3 ways healthy mamas disconnect from emotional eating
Emotional eating is one of the biggest reasons women, especially busy mamas, gain weight. There are so many different ways we emotionally eat, sometimes we’re looking to soothe or ignore a feeling, sometimes we’re looking for food to take us back to a fond memory and sometimes we just want our food to sound good! Emotional eating in one form or another is something every single woman struggles with! Healthy mamas know how to disconnect from emotional eating so that they can reach their health goals while still enjoying their food!
I see this process happen all the time in my Macros Made Easy Program. Most of the women in my program come to me with diet fatigue.
They’ve spent years losing and gaining back the same 10-15 pounds and have tried every diet under the sun. They’ve cut calories. They’ve cut carbs. They’ve cut fat. They’ve increased fat. They’ve taken weight loss pills. They’ve had all the weight loss shakes.
So when they finally come to me they don’t want to cut anymore. They don’t want to give up their favorite foods. They just want to feel good and eat food that makes them happy.
Which is exactly why I love macro tracking so much. There aren’t lists of restricted foods. It’s all about taking the food you’re eating and enjoying now and making it work for you instead of against you! With macro tracking, we start where you are and we make progress from there.
When I started tracking my macros, I felt the same way that my clients do! I told my macro coach that my non-negotiable was my morning coffee with coffee creamer. I’ll be honest it was mostly coffee creamer with a little bit of coffee. Regardless, I was never going to give it up. I loved my coffee. It made me happy. I wasn’t ever going to let it go away.
I didn’t realize it yet, but I had an emotional attachment to my morning cup of coffee! It was something I relied on to make me happy!
As I dove into macro tracking I would enter my morning cup of coffee with my large allotment of coffee creamer every single day. I made it a part of my meal planning. And it was amazing.
A few months into tracking, I started to realize that as much as I loved coffee creamer, it was costing me a lot of fat every day. I started to evaluate if the creamer was still worth such a large portion of my calorie intake. Learning about nutrition and how my food choices could improve my health, my weight loss, and my energy, I started to feel differently about my coffee creamer. The emotional attachment was breaking.
I had learned a trick about switching out coffee creamer for a protein shake, so I decided to give that a try. And, much to my surprise, it tasted just as good! Plus it added protein into my day without me even realizing it. So I gave up the coffee creamer and I was just as happy.
This is the progression you made when you become a healthy mama! You slowly release your emotional attachments to food because you learn they aren’t serving you anymore! It’s a huge breakthrough when you reach this point.
I’m always honored when a mama chooses to work with me because I know food and weight loss are emotional. Without realizing it we tie emotion to food in so many ways! Whether it’s your grandma’s recipe that you grew up on, a favorite holiday treat that brings back memories, or your favorite chips, food holds so much emotion in it.
I don’t ever want to tear you away from the happy memories food holds, which is why I don’t ever, ever, ever tell my clients they can’t have something!
What I want you to learn is how to control your emotions around food so that you can become the healthy mama that you want to be.
I want to talk you through the three main progressions my clients take in their food attachments and how you can overcome them too as you learn about nutrition.
Healthy mamas decide what’s good for them
When you’re hungry how do you decide what to eat? What are the words you use to think about food? I’m going to give you a few examples to get you thinking!
Do you say:
What sounds good right now?
What foods would nourish me and prepare me for my day?
How can I get protein into this meal?
My guess is you say, “What sounds good right now?” because that’s how most of us were taught to think about food - myself included!
The crazy thing is that when we say “what sounds good?” we relinquish control of our food to our emotions. Have you ever thought of it like that before? It’s a crazy thought. When you’re focused on eating for feeling or taste you fall prey to eating food that doesn’t serve you.
Healthy mamas think about food as fuel. And yes, we all want food to taste good, but sometimes, you have to eat to fuel yourself for the day ahead instead of blowing your tastebuds out of the water.
Think about it this way, if your kids had a big test in school would you let them start the day with Fruity Pebbles, donuts and orange juice that would inevitably lead to a sugar crash during their test or would you make sure they had a balanced breakfast that would fuel their brains?
That’s how you should think of your food too! Sure, a frappuccino and danish from Starbucks sounds amazing, but is that going to help you get your kids to school on time, make sure you perform well at work, give you the energy to go to the gym, run errands and clean the house? Probably not.
If you want to be a healthy mama, you have to start choosing food and meals that fuel your life!
Here are a few quick tips you can use to start creating healthy mama habits:
Have protein at every meal
Start your day with protein, fat and whole grains
Have healthy snacks throughout the day (think fruits, veggies, protein!)
Drink more water!! (See my 3x8 trick to get more water in your day!)
Healthy mamas don’t use food to soothe
One of the unhealthy attachments we can have to food is for emotional soothing. When life gets to be too much a lot of women do one of two things. They either use food to comfort themselves and end up overeating. Or they ignore their hunger cues and stop eating unless it’s absolutely necessary.
After having my son, Eastin, I developed an unhealthy attachment to food. For the first year of his life, he was in and out of the hospital and I coped with it by eating.
In the moment, eating helped to calm my nerves and anxiety, but long term it hurt me. I gained so much weight and I developed so many unhealthy habits. I knew that eating a whole sleeve of Oreos after every doctor’s visit wasn’t helping me and it wasn’t a habit I wanted to pass down to my kids.
It took a lot of time, therapy, and learning about nutrition to help me step back from my emotional eating, but mama, let me tell you, it was so worth it!
I created a new relationship with food. One that I would be proud to pass down to my kids. I didn’t demonize Oreos because they contributed to my weight gain. They weren’t inherently evil! They were how I coped with a stressful time in my life. They played a part and now that the stress was gone I needed to release them.
I became a healthy mama who knew when I could enjoy the treats (I eat a cupcake at all my kids’ birthday parties) and when I was trying to use food to hide the big stuff. That’s what I want for you too.
If you struggle with emotional eating, the first step is to recognize it. Whether you overeat when you’re stressed or don’t eat at all, you can practice this! Once you realize that you’re taking the action, grab a piece of paper and write down what feeling or emotion you’re trying to ignore.
If you can, write down why you think you’re trying to ignore it and write down what you could do to help deal with it.
Writing is a powerful tool! Don’t underestimate how helpful it can be just to write your feelings out. Maybe that’s all you need to do to confront the feelings you’re having.
If you can’t quite put your finger on why you’re using food to hide emotions, that’s ok too. Come back and revisit it when you feel ready to face that emotion.
Bringing awareness to your emotional eating patterns is exactly what healthy mamas do! If you need more help with emotional eating, let’s chat. This is probably something you could use a support system on and I’d love to help you through that.
Healthy mamas still get to enjoy food
Some foods are meant to make you happy. Maybe you have fond memories of making cookies after school with your mom. And when you eat cookies you think back on that experience and want to give that to your kids too. You can do just that and still be a healthy mama!
The most amazing thing about disconnecting from emotional eating is that you still get to enjoy food! In fact, you probably will enjoy food more as you focus on your health because you’ll start to let go of the guilt, shame and regret that you used to feel when you ate “bad foods.”
There are no good or bad foods, just food accountability!
When you stop viewing food as good or bad, you stop viewing yourself as good or bad when you eat them! You can enjoy a chocolate chip cookie without making it mean that you “cheated” or that you were weak. You can enjoy a cookie, simply because cookies bring back happy memories and they taste good!
As you learn about food, nutrition, and making the right decisions for your body, you take back the power to make healthy food choices.
That’s the transformation I want for you, mama. I want you to feel good when you eat a delicious salad and I want you to feel good when you eat a cookie. Both are serving a purpose and both can be good for you.
You can disconnect from emotional eating and learn how to make better choices without giving up your love of food. Schedule a free discovery call to take back your power!
