The Real Reason You Can't Stop Eating

00:00Emotional eating is not a character flaw. It's not you being weak. This is a learned coping strategy that your brain developed over time, probably a really, really, really long time ago because it worked. Like food generally does provide short-term emotional relief. It activates the brain's reward system and provides comfort. And for a lot of us, food was comfort long before we had language for what we were actually feeling. Think about it. You cry as a baby when you're hungry, you get the bottle. Reward system in the brain. It provides comfort. The problem, though, is that it's not that you use food for comfort sometimes.

00:34The problem is when it becomes your only strategy for managing the difficult emotions. What's going on, you guys? Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkie Stott. And on these episodes, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. On today's episode, episode number 353, today I want to talk about what I feel like is a misunderstood topic in the entire women's health and nutrition and fitness space.

01:14And that's the difference between emotional eating and impulse eating because this is what I see constantly. I see a woman has an off day with her food. She ate something that she didn't plan to. She went over in her macro numbers. She felt out of control around food for a minute, maybe, you know, a few hours. And then this, like, automatic response from her, from social media, from the fitness culture in general is her being deemed, I'm an emotional eater.

01:51What about if she's not an emotional eater? Like, what if what happened had nothing to do with emotion at all? And labeling it as emotional eating is actually sending her down this wrong spiral in her mind or this wrong path to fix it. She starts doing all of these things, therapy and journaling and meditation, because I'm an emotional eater. This distinction matters a lot because emotional eating and impulse eating have two completely different causes. They have different triggers. They have different solutions.

02:22They have different, you know, paths to take into the outcome. And if you are treating one like the other, you're going to keep spinning on this hamster wheel, spinning your wheels, wondering why nothing's working or why you can't get to the solution for yourself. Today, in this episode, I want to pull these two things apart and looking at them clearly and giving you guys like a real framework for figuring out which one you're actually dealing with and what to do about it. Okay. So before we get into the differences, let me first give you guys just a clear definition of the two of these, of each of these, because I think even the way these terms get used casually is part of the confusion.

03:05Okay. So first, emotional eating is eating and direct response to an emotional state. It's not physical hunger. It's emotion. So you eat because you're, you're stressed. You eat because you're anxious. You eat because you're sad. You eat because you're lonely, because you're bored, because you're overwhelmed, or even if you're happy. And the food becomes a way to manage, to numb, to avoid, or to amplify a feeling.

03:35So the emotion comes first. Then the eating is a response to that. And here's why it's important to understand that frame or that definition is because it is intentional at some level. Not always consciously, but there's a part of your brain that has learned, usually like over the years, that food provides emotional relief. That bowl of ice cream that you have after hard days generally does make you feel better in the short term.

04:06So that eating is a coping mechanism. And a coping mechanism, by definition, they're serving a purpose. They exist because they work, right? At least temporarily. So emotional eating is just a direct response to you already being in a certain type of an emotional state. And maybe like you're already, you're just, you're at the other side of it. You're, you're on the other end of it in terms of I'm having this emotional experience. You don't know that you're having the emotional experience. Maybe you're eating because of it. Maybe you need a pause.

04:37I'm going to get into this framework later on so you can know which one you're in it. So let me just pause me there for a second. Now, impulse eating is something different. Impulse eating is unplanned eating that's driven not by emotion, but by environment, by like availability, by habit, by a stimulus that happens. Like you walk past the break room and you grab a cookie, not because you're stressed, but because the cookie was there. Right? You finish your dinner and then you reach for more, not because you're hungry, but because it tasted good and you had your, you know, you want more of it.

05:11You maybe while you're watching TV, open the pantry, not because you're sad, but because you just want something when you watch TV. Right? Right? So in that instance, the food comes first. The decision, if you can, if you can even call for a second, comes second or it doesn't come at all. So the food comes first and then the decision to eat, it comes afterwards. So impulse is like largely automatic. It lives in your habits, it lives in your environment, it lives in your routines, it lives in your neurological reward system.

05:44It is less about what you're feeling and it's more about what you've been conditioned to do. So it's same behavior on the service, but unplanned eating that you later regret. Completely different engine underneath of it all. Now, what I want to dive into, like, I think that it explains why some women feel like they're, they tried everything and nothing works. Is that when you label all unplanned eating as an emotional eating, then you go looking for the emotional cause.

06:22Cause that's what this is all about. Like there's people, more, more people say, Oh, I'm an emotional eater. But again, like what I want to challenge you here is, are you? Because there's also impulse eating where you just are driven by what your environment is. Like the food's there, I'm going to eat it. Maybe you don't have an emotional cue and it's just impulse at that point. So that's why I want to be able to just like, have you guys be able to differentiate the two because then you know what you're actually dealing with. If you label all unplanned eating as an emotional eating, then what you're going to do is what I said earlier is that you're going to start journaling about your feelings.

06:58You're going to explore your relationship with food. You're going to dive into childhood patterns. You're going to dive into your stress responses. And if the actual problem is impulse eating, like the real issue is that you keep chips in the house and you've always eaten chips while you're watching TV. And that habit is so automatic. You do it even without this, even without deciding to. None of that emotional work that you're going to dive into in terms of journaling or finding out your stress responses or diving into your childhood patterns. That's not going to even work with you if impulse is your actual thing that you're trying to fix.

07:35Like you'll do all the inner work and you're still going to eat the chips. And then you'll feel like something is fundamentally broken about you. Like why can't I fix this problem? Because if you're doing all the work and it's still happening, then something must be wrong, right? But on the flip side, if you label impulse eating as something that just needs more discipline or better planning or I need to change up my entire environment, I need to remove X, Y, and Z. If you're going to be an actual pattern is that you've been using food to cope with stress or cope with loneliness or cope with anxiety for 20 years, willpower and meal prep containers and removing them from your environment are not going to fix it.

08:15So you can have the most perfect system in the world. You could be meal prepping and getting this underway and still blow it every night at 9pm because the real issue is at 9pm is when you're alone with your thoughts and food is the thing that makes that bearable. Are you guys tracking with me here? You guys starting to see more of the difference between the two, but majority of people label it as X. And so people move with trying to figure out how to find a solution for X, but it could actually be this that you're struggling with.

08:48And on the flip side, right? You could be labeling it as like, oh, I just need to fix my discipline. But 9pm keeps happening and it's actually not the environment and it's not that you need more discipline. It's that you need to figure out how to find a solution for the emotional eating. But on the flip side, you track it with me. Now I'm starting to confuse myself, so I'm just going to stop there. You're tracking me, right? The solution has to match the actual problem. Problem, you may not be an emotional eater.

09:20You may be more of an impulse. That is just your habit of what you do. And right now, most people don't even know which problem they actually have because they're all labeling it as I'm an emotional eater. That's the majority of people labeling it as. Okay, so a framework. A practical framework. When you find yourself in an unplanned eating moment or even when you're reflecting on one after the fact, here are some questions I want you to ask yourself. Question number one is, what happened right before?

09:52So with emotional eating, something happened. There was a triggering event or there was a triggering emotional state. There was a difficult conversation. There was a stressful work situation. There was a feeling of maybe loneliness or the end of the day that crept in. Maybe there was an argument with a friend or a spouse. You know, a kid. A moment of anxiety. Something happened there. There was a difficult triggering emotional state or emotional event that caused you to then go and eat something.

10:25Something preceded the eating that you can point to and you can figure out what it is. On the other side of the impulse eating, as often nothing happened. You just found yourself eating. There was no emotional event. You were just in the kitchen or you're at a party or you're watching TV. And the food was there and you ate it. Okay? So if you're finding yourself in a moment of unplanned eating moment or you're reflecting on one after the fact that it happened,

10:57ask yourself the question, what happened right before? And that's going to be able to tell you which one you're actually dealing with. Am I dealing with emotional eating or am I dealing with impulse eating? The second question would be, what were you feeling when you started eating? So emotional eating almost always has some type of a feeling attached to it that you can name it. If you slow down and you look at it, you pause for a second and you reflect. Anxiety, sadness, loneliness, stress, boredom.

11:29You can feel there was a feeling attached to it. If you can slow down and look at it. Impulse eating often has no clear feeling at all. And like, some of you may be like, well, maybe people just push their emotions down. No. Like, if you can pause and reflect and look back at it after the fact, usually, typically, you can bring awareness to the situation and be like, yeah, I was actually feeling this way. Impulse is like, nothing happened. It's neutral. You weren't distressed. You were just neutral. You're just, you're not trying to escape anything.

12:00It was just automatic. Okay, so you guys, tracking the difference, right? Question three would be, did eating make the feeling better? And this is a big one. Because emotional eating typically provides some type of relief. Even if it's temporary. Even if it's immediately followed by guilt. There was a moment where that food did what it was supposed to do. It numbed something. It soothed something. It gave you some type of a moment of comfort, of relief.

12:31Impulse eating often doesn't create anything. It doesn't create any relief. Because there was nothing to relieve. It might create pleasure in the moment. Like, food tastes good. Dopamine spikes. Like, I'm excited that this food is amazing. But it's not resolving, like, an emotional state. Because there wasn't one to begin with. Another question you could ask is, are there specific situations where this happens? So, again, impulse eating can be highly situational. It happens in specific contexts.

13:04It can happen always at night. Always in front of the TV. Always at social events. Always with a certain type of food if it's visible or there. The pattern is environmental. So, if you can think about it and break it down into E's. Impulse eating is environmental. Mental, emotional eating is emotional. So, you got environmental triggers. You got emotional triggers. Emotional eating can be situational too. But the situation is usually emotional rather than physical.

13:34So, it happens when you're, like, again, the emotions. You're stressed out about something specific. You have some certain kind of day. You're feeling alone at night. Like, there's certain feelings that arise in the situation. And then, one last question could be, would removing food from the environment stop it? This is almost a cheat code for telling them, how you can tell them apart. If you simply didn't have the trigger food in the house, and you generally think that would stop the behavior,

14:08then that's a strong signal that it's impulse eating. So, if you know that you're somebody that loves to have chips while you're watching TV, and you remove the trigger food, and then it stops, then the habit is tied to the availability and the environment in your situation. The chips are the culprit. The chips are your trigger. So, if you remove them, are you going to have the impulse to go eat the chips while you're watching TV?

14:40Probably not, because you're not there, right? If you think that you'd find a way to get the food anyway, if you drive to Wawa or the gas station at 10 p.m., that feels completely possible and the emotional state is high enough. So, that's a strong signal that that's emotional eating. Right? Like, if you feel like you can get in the car and drive to the gas station, figure out a way to get the food, then that's emotional. Because emotional eating is motivated. It will find a way to get the food.

15:14Tracking with me? So, those are some things that I would ask in the moment, or a practical framework that you can put into play to also figure out which one are you dealing with. Hey, while you're listening, if you're getting value from this episode, take a moment to tap that review button or share this podcast with a friend. It's a small gesture that goes a long way in helping more women find their way to feeling stronger and more confident in their skin. I appreciate you so much for taking the time to support this show.

15:45Let me go deeper on the emotional eating first, because I think it deserves more nuance than it usually gets. Emotional eating is not a character flaw. It's not you being weak, because that's what, like, social media and people and influencers write in their captions and their posts. Like, this is a learned coping strategy that your brain developed over time, probably a really, really, really long time ago, because it worked. Like, food generally does provide short-term emotional relief.

16:16It activates the brain's reward system. It provides comfort. And for a lot of us, food was comfort long before we had language for what we were actually feeling. It is deeply human. Think about it. You cry as a baby. When you're hungry, you get the bottle. Reward system in the brain. It provides comfort. The problem, though, is that it's not that you use food for comfort sometimes. The problem is when it becomes your only strategy for managing the difficult emotions.

16:46When food is your go-to for every time something hard comes up because there's nothing else in the toolkit, then that is something that, that is the situation that needs to be looked at and applied with the framework to provide you a solution to get you to work through what this is. And I don't want to call it a problem. It's not a problem. It's just something that has been developed over a long period of time and now becoming more aware of

17:16for which one you may be struggling with. And now the way, like, so the way that it actually can work and actually help is building emotional literacy. So what I mean by that, because it sounds like, you know, in today's world, it's like everyone talks about their emotions. And I know there's some generations where people just like push their emotions down. But if you can build emotional literacy, it can be genuinely very powerful for you. A lot of emotional eating happens because the feeling is so uncomfortable and it's so hard to sit with

17:46that eating becomes the escape. So when you get better at naming what the feeling is that you're actually feeling it, like not just being like, oh, I feel bad, but maybe like, oh, I feel anxious about something specific. Or I feel lonely tonight. Like I'm bored right now at home. You take some type of charge with it because you're naming it. You're taking the emotion that it has, like the charge that it has over you, you're taking and removing it once you're able to name it.

18:17Name feelings then at that point are easier to respond to than unnamed ones. And I just feel bad. Okay, well, if you feel bad, then it's just going to continue to, what is, it's very vague. Like, instead of getting specific, oh, I feel, I feel sad because, you know, my friend at work said something that was, you know, set me off. Or I feel anxious about this specific work thing that I'm dealing with. Or I feel uncertain about how my kid's soccer schedule is going to pan out for the next few weeks

18:48on top of, you know, all my commitments that haven't worked. You're naming specific feelings here. You're giving them, you're making it easier for you to then respond. You're naming them out loud. And then when you build like a broader coping menu, food works as like a coping mechanism. Then when you're able to call it what it is, you're able to, you know, the goal isn't for you to eliminate the urge to cope. It's to have more tools available so the food isn't the automatic first

19:19and only answer every single time. So when you're building this, right, and you're becoming more aware of it and you're able to name it, then what you can do is in place, oh, let me call a friend instead or let me go outside and get a walk in, right? You can feel the emotion. You know what the event is afterwards. It's usually going to food. Instead, by replacing that, then what you're doing is you're building a coping menu, essentially, is what I just said. But you're then adding in other events that will help you to cope

19:51with the feeling instead of turning to the food. Does that make sense? So getting underneath the pattern, if emotional eating is chronic and deeply rooted in you... Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss,

20:23Warrior Babe is here for you. At Warrior Babe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle, and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results and results that last. Look, don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com forward slash apply today

20:54to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com forward slash apply. All right, let's get back to the show. Then, you know, maybe some of these like more you trying to figure out and work it out on your own and building this coping menu that isn't working, then being able to get underneath it and work with somebody who actually specializes with something that I would highly recommend. Because this is not a nutritional problem at its core.

21:24It's a coping and emotional regulation problem that shows up through food. Right? Okay. Now I want to talk about impulse eating because this one is, again, like it's just different. It's different. There's no triggering event emotionally. Impulse eating, it lives in your habits. It lives in your environment. Like if I can like state back to when I first started my journey is there, I had more of an impulse eating than I did emotional eating. because I would sit down at night and I would just be comfortable

21:55on the couch and I just want to eat because I'm comfortable on the couch watching TV. It's, and that's just the way that I grew up. I saw my parents do the same thing. It's governed by something called like you being in a habit loop, right? Cue, routine, reward. If you guys read Atomic Habits, that's what he talks about in that book. The cue is a trigger in your environment or routine. Then the routine is the actual eating behavior. So the cue could be you sitting down on the couch to relax. Then the routine is the eating behavior. And then the reward is a dopamine hit

22:25that you feel from the food and you're relaxing watching TV. And then when that loop runs enough times over and over and over again, it becomes automatic. So your brain does this deliberate thing. It's not, your brain doesn't deliberate about it anymore. It just executes. It just does it. It doesn't think about it. It just, it just moves. It just executes. This is why emotional or impulse eating feels so out of control even when you're not distressed.

22:56It's the habit. It's so well worn in you that it runs whatever your conscious, it overruns your conscious input. So it runs without you having any conscious awareness on it. Maybe example is you'll be in the pantry at night and you're like, how did I even get here? And you have chips in hand and you're eating it. Conscious override. So what actually helps here is the environment design. This is your most powerful tool for impulse eating. If the cue isn't present,

23:27the loop can't fire. So don't keep the trigger food in the house. Whenever I tell people at the beginning of coaching them when I'm first trying to distinguish which one I'm actually dealing with, am I dealing with emotional eating or am I dealing with impulse eating? If it's impulse eating, I'll be like, okay, cool. Easy. Emotional eating is a little bit, is a little bit harder to work through. I will be honest about that. The impulse eating is like, all right, you just go clean out your kitchen. Go throw everything out. Put a fruit bowl on the counter. Make the impulsive choice the harder choice and the intentional choice the easier one.

23:58So you're interrupting the cue to routine connection. The moment between the cue firing and the behavior happening, it's tiny but it exists. But building a pause into the movement, even in five seconds of conscious awareness can be enough to interrupt the automatic response. So by the time you get into the kitchen, if the food isn't there, you can create an automatic response or a fire or like a break in the pattern, a pause, and be like, oh, I'm looking for that food

24:29but it's not here because I removed it. So actually let me move to eating something more healthy or put a sticky note on the pantry. But like, don't eat this food or, you know, maybe if it's there because your kids love it. It's a pattern interrupt. Anything that inserts like a speed bump between the trigger and the behavior. And then maybe if you, maybe if you substitute the routine, like you can't eliminate a habit loop but you can replace the middle part of it. So if TV plus the couch

25:01is a strong cue for your evening snacking then change what you do on the couch. Have something to do with your hands instead. Change the environment entirely. Right? So these are some workarounds if you know that impulse eating is what you struggle with. And the way that you can do it is like bringing awareness logging into the picture. So for one week every time an impulse eating moment happens write down the context. Where were you? What were you doing? What was available at the time? And then patterns are going to emerge fast.

25:31And once you can see the pattern clearly it loses some of its automatic power over you. I hope this is helping helping you guys. Because these are some strategies and frameworks. One, I just if you identify with either one of what I just said now you know a framework to apply plus the questions to figure out which one you are dealing with and being to identify it and then how to how to work or work with it

26:02and through it to provide you and get to the solution. And this is some of you guys could be like well what about if I deal with both? And then they like interplay in ways that can make it genuinely confusing because you're not sure. Like you might be an impulsator in normal circumstances automatic habit-driven environmental dependent but when emotional stress hits the impulse eating gets louder the restraint gets weaker it feels like emotional eating because the emotions are there also.

26:33Or you might use food emotionally in specific high stress seasons but have a totally neutral relationship with food the rest of the time. And what looks like emotionally is actually just a stress response in a specific context. So it's like in that I would say understanding what is dominant for you and in which situations each one shows up in. So that's the starting point for actually addressing it because you can't fix something that you haven't correctly diagnosed. So then the framework that I put in with the questions is your tool for that.

27:05Start using that. Start using it not as like you looking at it from a bad point of view and self-criticism on yourself but more so looking at it and changing the narrative in your mind as information gathering. Every time an unplanned eating moment happens that's data for you. And data gives you something to work with to be able to understand which one you're navigating which one you're actually dealing with so that you could actually correctly fix it. Okay? So just to sum up

27:35everything that we talked through today which I hope that it was helpful because in some ways it can be the same but in other ways they are also two very completely different categories that people can deal with and do deal with. You know emotional eating is one thing and pulse eating is a completely other thing and sometimes you have the two of them but being under being able to identify and bring awareness to which one you were actually dealing with will help you to move forward. So emotional eating is eating in response to emotion.

28:06It's a learned coping mechanism that serves a purpose for you. The solution often involves you figuring out your emotional literacy and being able to identify and name what emotion are you feeling and then building a coping menu or coping toolkit that once you feel the emotion instead of going to the food as your routine then you're going to go and call a friend or go for a walk or you know doing something else going to work out or if you

28:36need to sometimes diving into because professional support can really help with emotional eating side of things because it may be deeper way deeper underneath just the pattern and then impulse eating is automatic it's usually driven by just a habit of doing something by environment by getting reward the solution will involve you designing your environment differently having a habit interruption and bringing you know awareness like having sticky notes

29:06around or reminders hey you know being a pattern interrupt and bringing pattern awareness to it they can look the same from the outside you guys too that's where it can be a little confusing but they have completely different engines and solving one with others tools is not going to work so something that just helped you this week is like the next time you eat something unplanned don't judge it just study it look at it from a data standpoint and ask the five questions that we went over

29:36is there an emotion was it automatic what was the cue what did it do for you and start building the data on which pattern actually dominates for you that type of awareness is worth so much in gold to help you understand what the actual pattern is that you have and if you want to be in the space there's so many women that we've coached through this inside of warrior beam I'm going to be in a space where you can have conversations with the women who get it

30:07who have been there who are asking the same questions who've done the same work who've come from you know maybe there are just a couple steps ahead of you and can look back and be able to help you then come join the free warrior beam community get inside it's completely free come join us the link is in the description below this podcast check it out get inside and share this episode with someone who needs to hear it she exists in your life for a reason so send this to her and help her all right I love you guys and I'll see you in the next episode real quick

30:38if this episode resonated with you or gave you the push that you needed I'd love for you to pay it forward drop a quick rating and review share the podcast with someone who might need it and help me keep spreading the word your feedback not only helps the show grow but it might just be the nudge someone else needs to kick start their transformation thank you so so so much for your support

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.