but not weekly
therapy appointments.
So again, just the context of how we're getting here, the food industry, who is so brilliantly
manipulating our food to be as addictive as possible, because that's just their job.
And within, again, just the world of consumerism, which is, if I have a problem, I can buy the
solution.
Capitalism, there are problems, I can sell the solution.
And patriarchy, we live in a patriarchy.
And so we just have to understand that all of these things work together to get a lot of us in a place
where it's like, I have a serious problem.
I, as an individual, have this problem.
And the truth is, a lot of this individual problem can be understood by looking at the culture and the
environment in which we all exist as individuals.
So my whole point here, this is one of my favorite Einstein quotes.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
The reason that I'm talking about Einstein here is because we have to change.
What this means is we have to change the way that we're thinking about this.
It doesn't mean that we have to change the way that we're eating.
It doesn't mean that we have to focus on the food.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
Which means what we have to do to solve this problem is raise the consciousness.
And what that means is think about it differently.
And so we don't want to get lost on the physical dimension.
As I sometimes talk about it, it's not about the food.
We have to be thinking about this differently and raising the consciousness through which we come
at this with, so what does that mean for me?
This is the main takeaway of today.
If the biggest problem you have with food is that you're an emotional eater, that's not a problem
that you have with food.
It's a question about how you're coping with your emotions.
This is everything we're going to be talking about today.
I think the problem with emotional eating is not emotional eating.
The problem with emotional eating is that we don't understand it.
Emotional eating is not actually a problem, it's a solution.
But this is where I like to say, there's nothing wrong with us for being here.
We have to eat food every day and we have to feel feelings because we're human.
And what we have to do now is just unpack it and understand it.
How do we get to such a place where this is so complicated and confusing and that's what you're
here to out?
So what I like to do is first start with just this understanding that we have the dsm.
So the dsm, for anyone who's not familiar, I have one right here, actually.
Here's my dsm.
The DSM is where we get all of our mental illnesses, the disorders for what is an eating disorder
and what is not.
And so because we live in this world that we have a DSM and a whole mental health treatment
system based on the dsm, we have eating disorders that are kind of boxes.
You have anorexia, many of us are familiar.
You have bulimia, you have binge eating.
There's at this point, there are many added to the latest dsm.
But my point is that it sets up this culture and belief system that is some people have a disorder
and some people do not.
And if you don't have a label for a disorder, then you're healthy.
And if you don't have a label for a disorder, then you're good, and you don't have an issue with
food.
And that's not true.
And so there's a lot of people who are struggling with food and eating and their bodies and their
weight, but not in a way that is so severe and so frequent and so intense that it warrants a clinical
diagnosis.
And so my point with this is just to show kind of what I believe is really the truth of it, which is
what?
We're on a spectrum.
And there are some people who eat to live, and then on the other side of things, there are people
with diagnosed clinical eating disorders.
But the truth of it, as I understand it, is that every human being has a body and a brain.
Every human feels feelings, and everyone has to eat food every day.
So we're all here somewhere, and we just have to figure out where we are.
But the reason that this is important is because why it matters for us is the same way.
You don't need to have clinical depression to feel sadness sometimes, and you don't need to be
diagnosed with general anxiety disorder to feel anxiety sometimes.
You also don't need a diagnosed eating disorder to have a dysfunctional, disordered, unhealthy,
stressful, confusing relationship with food.
And that's just what this is. It's a spectrum.
So I think it's also important to understand that research shows that people who are diagnosed
with eating disorders more likely than not float among the disorders and float among the different
labels.
And so there are some anorexic tendencies, maybe some binge eating tendencies, maybe some
bulimia tendencies, but it's more often that we float among them than.
Than just stay in one box, as I like to call it.
So we just have to know that for ourselves.
And also that the research shows there's more people struggling with disordered eating than eating
disorders.
Which is just to say there's so many of us.
There's 30 million people in the United States alone with diagnosed eating disorders.
There's more than that who are struggling in a way that doesn't have a label or a title or a
diagnosis or a treatment plan yet.
And that, I think, is why we're here, is we don't have an eating disorder, but we struggle with
emotional eating.
So what are we supposed to do well, that's what you're here for.
So what I want to teach you first is the way that I see this, the way that I see this is, okay, you are
the human.
I see some of my clients are smiling. They've seen this before.
You are the human over here.
And the reason that I create this very elementary diagram is because we really do have to
understand.
We are a body, and then separately, we are a brain.
And together the brain body system equals the human being.
So if we're over here being like, I don't know, I just really struggle with emotional eating and I don't
really understand why.
Well, my point is we have eating that's for the body.
We have emotion that lives in the brain.
So we're trying to understand emotional eating.
We have to understand what's going on in these two things as two separate entities because we
have to be living with both of them for the rest of forever.
So we just have to say that.
And this is where sometimes when it comes to intuitive eating, and I'm not going to say too much
about intuitive eating right now, but when it comes to just listen to your body, I hear that a lot. Just
listen to your body. Just listen to your body.
Well, sometimes the response that I get when I say something like that is, well, I'll listen to my
body, but then I'll just eat the whole sleeve of Oreos.
So is that what I'm supposed to do?
And my answer to that is, I get it. I so get it.
Totally been there.
But this is why I know if you're saying something like that it's not your body that wants a whole
sleeve of Oreos, but your brain absolutely wants a whole sleeve of Oreos.
So this is what we have to figure out is who are we listening to and what's the drive?
Is it coming from the physical body?
Is it coming from the brain?
And how do we know the difference?
Because if you're struggling with emotional eating, this is, this is the breakdown that we have to
just kind of start with.
So I see.
Oh, chat. Okay, nevermind.
Okay, so what I want to do is first start with Brain Science 101.
You have to know what's going on in the brain.
So this is basically Brain Science 101, that we have some positive emotions, some negative
emotions.
I don't love to use positive and negative to describe emotions because they're all just feelings and
we love them all, etc.
But I saw this online and it was just like too good to pass up because this is exactly how it works.
So why this matters for us is first, on the negative emotion side of things, we have things like
stress.
And then on the positive emotion side of things, we have the happy chemicals.
And I'm going to say more about both of these.
But the point is that our brain is always trying to reach an equilibrium between these two.
So when the negative gets too high, we don't have a choice because of brain science, we have to
bring it back down.
This is just the way that we function.
So on the stress side of things, this is my little picture.
To symbolize stress, we have to understand stress originally as a really great thing.
Stress is not a problem.
Stress is not something we want to get rid of.
Stress is a survival mechanism.
So I use this picture because what happens with stress is, is if we are, for example, being chased
by a lion, our eyes see the lion sends a message to the brain.
And now we have.
We are in fight or flight. Fight. Flight.
Freeze response.
The amygdala, the animal brain, is activated, and we have cortisol, the stress hormone, flooding
through us.
And what that means is we can run away from the tiger and save our lives.
So stress is a survival mechanism, and we have to see it that way because we're not trying to get
rid of stress. Right?
If we were getting rid of stress and then a lion were chasing us in the jungle, we'd be screwed.
So we're not trying to get rid of stress, but what we have to understand about it is that our brain
doesn't know the difference between stressors.
So our brain doesn't know that when you're having a really stressful day at work or with your
partner or whatever it is that's going on for you, everything, every time your phone dings, every
time you're sitting there scrolling, so many things in our everyday life give us create this fight or
flight reaction.
So we are living as though there is a lion chasing us, but there is no lion chasing us.
And this is why.
What we have to know about stress is that it is not about stress or no stress.
It is about acute or chronic.
We are designed to experience acute stress.
Acute stress is going out as a caveman and getting your dinner and then coming back in, retreating
into your cave and recovering Acute stress is okay.
But what we're not designed for is chronic stress is always living in this high state.
So part of the reason, and I think it's easy to understand it this way, I'm going to give you a
metaphor that I learned from John Gabriel, who I used to, who I work with, who also has lost.
He lost 220 pounds by visualizing meditating.
He is the creator of the Gabriel method, if you're interested in more on that.
But what he taught me was you want to think about the brain as though you have this old decrepit
shack and then let's say, and this is where you live, this is your home.
And let's say that you won the lottery and instead of getting rid of your old shack, you decided to
keep your shack and then just build on top of it this big beautiful mansion.
That's the brain. That's what we're working with.
Because your shack brain, as I like to call it, sometimes is your animal brain.
That's your amygdala.
That's what we share with all animals, including lizards.
And this is the part of our brain that is always, always, always just scanning for safety or danger.
It's either going to keep us alive or it's threatening our survival.
That's as black and white as the animal brain can get.
But then on top of this little shack brain, we have this whole mansion of the human experience,
which is every thought, every feeling, every interaction, every experience, everything that we are
going through in this mansion brain has to then be like filtered into this shack brain as either safety
or danger we.
Which is why so much of our life puts us into this fight or flight mode, even though there is no
actual threat.
Ok, so the next thing that is important about this is here we go is this.
When your brain releases one of these chemicals, you feel good.
And so just like we have stressors on one side that are coming from all over, your brain doesn't
know the difference.
We also have a lot of happy chemicals.
When these chemicals are released in the brain, we feel good.
So the reason that this matters for us is because dopamine and serotonin, two of the four happy
chemicals, are released in our brain every time we eat food.
And so I like to use this picture because this is what happens every time we eat anything.
It hits our mesolimbic or reward pathway in the brain.
And this is why human beings are designed to not only feel happy and rewarded when we eat food,
but also to seek out a source of serotonin when our stress gets too high.
So this is where I like to tell you, if you identify as an emotional eater or a stress eater, it is
because you are a human being and it means that your brain and your body, your whole system is
really working properly.
That's not the problem. So we just have to understand from this point that if we are eating when
we're not hungry and we'll keep.
This is what the whole thing is about, is we're designed for this.
This is the way our physiological body, our biological system is wired to exist.
So I also think it's important that food.
Part of the reason that these chemicals are released in the brain is very similar to the reason that
sex feels good is because we're wired to reproduce.
We have the motivation to reproduce, is the same reason that we need to eat food and it feels
good for survival reasons.
If we take out the dopamine receptors from the brains of mice, they die from starvation right next
to food without the motivation to eat it.
So that's how this is working.
And we have that same dynamic in us.
The point here is here now we have the amygdala.
This is your animal brain, the one that is feeling your fear and keeping you safe.
This is your prefrontal cortex where you have all your good judgment and decision making.
This is the part of you that says it's a sleeve of Oreos.
The prefrontal cortex, the amygdala is the one that says this sleeve of Oreos is safety and survival.
The hippocampus, though, is one that I like to talk about because the hippocampus is the part of
the brain that stores our memories.
So the reason that this is important is because if you have ever in your life used food emotionally
to feel better, your hippocampus stores that as an effective way to cope with stress.
So then we just go back to it over and over again.
The neural pathway in your brain gets deeper and stronger so that as soon as you start to feel
stress, well, your brain knows just eat food.
So we have to talk about that.
Because I personally don't believe in self sabotage.
I think some of the time it can be, but I think most of the time it's not self sabotage.
Because what we consider self sabotage is what I consider self soothing.
And I think we have to just understand it that way.
I have two clients I usually talk about in this area.
One who came to me after he lost about 130 pounds and then gained it all back, plus some.
And when I asked him, how does he feel?
How do you feel having this weight back on your body?
His answer was tired and angry, lethargic.
You know, this sucks.
And I was like, well, what are some of the good things about having this weight back on your body?
Good things?
Well, people really don't mess with you as much.
I was like, so it sounds like safety and protection.
And he said, yeah, actually, I have a lot of those issues.
And I said, what do you mean by that?
He said, well, with being adopted and everything.
So that was one. I have another client who came to me when I was a personal trainer in a gym, and
he was about between three and four hundred pounds, I would say.
And when he came to me, he had been seeing so many different dieticians, nutritionists, every one
of them just telling him to eat 1200 calories a day and basically at this point, just yelling at him for
not being able to do it.
And so when he came to me, I asked, do you know when your weight gain began? Do you know
why?
Do you know what happened that your weight gain began?
And he said, well, no one's ever asked me that.
I said, do you know some people don't know.
He was like, of course I know.
And this is a man that worked for the fire department in New York City.
So he said, right after 9, 11, when six of my friends passed away.
And this is my point, is that this is not eating in response to appetite.
This is eating in response to stress and trauma and emotion.
And we just have to understand that this is exactly what's going on.
So not all of us have those experiences that are so clear to see, but a lot of us have similar
experiences, and that's why we're here.
So my point, as always, is it's not that the hunger isn't real.
It's just that the hunger isn't physical.
If we are eating food when our body is not physically hungry, it doesn't mean that there's
something wrong with us.
It doesn't mean that we have to do something different.
It means that we have to understand if we're eating when we're not hungry, it doesn't mean the
hunger isn't real.
It means the hunger isn't physical.
And that's kind of just the beginning of it.
It means that it's up to us to say, what is it?
If it's not for my body, if I'm not eating food because I'm hungry, then what is it?
This is where the questions begin.
So I Love this quote.
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is now the head of.
She has an amazing TED Talk.
I hope you all watch quote is straight from her TED talk.
If you are a doctor and you see 100 kids that all drink from the same well and 98 of them develop
diarrhea, you can go ahead and Write that prescription for dose after dose after dose of antibiotics,
or you can walk over and say, what the h*** is in this well?
And my point is that when we address weight, food eating on the physical dimension, we're not
asking what's in the well, we're just writing prescription for dose after dose of antibiotic.
But we're not actually getting any answers.
What we have to do is just think about what happened when that food became safety, became
comfort, became survival.
When and how and why did food become the solution, not the problem?
Why is it in a holistic sense, not just a physical food eating one?
How did we get here?
What psychological, emotional need is it meeting?
Those are the questions that we have to start asking.
And so the reason that I love Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and everything that she's doing is because
now she's the Surgeon General of the State of California and aces the ACE Study, which I'm going
to talk to you about next.
The ACE study and the Dean Burke Harris go hand in hand.
What Nadine Burke Harris is taking all of the information that we gathered from the ACE study and
now basically making it mainstream healthcare so that all these different pediatric clinics, etcetera,
Are now using what we learned from the ACE study.
Now, the reason this is so important, this is the ACE Study.
This is the ACE pyramid.
The ACE Study, for anyone who's not familiar, is the Adverse Childhood Experience Study.
What it found across the board, statistically significant.
It surveyed 17,500 adults in the United States.
What it found was that all these different health issues that we have later in life, everything from
stroke, heart attack, addiction, pain, all different kinds of things, are actually linked back to
childhood stress and childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
So today, now we know that nine out of the ten leading causes of death are related or can be
traced back to childhood stress and trauma.
So the reason that we're talking about this is because it really, really changed a lot for addiction
treatment.
Because what it meant was that we have to stop questioning and doubting the willpower of this
adult and just start asking what happened to them.
We don't have to be worried about what's wrong with them.
Why can't they just stop drinking?
Why can't they just stop smoking?
What's wrong with them is not the question anymore.
Because now we have the ACE Study and it's obvious if someone is struggling like this later in life,
we have to go back and they have to tell their story.
And we have to understand that.
And so it really changed everything in terms of Addiction.
But the reason that I bring it up here is not just because all of this is so important for us to
understand in terms of the mind and body connection generally, but because, for example, in
myself, when I found the ACE study, I felt like everything started to make sense.
Because when I thought back Now, I was 300 pounds when I was 18 years old.
And that was seen as a problem.
And it was for a lot of reasons, but I never, obviously, was encouraged to think of it as a solution.
How is my obesity and my eating habits a solution?
Well, no doctor ever suggested that.
But when I found the ACE study, things started to make sense because I thought back about my
own story and what was going on in my life when I was a kid.
Well, when I was five, there was a big family trauma.
And the way that I thought about it was I didn't have drugs, alcohol, gambling, cigarettes.
I didn't have any of that accessible to me when I was five years old.
But I did have to eat food every day.
And now at this point, as I'm starting to put all this together, I know that food, because of those
happy chemicals, can affect our brain and our chemistry just the way as other addictions can.
And so what I want to talk to you about especially is that it's not just drugs, alcohol, gambling and
cigarettes.
But what I think is amazing about this is that the reason that the ACE Study was born.
And like the ACE study, I hope you guys hear more and more and more about it.
You will hear more and more about it if you haven't been already.
But why this matters for us is the reason that the ACE study was born was because Vincent Felitti,
who conducted the ACE study, had an obesity clinic.
It didn't start with addiction, it started with obesity.
And so he had an obesity clinic.
And what happened was he was being classic doctor about it, and he was trying to figure out why
people who lost an incredible amount of weight couldn't keep it off.
And so he started like interviewing some of the people he was working with.
And he wasn't working with people that had 20, 30 pounds to lose.
He was working with people that had one to 600 pounds to lose.
And so at one point, one woman he was working with lost, I would say, like, I think it was like close
to like 200 something pounds, kept it off for a few months, and then in a matter of three weeks put
on 37 pounds, which Felitti said he didn't know was physiologically possible to gain so much weight
so fast.
And so when they started talking about it and uncovering things.
It turns out that someone at her job had approached her sexually.
And then she had a whole history of sexual abuse from her grandfather.
And so it occurred to him that there are all these people maybe who have a weight issue because
this was a way of protection, this was a way of finding safety.
And this actually made them feel better, not worse.
And so when I was reading about this, he started ask.
He created all these different questions for the people that he was working with at this obesity
clinic.
He wanted to know how old they were when certain things happen, how much did they weigh when
certain things happen.
And one of the stories he told was how he asked one of the questions was, how much did you
weigh the first time that you were sexually active?
And this woman burst into tears and said, 40 pounds, because it was sexual abuse.
And so he, one after the other, now he's one after the other.
There's all these people who are really obese that have some sort of sexual trauma, physical
abuse, neglect, etc.
All the big traumas that the ACE study accounted for.
And so he's starting to put it together.
But this is before all the ACE study is done.
He's putting all this together with obesity and body size.
And so he brings it to basically the medical community in the obesity world.
And they told him that he's being naive and that he shouldn't listen to his patients because they're
making stories up because they're failures, and these are just excuses.
And so someone said to him at one point, people aren't going to believe you because you have
only like a handful of cases.
What you need to do is get thousands of people.
You need to really prove that this is a thing.
And so the ACE study was born.
And so the whole thing that then revolutionizes addiction treatment got lost in the $80 billion diet
industry, I think, or something in the culture where it didn't do the same thing for people struggling
with emotional eating.
It's not like we have a culture now that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't need a diet
industry.
We just need to figure out why people are eating and not what is wrong with these people for
eating, but what happened to them.
And that's what's happening with all these other substances and all these other behaviors, but not
food and eating until now, I think.
So that is the way we really have to think about this, is that we have not an emotional eating
problem, we have an emotional eating solution.
We have just done such a good job of keeping Ourselves feeling safe and keeping ourselves feeling
in control.
We're just doing so well in this brain body system that we have, and now we just have to start
asking questions like what happened to us?
How did we get here?
So my point here is we can't solve an emotional problem with a physical solution.
This is the whole thing.
This is the whole thing is if we're eating when we're not hungry, it's okay.
We just have to understand that we can't solve the emotional problem with a physical solution.
So just like food and eating, we also can't use dieting and weight loss to deal with this issue
because we can get the weight off our bodies.
That's really not up for questioning.
You can get the weight off your body.
You can also get weight loss surgery.
You can get the weight off your body.
But if you don't understand how you got here, the weight on your body or into this relationship with
food, whether it's resulting in obesity or being overweight or whatever it is, or it's just psychological
and emotional, what we have to do is not try to solve it.
We just have to try to understand it.
We can't solve an emotional problem with a physical solution.
So on that note, though, I call upon Dr. Gabor Mate, who's an addiction expert, says something
very important.
It's a myth that drugs are addictive.
Drugs are not by themselves addictive because most people who try most drugs never become
addicted.
So the question is not why are some people vulnerable?
The question is why are some people vulnerable to be addicted?
Just like food is not addictive, but to some people it is.
Shopping is not addictive, but to some people it is.
Television is not addictive, but to some people it is.
So the question is, why the susceptibility?
Gabor Mate also has a fantastic TED Talk that I hope you will all watch after this too.
This is also where this is from because Gabor Mate talks about his own music addiction.
He talks about the story of when he was.
He left babies, like he missed the delivery of babies in the hospital he was working at so that he
could like go listened to records at the music store.
And he talked about how music addiction is not in the dsm.
Music addiction is not a real thing, but it doesn't really help people who are addicted to music to
say it's not a real addiction.
So that's kind of my point.
When it comes to food and eating and dieting and weight loss, whether or not it's an addiction or
not is just semantics.
I think Whether or not it's in the DSM or not is semantics. It's logistics.
But what we have to understand is, in many ways, it works the same, it feels the same, it acts the
same.
And so what we have to do is just get into what is your experience of how this works for you, not
what's in the book, and is it real, according to someone else.
So why the susceptibility?
Says Gabor, the reason that you're staring at a teddy bear is because part of the answer to the
question, why the susceptibility?
Because the ACE study was a really big deal.
To show us that what it was, it had an ACE survey with 10 questions of the biggest traumas.
So, abuse, neglect, a parent dying or being imprisoned, et cetera.
And that was the 10 question questionnaire.
And if you had the higher the ACE score, the higher your risk for all these health issues later in life.
So what we figured out in 1997 was the relationship between childhood stress and issues later in
life physically.
Okay, so the reason you're staring at a teddy bear is because what we have to talk about is not just
stress.
We have to talk about trauma.
We have to talk about what trauma is because we have a few different definitions of trauma.
We have the ACE definition of trauma, which is those 10 things on that list, the big T's, as we call
them.
But then we have to also know about the little T's, because not all of us have big T traumas.
Some of us do, but most of us, I think all of us, have little T traumas.
And the reason you're staring at a teddy bear is because the definition that I got for trauma years
ago that really, really expanded my understanding of it was, say you are 5 years old and your
favorite thing in the whole world is your teddy bear.
And one day you're walking up the stairs and you see your brother hanging your teddy bear out the
window. Ha ha.
I'm going to drop your teddy bear out the window.
You experience trauma because trauma, as we know now, thanks to the science, trauma is not a
matter of your opinion.
Trauma is a matter of your brain science.
So what we tend to do is we grow up, we become adults, and we say, that was nothing.
It was a teddy bear.
I understood, you know, it was nothing.
But to you, at five years old, it was everything.
And if we're adults and we're saying, oh, that wasn't a big deal, oh, that wasn't that bad, it was
fine. I got over it.
What we're doing is really Overlooking a lot of our little T's.
And the reason that I bring this up is not just because we all have them, but one of the responses.
The number one response, especially to childhood trauma, no matter how big or small, is
dissociation.
And what that means is because it's so painful and hard here, the way that this feels in my body,
I'm going to dissociate.
I'm going to just not feel this.
And that could be a lot of different things.
That could be drinking alcohol, that could be taking drugs.
It can also be eating food.
It could be doing a lot of things later in life.
It can be rushing, worrying, multitasking people, pleasing.
All of these ways of just being in our heads and spinning the wheels is dissociation, because it
keeps us in our brains and out of our bodies.
But the reason that we have to know about this is because why the susceptibility?
Well, we all have trauma.
The question is how big or how many.
But even that doesn't really matter because what we're saying is we all have trauma.
And so if food and eating for safety and protection and comfort is really a trauma response, well,
that changes the way that we're treating it.
But that's exactly what it is.
And the other thing is to answer the question, why this susceptibility?
Well, I created this chart because this is the way that I understand it, is there are two reasons.
When I was doing my research on all this, there are two reasons that human beings eat food.
So one is homeostatic, which means you're hungry. This is for your body.
Like, calories are energy, so you need to be eating because of hunger.
And then hedonic reasons for eating is emotional, basically to feel better or to reduce stress.
So here in my mind, this is how this diagram works, is that this is birth.
This is where we're born over here.
And then time is going this way.
So this is birth, where hunger is simply homeostatic.
You're eating food when you're hungry, right?
You're feeding a baby.
When the baby is full, it turns its head away because it knows how to communicate to you that it's
full and it doesn't want more food.
So this is how we start here on the planet.
Or our hunger is homeostatic because we need to survive.
But as time goes on, we live our human life with our big human mansion brain and our little animal
shack brain.
And things get stressful and things get hard and scary and emotional and all of these things.
And so as we're Collecting these little teas that we think of as no big deal.
Well, we're also in need of.
Because this is the way the brain works, in need of stress relief, something to bring us back down,
something to help us out and make it a little bit easier.
And food can be one of those things, especially early on in life, if you don't have access to those
other things.
And so my way of understanding this is we start here homeostatic, but then life is complicated and
messy and emotional, and then we end up over here where some of the people I work with say
things to me, like, if I'm not eating for emotion, I don't know why I'm eating.
Like, this is the only reason that I eat is to deal with my feelings.
And this is where we end up.
So we get to this point late in life, later in life, where it's like I'm struggling with emotional eating.
And my point is we just have to go back to our factory settings, as I like to call them.
Sometimes when you have issues with your phone, you put your phone back into factory settings.
This is what we're doing.
We have issues with food and eating.
We have to go back to our factory settings.
We're food and eating was just for survival.
So what we have to do is kind of like take apart the emotional and the physical.
So we have emotions on one hand and then we have eating on the other hand.
But what we want to do is start to separate them and have emotional solutions to our emotional
problems and physical solutions to our physical problems.
So this is the way that I understand how did we get here?
In many ways.
But then again, also we have this.
But again, within the culture and the society and everything that we've been taught about this, if
we have an emotional eating problem, then we should probably deal with it with dieting.
So the way that I know that this is all about emotional eating, but I think it's so important to talk
about what happens when we go on a diet or just try to restrict food.
Because again, food and eating is really only part of the equation, I think, especially if we're
struggling with it.
And again, the front line is dieting.
So psychologically, here's what I'm going to do.
Like I just said, what we have to do is split things physically and psychologically.
That's how I think about this.
So when we go on a diet, and this won't be too much, but when we go on a diet, what happens is
we physically on the physical dimension with our bodies, we go On a diet.
But remember that reward system, that mesolimbic pathway in our brain?
Anytime you set a goal, any kind of goal, like, imagine you study all night for a test, and then you
ace it.
You know, the flood of happy chemicals in your brain because you aced your test.
Fair.
So similarly, if your goal is to be on a diet and then you follow your diet, the same kind of chemical
reaction is going on in your brain where, you did the right thing, you did a good thing.
Congratulations.
And so we have this.
We go on a diet, but we create a new reward system.
So we have a new system of good, bad, right, wrong.
And when we restrict our food, eat less.
Maybe you skip the dessert after dinner, you have a salad with no dressing.
Whatever it is that, like, I'm doing the right thing, I'm proud of myself for this, the reward.
And so we have this psychological component of what's going on here, so that physically, maybe
we're getting smaller, but psychologically, it feels like we're better or more worthy or more lovable.
And so weight loss or dieting on the physical dimension becomes the new source of happy
chemicals.
This is the thing that makes me feel good.
And so dieting becomes the addiction.
And what we seem on the physical surface to everyone else is invested.
We have a lot of willpower and discipline, but really, psychologically, according to the brain, this
looks much more like we're addicted to it.
And so what happens is, because psychologically, what we've done is, again, not just food and
eating as a trauma response, but now there's this illusion of control.
It feels like we can solve the emotional problem with the physical solution.
If we just portion our meals enough, if we just calculate our food enough, we won't have to feel all
of the anxiety of not knowing how to eat.
And so this is just another manifestation of really the same kind of thing.
It's just another trauma response, a way of feeling safer and better.
But it doesn't ultimately lead us to health.
Because part of what happens when we go on a diet, and this is what that was, what goes on
psychologically and as far as the brain science.
But what happens physically in our physical body when we go on a diet, well, your brain thinks that
you're in a famine.
So when we go on a diet and our brain thinks that we're in a famine and there is not enough food
around, the reason that 95 to 98% of people gain their weight back, plus some.
The plus some is important because what your brain is doing is saying the Famine, it is over. This is
great.
So I am going to come in as your brain and do exactly what I do, which is protect you.
And I am going to help you out.
I am going to help you out so much that I am not just going to gain all that weight back that you
just lost. You are welcome.
But I'm going to even gain extra weight for the next famine that you have to go through so that
you don't have to suffer so bad, so you don't even have to worry. Thank you.
That the famine is over.
But now I'm going to gain all the weight, plus some.
You don't even have to worry about it.
I will take care of you.
And that's what the brain, body system does.
So it's not like 98% of people who've tried dieting just wake up and lose all their willpower.
It's just that this was never, ever going to work sustainably in the long term anyway.
But one thing I do want to share with you is that because I personally, if you're like me, you're like,
yeah, but what about the 2 to 5%?
What about those people that do maintain their weight?
And there's the National Weight Control Registry. You can find this online.
That is the largest survey of people who have lost and maintained over 60 pounds.
And what they're doing, because this is the whole reason for the National Weight Control Registry
is like, how are you doing it?
And how they're doing it is a low calorie, low fat diet, daily exercise, and they weigh themselves
often.
So my point on that is it's not that diets don't work. They do work.
It's just that diets can't end.
The only people that have maintained their weight loss after dieting are living forever on a diet.
So we just have to know that that accounts for 100% of the people that try dieting.
And that's those are the options.
So what are we supposed to do about this?
Well, part of the reason that I created this is because we have to understand that every single bout
we have of dieting and dieting doesn't just mean that you're like paying Weight Watchers a fee or
anything like that.
It just means even psychologically, even mentally, that you're going through this process of
counting calories or how many points are in that or how many macros or carbs or whatever it is
you're counting if your brain is in that state.
What we have to know is that every single time you have a Period of time, whether it's a day, a
week, a month, a year, whatever, where you are on track or in control or being good or any of the
ways that we talk about it.
If you're over here, it is inevitable that you go from over here to over here.
You will go from dieting to binging.
This X is where you have no power because your brain and your body, they're only designed to
protect you and save you and help you.
So they're going to react when you go into a famine.
They're going to gain the weight back.
So coming over here, though, after we binge, after we fall off track or lose control or be bad, after
this, we go back on a diet or we try to restrict or eliminate.
This is a choice.
This is a choice.
This is a conscious decision that you had to make after this.
You decided to perpetuate this cycle by getting yourself back into it.
So what we have to understand is that the only way out of this cycle is not to do what we all want
to do, which is say, I am just going to lose the weight and then it will be done.
I am just going to lose the last few pounds and this is the last diet ever.
And then it will be over and then I will never do it again. That's what we want.
But then your brain, body system, again to protect you, has its plan and it's going to gain the
weight back. We can't do that.
But what we can do, the only thing we can do, is what we don't want to do, which is to say, I guess
I'll gain the weight back and then I won't go back on a diet.
That is the only, only, only way for this cycle to end.
And so when I gave, when I was presenting this, I did a workshop at my yoga studio a couple years
ago.
And when I was presenting all this, someone came up to me and was like, everything you're saying
really makes sense through the lens of addiction because I've been to rehab, I've done this with
drugs and I've done this with alcohol.
So I totally understand now it's food.
And I get everything that you're saying, but there's no abstinence.
So I could do this when there was abstinence, but there is an abstinence around food, so what am I
supposed to do?
And my answer to that was, there is not abstinence around food, but food is not the addiction now.
Dieting is the addiction now.
You don't need to abstain from food and Eating, you need to abstain from dieting and tracking and
calculating and portioning and controlling and all those things.
That's what we need abstinence from.
And when he looked at me and was just like, but when you say stop dieting, I have so much
anxiety.
I just feel so scared.
I don't know how to do that.
What am I supposed to do with all of this anxiety?
And I said to him, anxiety is an emotion.
You feel it.
There is nothing to do about it.
You can't solve an emotional problem with a physical solution.
You feel anxious, but dieting is just a distraction.
Dieting is a way of coping with that anxiety around food, but it's not actually solving that anxiety
around food.
We need emotional solutions to our emotional problems.
Ok, so having said all this, now it's like, what do we do now?
We're emotionally eating, we're emotionally dieting, and none of them are the emotional solutions
we're looking for.
What do we do now?
Well, the first half was, how did you get here? This is how you got here.
Now we're going to talk about what we do now.
So some of you are familiar with this idea, what hurts versus what hurts worse, by my friend,
colleague, mentor, everything Nicole Sachs.
So Nicole Sachs is someone that works with chronic pain.
And the way that she talks about chronic pain is.
So how she heals chronic pain actually is through basically a journaling technique and
psychological, emotional healing exercises that can heal physical symptoms of chronic physical
pain.
So not only has it worked for me, but it has worked for so many people.
And this is someone, if you have any symptoms of chronic pain and if you have no symptoms of
chronic pain at all, this is someone that I highly, highly recommend you check out and listen to.
But our work is very, very.
We mirror and echo each other very much.
But the reason that I'm calling upon Nicole Sachs is because this idea of what hurts versus what
hurts worse is kind of the fundamental root of both of our philosophies.
That is when we're talking about food and eating, obviously at this point we have this physical
component of us as humans, and then we also have this emotional component of us as humans.
And the reason that I say what hurts versus what hurts worse is because like this guy at the yoga
studio that was saying, but what about all my anxiety?
My answer to that could have been, it's what hurts versus what hurts worst is you feel the anxiety,
the emotional part of you.
You feel anxiety what hurts?
Or you keep dieting what hurts worse?
That's your choice. But Those are the only two options we have.
What we want is to live in that.
Option three, where I could just keep doing what I'm doing, just like, shuffling the food around, and
my relationship with food will take care of itself.
It will happen if I just keep doing what I'm doing.
I'll get something different eventually.
Like, we live in that place, and many of us live in that place.
And you can think of the most common examples of having some sort of conflict.
And what we do is, like, right, I don't want to say anything to them.
They're not going to say anything to me.
We can just kind of hope that it handles itself.
It kind of just takes care of itself.
And we do that very often.
But option three is what causes our pain.
Option three of just.
It will take care of itself causes our pain because it never does.
What we're left with is anxiety around food or dieting because we have anxiety around food. That's
it.
The other side of this is you either have the emotion that you're trying to not feel, or you eat it.
You're either having an emotion or you're compulsively eating or compulsively dieting to deal with
it.
Those are the only two options.
So that's why I like to use this idea of what hurts versus what hurts worse.
And this is a video about.
It's like a couple minutes just about.
Again, where are we going from here?
But through this lens of what hurts versus what hurts worse, someone just let me know, like, wave
at me if you can't hear this.
But I think you should.
Should be able to.
Why is my work exactly the same as Nicole Sacks work is because option one is struggle with food
and eating for the rest of your life.
Option two is struggle with the emotional root causes that are causing you to struggle with your
food and eating in your body.
Option three is go on a diet, be the perfect size.
Never think about food ever again.
Exercise only because you love it.
Have the perfect inner dialogue, et cetera, et cetera. Be done.
Be perfect, have it figured out.
Option three doesn't exist.
We are either gonna struggle on the physical dimension with food and eating in our bodies, or
we're gonna struggle on the emotional dimension, the root cause of why we're having this issue.
But the third option of.
Of being in charge of everything, being totally in control of your body, having everything exactly
the way you want, it doesn't exist.
And if what we have to do is come back to connect the physical to the emotional, because those
are the only two options, what hurts versus what hurts more? What hurts?
Struggling with your body.
What hurts more?
Struggling with the fact that you live in a conditioned society where you're struggling with your
body even though you don't deserve to.
Those are the only options.
But that's why I think it is so abundantly not about food and eating and about the consciousness
through which we're coming at this.
Because I think what a lot of people have in mind as their goal is their body to look a certain way or
their body to be a certain way.
And that's living in option three, where you get to live as though you don't have any emotional
components.
You get to live as though your spirituality isn't going to be a component of this whole process.
You get to live disconnected, fragmented, and in total control.
It's a lie.
So part of the reason that people get cracked open.
I had a client once that was like, do you ever warn anyone?
I was like, about what?
And she goes, the awakening.
And that's why is like, people will come in thinking, this is about to be about food and eating and
your body.
And my whole point is this is about food, eating, your body, your mind, your lifestyle, your soul,
your path, your future, your everything.
This is so much bigger than you want it to be.
This is so much more complicated and deep than you want it to be.
Because what you want is to have it be very simple and completely in your control. And it's not.
It's so hard for me to not just, like, stop this and be like, what are your thoughts and feelings?
I want to get into your head so bad.
But what I want to do is just continue, and then we'll have time later to do all that.
But I wanted to just share that because I think it's really on point.
And this is the way that I think about it as it relates to food and eating.
So option one, like you heard me say, you struggle with your eating habits for the rest of your life.
Option two is address the emotional issues causing you to struggle with food, the substance on
which you survive.
And then option three is be the ideal size and have complete control over your body and live in
peace and freedom, enjoy exercise, love your body unconditionally, and never, ever have to think
about food ever again.
This option does not exist.
And so this is what we're left with.
And this is why we have to start here in terms of how do we get out?
What do we do now?
Well, we have to understand what we're working with, and we have to understand that this option
doesn't exist.
And so what does that look like in practice?
What does that actually mean?
Well, honestly, I like to use Oprah as my example because years ago, Oprah, who I love Oprah,
gave a speech where she realized she was sharing how after all of these years of going up and
down with her weight, she realized that it's emotional.
It's an emotional eating thing.
And this was a really big revelation.
And so she gave this story about how she was in a meeting at work and people were saying things
to her, you know, like, Oprah's life is, you go here, you do this, you wear that, you say this. This is
the plan.
And Oprah, little did any of us know, really is kind of a people pleaser.
And just like, sat there nodding her head and was like, okay, even though she didn't really want to
do some of those things.
And so she realized as she was talking about it that she was kind of like biting her tongue in that
meeting and then went home and was eating everything.
And the reason that she was eating so uncontrollably, it hit her was because she was just biting her
tongue all day and she wasn't standing up for herself.
So what does Oprah do?
Oprah buys Weight Watchers.
And my whole point with this is I think it's probably more effective not to count points on the food,
but to learn how to set boundaries to begin with so that you don't have to bite your tongue all day
and then go home and eat everything.
We can't solve emotional problems with physical solutions.
Whether it's food that you're eating at night or the fact that you're putting points on your food in
either direction.
We can't solve an emotional problem with a physical solution.
So to me, that's living in option three.
That's option three of I'm going to go to work and I'm going to keep my mouth shut, and I'll just
keep doing what I'm doing, and then I'll go to the food and I'll just put points on it so it's in control,
but never really getting to the root of the issue, which is when people are talking to you, you're not
setting boundaries and you're not expressing yourself and you're not actually feeling what you
need to feel and dealing the way you need to deal, you're eating and manipulating food around it.
So that's the example that I think about when I think about what is option three.
Option three is, again, pretending that you don't have to deal with your emotions, that you don't
have to make this very complicated.
You can just do the whole food thing.
That's not working. And you're here because that's not working.
So the solution, what do we do about the solution?
Well, to me, the solution is first, the presence and awareness of your own experience.
What is it that you need first to know that what you need is actually to set those boundaries and
say what you need to say.
But also then what we have to do is abstain.
We have to abstain from two things.
Not just emotional eating, but also the compulsive dieting or restricting or controlling that we do
around food.
We have to abstain from both of those and actually find those emotional solutions for the
emotional problems.
And usually when I present it this way, people will say, but it is so hard.
But it is so hard.
It is so hard to sit in that meeting when people are telling me what to do.
And it is so hard to be like, I don't really want to do that stuff.
And my answer to that is, I know, I know that it's hard, but life is a choice between what hurts and
what hurts worse.
So those are the only options. They're both hard. You get to choose. You get to choose.
You're hard, but they're both hard.
And something that I always say on this is just because withdrawal is difficult for a drug addict is
not a good reason for a drug addict to continue doing drugs.
It is hard, but the solution is not to avoid the hard.
The solution is to choose your hard and be in alignment with the choice that you make.
So now what?
So to be clear, there's a few things I want to say about emotional eating before I get to the rest of
what do we do now?
One is that we don't have health issues from emotionally eating.
Every once in a while.
We have health issues from using food and eating as our primary or our only coping mechanism.
So it was a problem for me growing up because there was no awareness, no consciousness at all
about what or how much or when or why I was eating.
I was just eating mindless.
The problem with that was that it was the only way that I was coping with anything.
But if you are every once in a while being like, I had a really hard day and I just want, like, cereal
for dinner followed by ice cream, great.
You had a really hard day.
You are fully conscious and aware and present and intentional with your decision to eat
emotionally.
It was your choice, not the food's Choice, very different.
So I just say this because I emotionally eat as a human, as a normal person, constantly.
But the only difference now is I know what I'm doing and I'm choosing to do it.
And there doesn't need to be fear around that, and there doesn't need to be shame around that.
Because I know enough about the brain science at this point that when I'm eating emotionally,
choice or not, what it means to me is I'm stressed.
What it means to me is that I'm trying to solve an emotional problem with a physical solution.
I know that that can't work, so how do I course correct?
But we just have to be really clear about that, because we're not trying to never use food
emotionally.
We have to be realistic about this.
You're human and you're going to have emotions and stress.
What we have to do is drop the shame around that.
Two is there is no abstinence around eating.
You can practice abstinence around emotional eating.
You can't abstain from food.
You can abstain from using food like a drug that's on us.
So I get why there's no abstinence, but there actually is because a lot of our behaviors are driven
by emotion.
If we can have emotional solutions to emotional problems and use food and eating for our bodies,
that's abstaining from emotional eating.
3.
Now we have to talk about the real problem with emotional eating.
The real problem is not that you're going to put weight on your body or that maybe, you know,
okay, there are physical problems that come from this.
There are physical problems.
But to me, the real root of it, the real root of the problem.
When you're emotionally eating, what happens is you feel an emotion.
And boredom counts, by the way, boredom counts as an emotion.
The least tolerable human emotion, so lends itself to a lot of emotional eating.
But when we feel an emotion and then we go eat about it, what we're doing on a deeper, maybe on
a spiritual level is saying to ourselves, sending the message to ourselves, to our system that this
emotion is just too much.
This is too much to deal with.
This is inconvenient, this is sensitive, this is dramatic.
This is time consuming.
I don't want to deal with this feeling.
I'll eat about it.
And what we're doing to ourselves is neglect.
What we're doing to ourselves is neglect.
So the way that I think about it, and many of you know this is if we think about just the inner child,
right?
You have a little kid in there.
Who's feeling all these emotions if the way that you're dealing with that is just eat.
I don't want, just oh God, you take so much energy from me.
Just eat about it.
I don't want to deal with this.
That's the message we're sending ourselves and that's how we're treating ourselves and that's how
we're neglecting ourselves.
When Oprah sits at the table and doesn't set a boundary, that's self neglect.
Because she doesn't want to do that stuff.
She's just saying she does.
And this is how a lot of us are living.
But we have to really, really get down to the problem is not the food and the eating.
The problem is the emotion.
And you don't want to be neglecting that.
So we just have to get clear on that too.
And that abstaining from these cycles of either food and eating or dieting and weight loss will bring
withdrawal.
It will bring up that anxiety, it will bring up that stress.
It will bring up the discomfort of actually putting your foot down and saying what you want to say.
It will.
And that is where we have to remember that withdrawal is hard and it's still a good reason to keep
going.
So the three step process that I came up with for this, what do we do now?
Acceptance.
Restore balance and reconnect with yourself and others.
So I'm going to go through, what does all of this mean and how do we do it?
One is acceptance.
So the big thing on this, I use this all the time.
It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
The first thing we have to do is accept what we're working with.
We have to accept that we don't have a food issue.
We have to accept that this is not about eating to begin with.
Emotional eating is all about the emotions and not about the eating.
So we just have to accept that our solution is really awareness and connection to ourselves, our
feelings and our eating habits.
We have to just be aware.
But we have to first also accept that this is not your fault.
So many of us carry such shame and such blame and such self loathing about this issue with food,
issue with food that we have.
And the reason that I say it's not your fault, it is your responsibility is because you cannot use, get
anywhere healthy or healing if what you are doing is shaming and blaming yourself.
We have to understand, just look at all of the ACE study and everything that came from it.
This is not your fault.
It was never your fault.
You never did anything Wrong.
You are not bad. You are not wrong.
There is nothing wrong with you.
We have to accept that and some of us, because it allows us to feel a little bit more in control
around it.
We like to keep all the shame and be like, no, no, no, it really is my fault and I really will be the one
to get myself out of this.
It really wasn't your fault and it really is your responsibility.
So that's acceptance.
And sometimes we can accept something and then come back to it and struggle with it and accept
it again.
And we're going to be in this relationship with acceptance around this.
But we have to know what we're dealing with.
So two, Restore balance.
This is one of my most favorite things as my pendulum because this is what we have to do.
One, I'll walk you through it.
Number one is this is where we start.
We have a lack of awareness of ourself and we have a lack of awareness around food.
So we have these eating habits like emotional eating and stress eating and overeating under
eating, mindless eating.
And we look at these because we can see them.
We look at these as the issue, these are the problems.
But my point here with all of this is to say when you're emotional eating, it's a lack of awareness.
You're not paying attention to your emotions.
When you're stress eating, you're not paying attention to your stress.
When you're overeating, you're not paying attention to the fact that you're full.
When you're under eating, you're not paying attention to the fact that you're hungry.
When you're mindless eating, you're just not paying attention.
So the point is that all of these, these are not the problem, these are the symptom. This is what we
see.
This is the symptom of the problem.
But the problem is actually that we're unaware of whatever's going on with us.
Stress, emotion, physical sensations.
So we swing the pendulum over here.
We try to solve the problem and we get hyper aware around food.
So instead of a lack of awareness around food, now we're hyper aware on food.
Now we're dieting and meal plans and points and counting and all this stuff.
We know every calorie of every morsel of food that we eat, but it still doesn't solve this.
We have a hyper awareness around food, but we're still a lack of awareness around ourselves.
And so what we do, many of us, is swing this pendulum back and forth, back and forth, shuffling it
between the eating habits over Here and the eating habits over here, but never actually connecting
inward to ourselves.
This is what I think Oprah's doing, right, is like, we have this over here, and then we just put the
points on it over here, and we just never really land with the awareness of yourself and the
awareness around food.
This is what you're going for, is just to be aware of what's going on.
And also so not just because I had one person ask me.
So the point is to just swing very little back and forth here.
The point is, you don't want to be swinging.
You want to hang out here.
Now, again, we're being realistic about humans, and, like, obviously, we're going to swing a little
bit. Same here.
But this is what we're going for, is you want to hang out here and just be in a constant state of
awareness around yourself and what you need.
And abstaining from these distractions, abstaining from the thought process that is. This is the
problem.
I'm eating my feelings. That's a problem.
No, no, that's a solution.
So abstaining from that distraction.
And over here, you're going to have the thought every once in a while, oh, I know.
I could just put points on this, and then I'll have my solution.
And also abstaining from that.
But it's hard because it's a thought process.
This is where we have to be really clear about what's going on in here.
Because the addiction is not a physical substance.
It's not drugs or alcohol you can just stay away from. It's a thought process.
It's a pattern that we create in ourselves.
And so we have to be extremely aware of what's going on inside to hang out here.
So, okay, these are all coming up.
These are all, like, my favorite things to teach.
So how do we do that? Now we're aware.
We're aware of ourselves, our feelings, our thoughts.
We're aware of eating and food.
Now, this is where we go from here.
We have a problem with emotional eating. So what do we do? This is what we do. We practice
health.
Not just eating for health, but living for health. And what does that mean?
Well, many of us are familiar with the physical part of the pie chart is, you know, food, eating,
exercise. These are for our bodies.
But there are four things that are really important for our physical health.
Eating, healthy food, real food, doing regular exercise, some sort of movement, sometimes
strenuously sleep, proper sleep, hygiene, and water. So hydration.
And I thought this was, like, really, really common knowledge, but it's Just such a good key when it
comes to water hydration.
And are you drinking enough?
Just look at the color of your pee.
If your pee is really yellow, it means you need more water.
If your pee is clear, then you're good.
So just having that as it's good, it's all good.
So these are the four things that we need for our physical health, really.
And then we need to start looking at the other parts of the pie chart.
So many of us are, again, like I said, really familiar with what I have to do for my body and a lot
less familiar with what are the other kinds of health.
So very briefly, mental health.
Mental health is the way that you're talking to yourself.
Learning, stimulation, creativity, rest, motivation.
Like that's your mind, your emotions, your feelings, stressors.
Can you identify your feelings?
Are you talking about your feelings?
Can you share your feelings?
Do you have outlets for your feelings?
Your emotional health, spiritual health, all of these are different for everyone.
Spiritual health can be anything from organized religion to being in nature, to the connection you
have with other humans and something larger than yourself, something bigger than life, literally.
And to feel connected to that connection generally.
Social, social health.
Social health is not just friends and family.
Social health is, are you living a connected life?
Are you making eye contact with people?
Are you saying hello to your mailman?
Do you feel connected to humans?
That's part of health and environmental health I like to put in here as just kind of the catch all,
because we are not separate, like we were saying, from our environment.
And so we just have to have our eyes on also all of the messaging and the culture that we live in.
And environmental health can include, you know, the lead in your water and the pollution in your
air and everything else.
But also we just have to know that our health is all of these things.
Our health is not just eating vegetables and running on a treadmill.
Our health is being taken care of in all of these places.
Because if you are taking care of yourself in all of these places, if you are getting your needs met in
all of these places, you don't have that emotional reservoir, as Nicole Sachs would say, the
emotional reservoir overflowing into your relationship with food.
Food and eating was never the problem.
It is unmet needs and stress and trauma that hasn't been dealt with that overflows onto food and
eating.
So this is what we're going for in terms of how do we get out.
We have to reprioritize and reorient ourselves to what it means to be healthy and really focus very
much more on the invisible components of us, the ones that we can't measure and track and weigh
and portion, but the things that we feel and the things that we think and where is our stress and
how do we feel?
That is what we want to go for.
So I think the biggest thing on this that I want to say in regards to food and eating is that when it
comes to food and eating, there is so much, obviously, we could be saying about nutrition.
But for me, at this point, the hardest thing that I have witnessed in people about getting out of this
struggle with emotional eating is that many of us are coming from a place of dieting and trying to
be really controlling and having all the answers and everything.
So that when I say things like what we have to do is eat real food, that's like the biggest thing,
number one, is just eating real food versus processed food. So what does that mean?
Does it come from the Earth?
Think about where it came from.
Just start thinking about where the food you ate came from and what's in it.
The number one thing I would say is to look at the ingredients.
First of all, the nutrition facts.
You want to stop thinking of yourself as a robot.
Calories in, calories out.
It's all about the numbers.
You want to think about what is the substance, the essence of the food that I'm putting into my
body.
That's going to come to you from the ingredients.
So just a few things.
One is 80 to 85% of every grocery store in the United States is not real food.
Okay? So just having the understanding of that, that when you walk into the grocery store, many of
us are not actually looking at real food.
So real food is the stuff that, you know, comes from the earth.
So fruits, vegetables, animals.
But even that has a whole processing kind of component to it.
But the point is, we want to just stay away from really processed in bags, in cartons, in boxes, and
all of those things and just go back to what is real food.
So, again, obviously, we could say so much about what that means, but the hardest thing in
making this mental transition is that we have so much energy left over from dieting.
Think about how much energy dieting takes.
It's like every thought, every everything.
It's like all day long you are in this place.
So that when we switch our priority to a place of health, it becomes, well, what about all this extra
energy?
And I'm like, just eat mostly real food most of the time when you're hungry.
And it's like, but what else?
And it's like, that's mostly it.
And then you should do the other stuff to take care of the other parts of you. Yeah, yeah.
But what else about the food?
We're not. This actually wasn't a food issue to begin with.
We don't have to do all of that. But what about the food? How do I do it right? How do I do it better?
How do I do Just focus on eating real food most of the time when your body is hungry and you are
going to be ok.
The biggest thing that needs your attention is all of these other parts of you that have been
neglected until now.
Ok.
So I am going to leave my pie chart here because there is just so much to say on it.
But that is the point is we have to start making physical health just a component of our health. It is
not everything.
Now these are my go to in terms of we are going to be mindful and aware around food and eating.
That is the pendulum.
We are going to have our pie chart so that when we are eating, when we are not hungry.
Now we want to figure out what are the coping skills that I need to use, what are the needs that are
unmet, what are the traumas that are coming up, what is the stress I am not dealing with.
So this is about how we reconnect to ourselves and these are the things that I think are the most
important in terms of reconnecting to yourself.
Number one is mindfulness.
So we'll talk a little bit more about that.
We're going to practice a little bit and mindful eating.
So all of those, all of you that are here at the end of this, if you want my mindful eating guide, just
shoot me an email.
My email will be on the last slide but I have a mindful eating guide so if you want it, just reach out
to me and I'll send it to you.
But the point is mindfulness.
So just being aware and mindful throughout the day.
Mindful eating especially the number one thing with mindful eating is are you eating when you're
hungry and stopping when you're full?
And if you are eating when you're not hungry, do you know why?
What you're really hungry for?
So that's being mindful as it relates to all this meditation.
The biggest thing, the biggest resource that I can send you to is Insight Timer.
The app is amazing.
So many free meditations, visualizations.
I think it's the best one out there.
Visualizing, that's another one that you can find on Insight Timer.
Visualizations, breathing exercises.
We'll practice some of Those journaling, journal speak.
All of the Nicole Sachs people here, you know what I'm talking about.
If you're not into journaling already, please, please explore Nicole Sachs's work. Gratitude. Huge.
This should be a daily practice, I think in terms of just like filling up our bucket of happy chemicals.
Gratitude is a proven way to do that. Yoga.
Yoga literally means union between mind and body.
I could not recommend yoga more for anyone who's struggling with emotional eating.
It is being incorporated into a bunch of eating disorder treatments now, which I am so excited
about.
Just generally, nature.
Nature brings us back to our factory settings again, as I like to say.
I like to combine nature with grounding.
I didn't put grounding on here, but grounding is a practice of walking barefoot on nature, on mother
earth.
Grass, concrete, whatever it is.
Just putting yourself on the earth does good things for our chemistry. Music.
Music is another big one that can be used Just any human that has a brain.
We can be using music as a coping skill therapy.
I have a biased opinion, but strongly recommend connection, not just to yourself, but to other
people. It is so major. It is so big.
Lyssa Rankin has an amazing TED Talk as well.
Highly recommend that.
Talking about connection really brought that up for me. Boundaries.
You heard me talk about Oprah.
I think we know that boundaries are so big, so, so big when it comes to unmet needs.
This is because we're not setting boundaries with other people, but also with ourselves.
So just having, just having your eye on that, that internal relationship.
Abstain from emotional eating and dieting, because both of those you can think of as your
addiction that you don't want to perpetuate.
And then I just say, what's on your list?
Because everyone is going to have a different list.
All of these are good and helpful in terms of regulating our chemistry, coming back into our bodies,
healing trauma, all of those things.
But also, what is it that you need?
It is going to be different than what I need.
And what I need is different from what you need.
And I think it is also important to say that what you need in the afternoon might not be what you
needed in the morning.
And what you needed today might not be what you needed yesterday, the day before that.
So we just have to keep this connection with ourselves and always be asking that question, what
do you need?
What is it that you need?
What you need is not food, but what is it that you need?
And figuring that out for yourself, not all of it's going to come from someone else saying, these are
good coping skills.
And lastly, this is how we connect with ourselves.
This is how the internal dialogue is so important when it comes to this work.
You really want to be on your own team.
And so this is the last thing I'm going to say when it comes to what do we do and where do we go
when it comes to emotional eating.
So first is you have a behavior that maybe you don't want to do anymore.
It could be eating, it could be restricting and dieting, overeating people, pleasing, drinking. Right?
They're all here.
So two separate moments.
One is when you engage in the behavior.
Two is when you're mindful that you engaged in the behavior.
So sometimes we don't realize it until the next day, sometimes it's an hour later and it's like, ah, I
did that thing again.
Like I wasn't hungry and I just like ate all the food.
And okay, so the old way of doing this is you have that moment where you're like, oh, I did the
thing again.
And then the old reaction where many of us are just because of habit at this point is the guilt, the
shame, the regret, the self loathing, the what's wrong with me is I did something bad, I did
something wrong. And that.
And then we just kind of stay here and hang out here. It doesn't feel very good.
But this is all we really know how to do, is shame and blame.
And so this questioning of ourselves, what's wrong with me? Why did I do this again?
Such a failure creates a chemistry of danger.
So when we're talking about brain science, this is where if you're creating this chemistry with just
your thoughts and feelings, which you are what you need because you don't have a choice, is
safety.
What you need is safety.
And so to find safety, you'll go back and do these behaviors again.
But what we can do differently is when you do this behavior and then you're mindful that you did
this behavior, what you can actually do differently is go over here and instead of the old reaction,
what you want to do.
And again, I think it's helpful to think of your inner child and just think about curiosity and
compassion.
What happened?
It's not what's wrong with you, it's what happened to you.
What happened. And when you're over here and you're saying what happened, the next thing you
want to do is tell your story to yourself.
What happened that you were not hungry but eating anyway.
No judgment. This doesn't work if you judge it, this doesn't work if you shame it.
It Only works if you're really genuinely compassionate and curious and say, what is it? What
happened?
And then you tell your story, you get some answers and understanding, and then you have insight
and awareness into yourself so that you don't need to engage in these behaviors again.
So just a quick example of this.
I had a client once who said to me, she was like, so I ate three pieces of pizza, and I didn't taste it
until the last bite of the crust of the third slice.
That's when I was like, oh, you just did this thing.
And so we talked about it, really slowed it down, and I basically followed this and was like, tell the
story. What happened?
Like, how did you get to a point where you're eating three slices of pizza, you don't even know it?
And so she was saying, well, I was really stressed out and this and that.
I was really stressed out.
And then I think that's why.
So, okay, you tell your story, you have some answers and understanding.
And so this was such a good example of exactly how this works.
It was like a few months later, she was like, I did the thing again.
But I was like.
I was like one and a half slices of pizza in.
And I was like, oh, I'm doing the thing again.
And what I need is probably to calm down a little bit.
I don't need to be eating three slices of pizza that I can't even taste.
What I probably need to do is, like, take a few deep breaths and, like, reevaluate, because I'm not
actually hungry.
I'm just eating because of stress.
And so this is how it works.
The reason that this.
The reason we don't like this and what we don't like about it is that it's not immediate.
It's like, I have to, like, I have to.
I have to, like, sit there and I have to think about what happened.
I have to tell my story.
I have to feel feelings.
That's so much work.
I can't just, like, take a pill and like, that's the whole point is what hurts.
What hurts worse is you're over here or you're over here.
You can either be doing this thing that you've been doing and just hang out here and do the safety
danger thing over and over again, or you can embody this where you're being curious about
yourself, you're being compassionate to yourself, you're being patient and actually asking
questions, and then you're actually getting answers, understanding, insight, and awareness about
yourself.
But this is about what hurts.
And what hurts worse and I think this is.
This is what hurts. This is what hurts worse.
And that's all we're here to choose between.
So I think that's that.
My friends, thank you so much for being here.
Seriously, seriously, seriously. This was so amazing.
Be in touch. I literally wish I could, like, know and be all of your friends and give you a big hug.
So shoot me an email.
Just introduce yourself or whatever. I love you guys. I love you. I love you.
Have an amazing weekend and amazing everything.
Thanks, guys.