July 12, 2023

Mindless Eating vs. Emotional Eating [Ep. 51]

Show Notes
Transcript

Do you feel like you aren’t quite sure what happened after you overeat? Like you don’t even remember it?

You are likely going unconscious and eating mindlessly. It's not that you are eating in response to negative emotion--or what you might call emotional eating. It's just that you aren't paying any attention (most likely because you are doing something else at the same time) and you aren't really sure how much you've eaten. You just know you feel over full.

This is a type of emotional eating, but isn’t quite the same. In this episode I explore the differences and how to identify when you are eating mindlessly.

I also give you 4 things to work on to reduce your mindless eating and help you get to your natural healthy weight.

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More from Well with Lisa:

Schedule a free session: wellwithlisa.as.me
Your Go-To Meal Guide: grab it HERE
Instagram: @well_with_lisa

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This is the Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast, I'm Lisa Salsbury, and this is episode 51 mindless eating versus emotional eating.

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Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food.

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I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury.

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I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter.

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I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating.

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Most of my clients come to me with some form of emotional eating.

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The truth is that if you are above your natural, healthy weight, there is some amount of overeating happening, which means you are eating beyond physical satisfaction.

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I know that sounds kind of domino technical, but for so long, I just searched and searched for what was wrong with me.

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And I put that in air quotes.

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Right.

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I kept thinking, surely my thyroid is off or I have some other condition, which makes it hard to lose weight.

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But the truth was that I just over eight.

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I consistently ate beyond satisfied.

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And I did that multiple times a week.

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I was never what I would call a binge eater.

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Although that has happened to me a few times in my past.

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Mostly, I just ate more food at meal times than I needed.

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And I snacked between meals as well.

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And often those snacks were high in sugar.

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Which all just added up to too much food for my body.

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There's two primary ways that I believe we get to overeating.

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And that is emotional eating.

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And mindless eating.

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So, if you think about your hunger signals, physical hunger, Is gradual.

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Perceived in our stomachs occurs hours after eating a meal and disappears when we have had just enough.

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The eating experience when physically hungry is actually quite satisfying for most of us.

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And if you feel physically hungry prior to eating, it feels good to satisfy that hunger.

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On the other hand, emotional hunger is characterized by several things.

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It's acute.

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It starts in our brain.

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It's unrelated to how long ago we ate our previous meal or how much we previously have eaten.

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It often persists after eating enough.

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And after you eat from emotional hunger, you may find that it unleashes secondary emotions, including guilt, and sometimes even shame.

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Most people think emotional eating is crying face down in a pint of ice cream.

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But

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it can look like needing a snack to get through those work emails.

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You've got to write.

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It can look like a little rewards every time you accomplish something.

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Have you ever done this?

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Where you get a stack of crackers or Skittles, and you have some after each phone call you make, or each chapter you study.

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It can look like eating.

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Extra helpings at mealtime, because you are telling yourself you don't get this food very often, or it's just so good.

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Or you feel the fear of missing out maybe on what it tastes like, or everyone else is eating for whatever reason.

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It's those extra helpings at meal times.

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It can also look like feeling really stressed and eating to calm down.

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Although we often associate emotional eating with sadness, eating because we're depressed or sad or feel bad about ourselves.

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Emotional eating happens for all kinds of emotions.

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It could even be said that any time we eat when we aren't physically hungry or beyond our physical hunger, That's emotional, eating.

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I just like how it often persists after eating enough.

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So obviously emotional eating is the big contributor to overeating.

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So mindless eating is a close cousin of emotional eating, or maybe just a subcategory, I guess, of emotional eating.

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It is where we are instead of feeling bad and your brain looking for ways to solve for that emotion, you are eating more on autopilot.

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It's a form of emotional eating in that it's often not eating because we are physically hungry.

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It might start that way.

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But it usually does not end that way.

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The thing is, I think mindless eating happens way more often than we realize because of our current state of distraction.

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So common in today's world.

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Mindless eating looks like snacking on popcorn or chips while watching a movie.

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You look down the bag has gone.

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It's eating while driving.

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It's eating while scrolling Instagram or Facebook.

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It's eating everything on your plate, just because it's there.

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Eating from the bag.

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So we have no idea how much we've consumed.

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It's eating the jelly beans from the bowl on your coworker's desk while chit chatting, without even noticing your doing it.

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Side note.

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I will say one exception here that my clients always ask me about is, um, snacking while on very long road trips, in order to stay awake when you are the driver.

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In that case, obviously better to arrive alive.

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I always say so if you're doing, you know, one or two long road trips a year and you overeat that day in order to stay awake.

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You know, I'm not gonna tell you that.

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That's a bad thing, but generally speaking, if you're running errands around town and it's your habit to keep snacks in the car, or just to grab something every time you leave the house, when you're going to get in the car, that's a good place to be aware that that is probably mindless eating.

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So here's a couple things I noticed that are going on with mindless eating.

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Number one, it's just going unconscious.

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When we eat.

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We don't pay attention to our bodies.

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We don't pay attention to the actual food.

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We are eating.

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We are enjoying it in any meaningful way.

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And it's only serving to Sue our boredom, or we truly aren't even noticing we are eating.

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If we aren't thinking about the food.

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Or our body or how it's feeling while eating chances are we will mindlessly over eat.

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I noticed this especially happens when food is just out and available.

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So you grab a handful of nuts from the bowl as you pass by, or you are chatting with people at the table.

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And the next thing you know, the entire bowl of chips and salsa is gone.

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And you aren't sure if you are the one that ate at all.

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Number two is that we eat exactly.

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What's served on our plate without asking ourselves or checking in if it's the right amount for us.

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We mindlessly clean our plates.

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Out of habit.

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'cause that's what we've always done.

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And the habit is the big contributor to the mindlessness here.

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We don't bother to check in with the body because we just.

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Eat and tell it's gone.

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Especially in restaurants.

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This can be a huge problem.

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Portion distortion is something I talked about in episode 27 with the clean plate club.

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So I won't go into the whole thing here.

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You can go back and listen to that episode, but briefly I will just remind you that today's portions are considerably larger than they have been.

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Historically, for example, a typical bagel.

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Today.

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Um, a typical bagel in the mid 1980s would be about three inches in diameter.

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Whereas today's standard bagels are about six inches across.

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We call that portion distortion and it comes from an article out of the university of North Carolina.

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In the early two thousands.

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So the thing to remember about portions is that it's the actual amount that you eat, not what the serving size says.

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So meaning if you order the large French fries, that's considered the portion.

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Even though, if you were to look up the nutritional information, you might see that the large fry is considered to be two servings or three servings or whatever.

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You've all seen this on a package where it's the amount you would eat.

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Like it's a bag of chips or a bag of cookies.

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You know, the small, smaller kind, not like a family size, but it's typically what you would eat in a sitting, but you flip it over and you see the nutritional information says it's two servings.

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And restaurants were consistently served portions that are bigger than they used to be, or even just bigger than what our bodies need.

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You know this to be true because the same portion is served to you as well as to say my much taller, much broader shouldered teenage son.

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If you both ordered the lasagna at olive garden, they don't ask how hungry you are.

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They just bring the same size piece to both of you.

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And I guarantee.

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It's much bigger than the piece of lasagna that would have been brought to you 30 years ago.

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So most of us don't even realize this Because these portions have actually been this way Or just slightly increasing during our adult lives, but they are much different than what they were when our parents were our age.

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For sure.

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So when we mindlessly eat, just what's served to us or the amount we maybe consistently even serve to ourselves.

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It's possible that there is some overeating or eating beyond physical hunger going on.

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So here's a couple of ways to battle this mindless, eating.

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For starters, and this is my number one recommendation.

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I eat at a table from a plate without distractions.

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Don't eat, standing up or right from the fridge.

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Don't start eating from your plate that you've dished up until you have sat down.

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And taken a nice big breath.

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Smelled it perhaps given.

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Thanks.

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And then from that calm place, begin eating.

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Pay attention to the taste and the smells.

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Even if you are eating with other people, you can also still take some moments to pay attention to your food.

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I often even like, talk about the food who likes this, what do you like about it?

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Do you like this stir fry sauce?

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I did it a little different this time.

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Or the rice seems sticky.

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Or wow.

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I did a really good job on the rice or whatever.

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I mean, I am the cook in the family, so I like to talk about the food that I make.

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But I do like to bring some attention to it so that it's okay for me also to be paying attention to it and not just talking about other things and not noticing what I'm eating.

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But when you are by yourself, make an effort here not to eat in front of the TV.

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Or your phone?

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I know that is really, really common.

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And I would really encourage you to try to eat without distractions.

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Second.

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Don't eat in the car.

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I used to always bring a snack in the car.

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Like every time I got in, I think mostly, I don't know.

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I thought it would be more fun or it was like this me time.

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I don't really know why I used to do that.

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But I also recommend you not keep snacks in the car.

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Be confident in your ability as an adult to find food.

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If you are physically hungry, you don't need to keep snacks in case you might possibly get hungry.

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The chances are you're just going to eat the snacks, whether you're hungry or not.

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So I do still bring water, but of course that's different than food.

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Third, if you are not the one that serves your plate, like if you are at a restaurant.

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Or someone in the family dishes you up, take a look at what's on the plate and decide how much you would have served yourself.

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Based on your current hunger level.

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Split the food right there.

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And then so like, For example, in that lasagna example, just cut it right down the middle or maybe in thirds, whatever.

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We would have been the amount you would have taken for yourself.

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And that way, when you come to that cut line, you have an indicator and it's kind of like a little cue to your brain.

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To check in with your body at that time.

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So basically if you are not the one that served up your plate, take a look and decide how much you would have served and make an effort to.

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Eat that amount.

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Or at least check in with your body.

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When you're getting close to that amount.

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Lastly, keep eating to meal times.

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If you decide ahead that you only eat from a plate when your butt is in a chair, then you're not going to be grabbing things on your way through the kitchen or on your way past your coworker's desk.

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Practicing keeping your eating to meal times helps you pay attention to the hunger scale.

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Remember, I want you to wait until you are hungry enough to eat a meal.

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Constantly snacking throughout the date when you are a tiny bit hungry and then eating a little snack.

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So you're just barely not hungry.

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And then doing that again, an hour later is going to keep you feeling like you were hungry all day.

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Wait for true physical hunger at a negative three on the hunger scale.

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And then sit down.

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And eat a meal.

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It doesn't have to be a three-course meal.

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I'm not talking about big fancy meals.

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Honestly, I just finished lunch and I had cottage cheese and a mango.

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That's what I had planned for my lunch.

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I love it.

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I had lots of cottage cheese, so it's a good portion of protein and there's tons of fiber in the mango.

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It's easy.

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It's fast.

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Keeps me satisfied.

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So it's when I'm saying sit down and eat a meal, I'm not talking about.

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Having to cook some elaborate thing every time it just means an actual meal.

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And not a couple of crackers.

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Here's the thing many, many of my clients tell me they aren't sure what happened.

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I asked.

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Why do you think they, why do you think you overate?

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What, what do you think is going on for you when you're eating more than you want to, or you're getting into that really, you know, positive six part of seven, positive eight on the hunger scale and feeling really full.

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And so many times they tell me, I don't know, I'm not sure.

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I don't know.

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What was the emotion going on?

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They can't really identify a specific emotion.

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So they know they ate when they weren't physically hungry or past physical fullness cues.

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But at the same time, they weren't necessarily feeling sad or stressed or bored or some other emotion they could identify.

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Usually the answer is mindlessness.

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Usually they went unconscious.

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An eight out of habit or because it was there or because the clock said it was time to eat or just because they always clean their plate.

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There's just so much mindless eating that I realized I needed to separate it out as this sub category.

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Of emotional eating to really identify what's going on.

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If you find that this is you try these four tips, I just gave you this week.

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And just to review that was eat at a table from a plate without distractions.

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Number two, don't eat in the car.

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Number three.

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If you didn't serve your own plate, decide what you would have served.

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And lastly, keep eating to meal times.

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So if you find, like I said, that this is you and you're just having a hard time identifying you're like, yeah, I guess I'm over eating, but I don't really feel like I'm solving for emotions.

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Just start with keeping eating to meal times.

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And sitting down with a plate.

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Don't

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forget that if you need help with this, with this mindless eating or emotional eating of any kind.

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I am taking new clients right now.

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I have space for a few one-on-one clients and you can also get on my wait list for my next group program.

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So, if you're considering either of those options, I would also just encourage you to take a little time to talk with me about it.

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I do free strategy sessions, which is a terrible name for basically a phone call to ask me your burning question about your health or weight loss.

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If there's something you can't quite figure out, it's helpful to get a coach's perspective.

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And I love to be that for you.

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I think the best way to know if coaching is going to work for you.

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Is to get a little coaching.

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And that's what I do in these calls.

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So you let me know what's going on and I offer you some coaching and you decide if my program is the perfect fit for you.

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Link to schedule that is of course in the show notes, and I hope you have a great week.