Overcoming Emotional Eating (Wendi Francis)

The definition of discipline is to train someone to obey rules or a code of behavior using punishment to correct disobedience.

What can you do to really change your behavior? By really using tactics. As opposed to punishments.

If you know your cues are, you can start to disrupt those cues.

You can replace one behavior with another.

Work with your feelings. Feel your feelings. Remember language, feeling behavior.

We need to persist. We need to overcome and we need to learn.

Discipline is not the key to success with food. Learning love and growth is.

"Strength doesn't come from what you can do, it comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn't."

8 Reasons why people give up when it comes to their food change.

• Having unrealistic expectation.
• They've changed too much at once.
• Looking at change as permanent.
• If you're using food as a reward.
• If you have no support.
• Because they feel like slip-ups are the end all.
• Because of skipping meals.
• They moved into a patter of emotional eating.

"In recognizing why we failed we learn to succeed."

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

-Mother Teresa

2 Techniques to stop eating:

• The poetic pause - a 30-second pause before you begin eating to slow down and regulate your breath
• The 5 seconds rule - a five-second countdown to initiate an action.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."  -Winston Churchill

Deciding vs Doing

7 Ways to move from deciding to doing.

• Stop waiting until conditions are perfect.
• Stop. Get up. Do it.
• Stop overthinking things.
• Take continuous action.
• Use your action to overcome fear.
• Focus on the present moment.
• Eliminate distractions.

If you want to make the choice to make a change, you have to master your fears so they don't control you anymore.

In order to really make a choice to make a change and open your way to a new you and a new day, you have to accept how you are and where you are.  

"Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world. "

-Ralph Waldo Emerson 

How to get out of fear and the anxiety cycle

• Get out of you mind and back into your body.
• Clear the fear response.
• Calm the body into its natural state of relaxation.

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

-James Stephens

Physical symptoms of worry and anxiety are held in the body.

• It can create muscle tension.

Anxiety and Worry can show up as restlessness.

2 Types of Worry  

• Real problem worry
• Hypothetical worry 

“The journey in between what you once were and who you are now becoming is where the dance of life takes place.”

― Barbara De Angelis

Two ways to find your way back home:

Logistically - where are you going? how did you get off track and what happened?

Emotionally - Psychology

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.” 

― Yoko Ono

Just like seasons people have the ability to change, we can change how we eat and what season we are in by just being and aligning with who we are.

Feel your feelings and then understand the facts once you read the waves of feeling. So that you can come out on the other side, balanced on the levels that you need to.

• We eat for our stomach but we crave from our heart.
• Eat fiber at lunch.  
• Fiber can help you feel full longer.

Don't run away from emotions, feel from it and learn  from it.

Depression is a low energy emotion.

• Loneliness
• Sadness
• Boredom

How and why can depression lead to over eating.

• Using food to cope with emotions
• When you have over eaten
• To nurture
• To connect with happier times
• If your life is not what you expect it to be

"Depression is just our soul seeking something it cannot find."

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

To improve ones life or circumstances through ones own effort rather than replying on others

Sometimes you have to say no to other people so that you can say yes to yourself.

• Don't relieve the memories.
• Relegate the upset to the past.
• Don't keep trying to find blame.
• When something goes awry don't go under the comfort blanket.
• Stop looking for sympathy from other people.
• Plan ahead.
• Writing out your plan.

Why do  people eat in their car?

• Busy
• To get energy when driving
• Physically hide and emotionally eat
• Habit

What to do to help shift your car eating pattern.

• Clean out your car.
• Put things you love in your car.
• If you slip up clean up immediately.
• Go a different route home.
• Snack before you leave work.
• Use memo apps on your phone.

Car eating can takeover your car and your life. Being mindful in your change to change your mind and your car eating can really help you shift the way you do things. When you change the way you do things we know that the things you do change.

Breaking Bad Habits

• Mindfulness  
• Meditation
• Writing it down

You can use the limitless ocean of your mind and create fullness of being present in the moment to break those habits that bind you. Then you can find peace in the sanctuary of yourself in knowing that you can move and change the habits that drive your eating patterns.

More About Katie Bramlett

Katie Bramlett started WeShape with the intention of advocating for people to stop focusing on the number on the scale and instead put their energy and efforts towards something more meaningful. Her entire product is rooted in intention, movement, community, and beliefs. Katie has a passion for bringing awareness to the toxic expectations placed on people in the fitness industry and believes that if we all unsubscribe to those messages we can pave a new path that's rooted in self acceptance, care, and kindness.

WeShape is combing technology, kinesiology, and psychology to reshape how and more importantly, why we exercise.

www.weshape.com/overcoming

All social handles are @weshape and @weshapepodcast

Overeating reasons:

• Physiological reasons
• Environmental triggers
• Food deprivation
• Emotional deprivation

"The reason why people give up is because people focus on how far they have to go instead of how far they've come."

Types of Nurturance

• Emotional  
• Physical
• Mental
• Psychological
• Spiritual

Nurturing yourself without food

• Give yourself loving and kind messages.
• Take good care of yourself.
• Do nice things for yourself.
• Set healthy boundaries with others.
• Become your own advocate.
• Be compassionate with yourself.

• Eating is still a choice.
• Do not label yourself as a food addict.
• Dopamine is a brain chemical that relieves anxiety and helps calm the system.
• The addiction gene.

• Physical hunger vs Emotional hunger  
• Connect to another person or connect to yourself by nourishing yourself with good nutrition.
• Look at healthy recipes

• You are not alone, there are a lot of people who have issues with emotion and food
• Emotions and how they relate to your food
• Emotions are not emergencies
• The more you know about yourself, the more powerful you become
• "You are more powerful than you know and they fear the day you discover it"
• 2 Types of hunger: physical hunger and emotional hunger
• emotional repression reason
• "allow the emotional needs to be met"
• "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom"

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.” 

― Malcolm Gladwell

Stomach hunger - physical hunger

False alarm signals

• Teeth hunger
• Mouth hunger
• Mind hunger
• Thirst
• Fatigue
• Emotional hunger

"Take care of your body, it's the only place you have to live."

LinkedIn

Facebook

Instagram

"At first they’ll ask you why you’re doing it. But later they’ll ask you, how you did it."

“Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.” - Maya Angelou

• Let go of your past.
• Using visualization.
• Do not undereat on Halloween
• Giving out other things besides candy
• When it's in your house keep the candies out of sight
• Dressing-up yourself
• Remind yourself to mindfully move through the day
• Have something the next day to look forward to  

"Be mindful, stay present, be yourself and use the visualization inorder to help you overcome past and present halloween blunders."

6 Psychological needs

• The feeling of safety.
• Trust
• Self-esteem
• Independence
• Intimacy
• Control

Leptin  

• is a hormone that's produced by the body's fat cells
• it tells our brain when we have enough fat stored and that we don't need to eat

a hormone predominantly made by adipose cells and enterocytes in the small intestine that helps to regulate energy balance by inhibiting hunger, which in turn diminishes fat storage in adipocytes.

Solutions to help with Leptin levels.

• Avoid processed food
• Eat soluble fiber
• Eating protein

"You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great." -Zig Ziglar

Stages of change:

• Precontemplation
• Contemplation
• Preparation
• Action

"An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied." -Arnold H. Glasow

Change curve :

• Shock
• Denial
• Frustration
• Depression or Acceptance
• Experimentation
• Decision
• Integration

Things you can do to empower yourself around the psychology of change:

• Evaluate your level of control
• Practice self care.
• Check your thought pattern.
• Find your priority.

Uncovering your best you: food, weight and life transformation

• Self Sabotage Cycle
• Saboteur
• Eckhart Tolle - Ego
• "Self sabotage is a message that you need to learn something about yourself"

Common self sabotaging behaviors

• Procrastination
• Self medication
• Comfort eating
• Self injury

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy - Friedrich Nietzsche

• Identify the problem
• Recognize why it's there
• Identify what you want to change
• Identifying the obstacles and finding solutions
• Make the change
• Stick the change

How to truly make a behavior shift

• Focus on only one behavior.
• Identifying and understanding your why.
• Understanding how the current behavior serves you.
• It's okay to be uncomfortable.
• Remember that there's no time limit.

• We eat for our stomach but we crave from our heart.
• Eat fiber at lunch.
• Fiber can help you feel full longer.

"It's not the how you eat, it's the why you eat."

"You can't think your way out of over eating, you have to feel your way out."

True Triggers

1. Environmental triggers (Smell, Sounds and Colors)
2. Time of day
3. Emotions
4. Foods
5. PTSD

Setting limits with your food.

The ability and structure to say yes or to say no to something.

Types of limit:

• Punitive limit
• Neutral limit
• Loving limit

It's not that you can't eat anything you want, it's just not eating everything you want all the time.

"Guilt can prevent us from setting the boundaries that would be in out best interests, and in other peoples best interests." - Melody Beattie