How to break the generational habit of emotional eating so that you can lose weight and pass healthy habits down to your kids
Mama, I want you to go back in time with me for a minute. Think back to when you were a kid and you fell and scraped your knee riding your bike. What did you do to feel better? What about when you got good grades? How did you celebrate? When you were a teenager and your friends were mean, how did you comfort yourself?
My guess is you answered all of those questions with the same answer: food. This isn’t a habit you were born with. This is a habit that has been passed down from generation to generation all the way to you. And as a kid or teenager, you were able to bounce back from emotional eating, but as an adult, it’s not working so well.
This habit of emotional eating - for good or bad emotions - is hurting you. It’s making you gain weight. It’s not allowing you to go out and play with your kids. It might even be hurting your marriage because you don’t want to be intimate.
But Mama, this isn’t your fault.
Your problem with losing weight isn’t that you don’t have the willpower to stick to a diet. The problem isn’t that you’re broken or that you’re too far gone. The problem is that for generations we’ve tied food to emotions.
The good news is that you can be the one who breaks this. You don’t have to stay stuck. You don’t have to pass this down to your kids.
You can learn how to use food in a way that serves you physically and emotionally. I’m going to show you how today!
Emotional eating has been passed down for generations
Generational learning is the foundation for most of our thoughts and beliefs. For better or for worse, our families are our first teachers. Your parents taught you what they thought was best, but not everything they taught you is serving you anymore. This doesn’t make your eating habits your mom’s fault either! She didn’t know what you’re about to learn!
Here’s how we get stuck in emotional eating cycles.
As kids, we were taught to use food to change our emotions.
I was at a ball game a few weeks ago and I saw a little kid take a bad tumble. His mom raced over and was trying to comfort him and get him to stop crying. I overheard her say, “I have a sucker, would a sucker help you feel better?” The kid perked right up and trotted off to grab his sucker.
Now, I have zero judgment for this mama, we have all been there! You’ll do anything to get your kid to calm down and feel better! But this jumped out to me because it is so normal. From the time we can eat, we are taught that we can use food to feel better.
When you got good grades you got to go out for dinner.
When you got shots as a kid, the doctor gave you a lollipop.
When your boyfriend dumped you, it was a free pass to eat as much ice cream as you wanted.
You won the game and the team went out for pizza. If you lost, you got pizza and ice cream.
All of these emotional events were met with food and that association of big feelings = eating was simply conditioned in you.
We have to unlearn these negative thoughts and behaviors around food
Just because you’ve been conditioned to treat big emotions with food, doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it! You’ve learned that the association between emotions and food is no longer serving you. Which, means it’s time to unlearn that habit.
The key here is that you don’t replace the comfort you used to get from food, with shame. Most women who are looking to lose weight, feel guilt or shame about how they’ve used food in the past. They think they need to punish themselves for their previous food choices.
But Mama, that doesn’t work. If you restrict your food as punishment or workout like crazy as punishment, then you’ll never live a healthy life and you won’t pass down healthy habits to your kids.
Instead, we need to look at food as neutral. It’s not all good or all bad. It’s just food.
The truth is that food is meant to fuel our bodies, our minds and our souls.
Food can be a comfort.
Food can help you grow.
Food can fuel our busy lives.
Food can be fun!
Food is all of the things - not just one of these things. And when we begin to unlearn the negative associations we picked up as kids, as early adults, as moms, we have to replace that with habits and strategies that teach us how to approach our food in healthy ways.
True health comes through balanced food choices
The first step to healing generational food habits is to understand how food works, what our body is telling us when we feel hunger cues, and how to respond to those cues in ways that will benefit our physical health and emotional health.
Like we talked about before, this isn’t an all-or-nothing mindset. Cutting out sweets altogether doesn’t make you a healthy person, just like eating Oreos all day doesn’t make you one. True health - mental and physical health - comes from finding a balance between foods that fuel you and foods that are fun for you!
Understand why you need proteins, fats and carbs
The first thing I teach my Macros Made Easy Mamas is what the three macronutrients are and how to use them to fuel their lives. By implementing a balance of the three macronutrients you will have the energy to keep up with your busy life and maintain a healthy weight so you can show up like you want to!
To sum it up macronutrients, or macros, are the nutrients that your body needs for survival. The three macronutrients are protein, fats, carbs. All food is made up of these macros, but when it is highest in one macro that’s what determines if it’s a protein, fat, or carb.
Protein
Proteins are a serious force to be reckoned with, here are just a few benefits of protein.
Protein is used to build and repair almost every tissue in our bodies, including our muscles and bones. It also helps with bone density as we age.
Protein helps improve hair, skin and nail strength.
Protein helps synthesize hormones, especially the hormones that affect our mood.
Protein supports the immune system and helps ward off illness.
Protein boosts the metabolism and helps us lose fat and stay lean.
While protein's role is vital in our bodies most people are under eating protein! You should aim to have protein at every meal or snack you have during the day to make sure you have enough to perform these vital functions.
Fat
First, let’s bust the myth that fats make you fat. It’s not true. Fat is an essential part of a balanced diet! Fats nourish fatty tissues like your eyes, brain, and cell membranes. They also play an important role in hormonal health - which is especially important for women.
One of the reasons fat has a bad reputation is that the American diet is heavy in unhealthy fats. But if you focus on healthy sources of fat, ones that come from foods rather than processed fats, then you’ll see so many benefits in your body and mind!
Carbs
Carbs are usually labeled as bad, but the truth is that we need carbs to survive! We use carbs for mental clarity and function, workout recovery, fat-burning process and simply for energy, so we have to eat them to have a balanced diet.
The trick to using carbs to your advantage is to eat carbs that are slower to burn aka complex carbs. Simple carbs, are usually from processed food and are more likely to cause weight gain. While complex carbs are filled with fiber and micronutrients that aid in digestion and can promote healthy weight loss.
How (and when) to eat fun foods
Now. let’s talk about the fun foods! We all love cookies, ice cream, brownies, pasta and all those foods that fad diets tell us are “bad” foods. But this isn’t true. Food isn’t inherently bad! It’s just food!
Food only becomes a problem when we create unhealthy habits or mindsets around our food! For example, if you eat cookies to cope with a bad day, you’re using the food to ignore your real feelings and you’re mindlessly eating them. That’s not the cookies’ fault! Cookies are absolutely ok to eat, but we need to learn how to eat them without attaching emotion to them and how to eat them in moderation.
One trick to eating fun foods without any guilt!
I teach my Macros Made Easy Mamas this one trick when they’re starting out because it helps them avoid emotional eating without restriction.
If you have the urge to eat something fun or something that you haven’t planned for the day, instead of eating it in the moment and throwing off all the hard work you’ve put in for the day, delay the urge and eat it the next day.
By delaying our urges we do a few things.
We keep promises to ourselves. When it comes to breaking down old habits and building up new ones that serve you, keeping promises to yourself is the most important. Every time you keep the promise to yourself to not reward yourself with food or to only eat the food you planned for the day, you build confidence in your ability to live a healthy life.
Decide if the urge is worth it. Sometimes we want food so badly in the moment, but when we walk away, we realize that it wasn’t something we actually wanted or needed.
Create a healthy relationship with food. By delaying the urge and having that food at a later time, we learn that we don’t need to label a food as good or bad. When you come back and eat the food without the emotional attachment you break the pattern in your head that causes emotional eating!
Emotional eating isn’t something you’re stuck with for life. It’s a habit that can be broken down and dismantled, without having to give up your favorite foods forever! If you’re ready to break down your food habits that are hurting you and learn new habits that serve you, then let’s talk. Schedule a free discovery call to take the first step toward the healthy life you’ve been dreaming of!
