Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. If you’re new, my name is Kat and I am here to help you make your eating habits easier. And I’m also here to help you change them in a way that’s actually sustainable. So if you are new to my work, I specialize in changing eating behaviors without planning, tracking, willpower being necessary. And it’s not that any of those things are wrong. I just really want to help us as women come back to an angle of healthy eating that feels more natural and sustainable. Because chances are if you’re here with me, you don’t just want to eat healthy, you want to become a naturally healthy eater and achieve long term results as an effect of that. So maybe that’s long term weight loss, healing other health symptoms, just having a all take less from you. So that is what I am here to help you do.Now, if you have been here for some time or this is your first time with me, the best way to enter my world and begin my work is to sign up for my free course. So it’s called Solve Your Food Struggles in 5 Days. I will teach you step by step what you need to do to begin eating healthy naturally now without that planning, tracking or willpower. So you can go to cat rent us.Com forward slash course, and I highly recommend doing that. We get all of the incredible feedback from this free course and how helpful it is. And so I want you to go through that and see how it applies to you.So today we’re gonna talk about nighttime cravings, alright, and especially the kind that hit you after a long day so your energy is gone, […0.5s] maybe you were at work, taking care of the kids, socializing and it feels like the only thing that’s possible for you to do to recover is to comfort eat your favorite foods.So if you have ever felt totally in control all day with your eating habits and then at night everything goes out the window, this episode is going to help you.So I want you to listen very carefully and know that we can be honest with ourselves here and just hold a lot of space for how hard it’s been. But it is […0.5s] simple to solve for and it’s not complicated. So I want you to see how this relates to you.So here’s the problem that so many of us come up against, right? We’re doing […0.6s] everything right during the day.I think that many of the women I coach are type a very ambitious high achieving and they really show up to their career. So for you, this might mean you really show up in your day as a mom or you really show up in your career, at work or you’re a business owner and that feels set.But then when it comes to […0.5s] eating and following a food plan and checking off those things to lose weight, potentially it feels like that just isn’t sustainable.So you check things off in your to do list at work during the day, and it feels stable. But then the evening hits and all of a sudden, you don’t even know how it happened. You’re in the kitchen snacking mindlessly or you’re sitting on the couch watching Netflix and eating a tub of ice cream.And here’s what I want you to know. If this relates, there’s no shame here. I have been here. I want you to know that this is not about a lack of discipline or willpower. It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough or that you’re not committed. There’s nothing negative here.That means anything about you, something very natural and expected is happening. And what is happening and why this occurs is because you are energetically depleted. There is depletion happening in some form.So physically, emotionally, mentally, you are depleted and you are not hungry for food in these moments, although that’s how it presents. What your brain is hungry for is relief. It’s hungry for comfort and it wants to soften that stressful tension from the day.So this means rather than solving this as a food problem per se or a willpower problem that means anything negative about you, we’ve got to solve this as the problem.It really is, right? We have to solve this as a stress and tension and energy expenditure problem. So in my programs and my membership, we teach that emotional eating isn’t something to fix or resist. So if you are emotionally eating or comfort eating, it doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong with you. And I think it’s really easy to believe this, especially with where diet culture has taken a lot of us in the past decades, is that if you are overeating or emotionally eating, it must be your fault, right? It must be our fault. It must be cause we’re not doing something, right?What those methods didn’t understand is that behaviorally emotional eating is very expected and it makes sense for the brain to do. That is just there to keep you alive because here’s what’s happening.If you’re emotional eating, your brain […0.5s] is offering you cravings to seek comfort in food because the stress is not regulated.So when stress is not regulated, what this means is there’s a stress response occurring on the body because of mental exhaustion, unprocessed emotions, a lot of the things that we weren’t taught to do.So a lot of us are just in this low grade high functioning stress state all the time. And what does our body do in a stress state?It’s prime to keep us alive, conserve energy and bar down the hatches. So what this tends to look like for us is retaining weight and really high cravings because retaining weight, the body’s like, alright, a famine must be occurring. It’s very primitive. So I’m gonna reserve this energy for her so she can use it at a later time. Right?It’s very survivally based. And then the cravings go up because it’s our brain signaling us to get comfort as quickly as possible, so that stress can go down perfectly natural. So I know this can be a stretch for us to see at first, but this is the truth.Your emotional eating and your brain providing you these cravings. Are your brain doing its best to keep you alive, very well functioning. Properly functioning brains do this.And so that means rather than approaching […0.5s] nighttime cravings, are emotional eating as something to fix, cause something’s gone drastically wrong.What if everything’s functioning properly? No one just gave us the manual, haha, right, someone gave us the wrong […0.5s] annual that is 1,000,000% what is happening. And now I wanna offer we’re actually gonna take a manual that solves this problem for the last time.So again in my programs, I teach that emotional eating is not something for you to fix or resist, cause that is not possible. That’s not really how it works. It’s something I want you to be willing to understand and to work with. I want you to practice working with your cravings, working with your stress responses to really communicate with your body properly to see what it’s needing from you, so you both can work together to heal.So here’s the thing as well nighttime cravings aren’t the problem here. Stay with me. Your relationship to the nighttime cravings is […0.6s] okay. So many of us are showing up with solving this problem from a desperate aggressive fixing mentality.We’re like, I just can’t have this happen. I just need this taken care of, I just need this done. But I very often in my programs talk about a sense of maturity with our eating habits, becoming our own parent and caregiver with food. And again, none of us are taught to do this, so no shame.But I want you guys to see how bypassing and bulldozing it is to see cravings as something you just need to fix. I instead want you to observe how you’re showing up to solving this problem and think, am I showing up as a caregiver and parent to myself where I’m meeting myself and my body at eye level […0.5s] to see what I need, or am I demanding from this drill sergeant aggressive perspective?So what if cravings and emotional eating aren’t as big of a problem as it seems? It is, but your relationship to it is that it shouldn’t be there, which makes everything more urgent […0.6s] because here’s the truth.If you are demanding from your body and yourself, there’s no way you’re gonna be in a position to care for your stress, to tend to your body’s needs and emotions throughout the day.You are going to neglect doing that, and then the things that you weren’t willing to caregive are going to show up and demand attention at night in the form of cravings. So what I’m really getting to here is you have to be a certain persona when you solve for emotionally eating in the evenings for the last time. And you cannot approach it setting expectations and demanding from yourself in this fixing way.You have to be willing to care, give yourself, and ask where is the stress occurring, what emotions are coming up throughout the day? Because not checking in with that is what’s causing me to wanna emotionally eat later on.So the process of solving for emotionally eating is involves you getting closer to yourself and caregiving yourself more. It doesn’t mean getting further away from yourself and setting higher expectations.So here’s the solution to stop […0.6s] eating. So the solution to […0.5s] overeating in the evenings and solving for those cravings, it’s not to just stop with willpower and discipline. This will work short term but not long term.The solution to this is to begin checking in with your emotional and stress state before you get to that point of depletion. I want you to build moments of intention and presence throughout your day to see what’s going on with your emotions before you’re completely burnt out.And I want you to practice pausing throughout your day and asking yourself, what do I need right now?So I’m gonna give you guys a very relatable practical example, and it’s gonna sound very simple, but if you are struggling with cravings, this is not happening, I promise. So I want you to consider a state where you feel overwhelmed throughout the day all of the time because of a to do list.I think this is very relatable, so many times I will coach a woman who […0.5s] shows up and does the same routine every day, wakes up, gathers the kids together as best as she can, drops them off, goes to work, works hard, comes home. And then what ends up happening is as soon as she has a moment to herself, maybe kids go to bed, that’s when overeating happens.And the thing we wanna look at here is how is this woman in the scenario who’s relatable to all of us, how is she fuelling her day? What this woman in this example is fuelling her day with is the emotional fuel of overwhelm.And so this woman in the scenario would have a lot of thoughts where she’s thinking, I’m running out of time, and I just need to get things done. I’m not gonna finish everything on my to do list, nothing’s working for me, and […0.5s] everything is just too much.Let’s say we’ve all been guilty of these thoughts. So this woman without thought and emotional awareness is just gonna be in the cycle where she’s constantly overwhelmed.It’s piling and piling and piling on until the end of the day, until her brains like, hey, I need you to relieve this because I’m gonna burn out if you don’t bring me some comfort. And so that’s when she eats to regulate all of that. This is normal.And I want you guys to know in this client scenario, this woman emotionally eating is actually preventing her from total burnout that would be hard for her to recover from, because that is how she’s coping to regulate her stress that’s piling on with the overwhelm throughout the day.So of course, we do not want to be overeating because we wanna be healthy. We want results with our body that we want.So despite the fact that the brain is working for her and helping her regulate stress with food, sure, that is not the avenue we wanna be taking. So how do we solve this? How we solve this is by lowering the body’s needs to provide us comfort in food. And how do we fill that gap? We learn to regulate stress with tools that don’t depend on food.So I’m giving you a broad example here, but let’s revisit this day with the same woman differently.So let’s say this person wakes up this hypothetical scenario of this woman, and the first thing she does is her morning’s really hectic, right? She’s got the kids running around, she has things to do.But maybe while she’s in the bathroom, she takes a moment to observe, what am I thinking and feeling today, now that I’ve woken up?So what she would likely observe is she’s thinking, I don’t have a lot of time today, and she’s feeling overwhelmed in her body. Just observing that is gonna be so beneficial for her stress regulation, because so much of stress regulation is just getting out of our own damn head.Seriously, this is the case for me too. So much of stress regulation is just objectively looking at the thoughts and emotions that are fueling you. So in that moment, she’s gonna say, so overwhelm is going to be with me today. Cool, understandable. And then she’s gonna observe overwhelm in her physical body emotionally as a vibration.Rather than spinning in her thoughts as if they were true and coming up with stories about why time is running out. She’s just gonna say, oh, I’m feeling overwhelmed today and that’s gonna be that. And that doesn’t mean it’s gonna be easy, but now she sees what’s going on.So then with a clear head, this woman is going to go through her day. The kids are still gonna be messy.She’s still gonna have things changing her schedule. She’s gonna show up to work and still do the best she can, right? And then maybe during lunchtime she checks back in when there’s a little bit of a window and she says, what do I need right now?I know overwhelm is with me today. Is there anything I can do? And maybe she needs a glass of water, maybe she’s gonna go to the bathroom. But the simple check in is gonna allow her to emotionally process with the awareness that’s actually necessary.So instead of spinning in, I’m running out of time and just bulldozing through her emotions, she’s actually gonna lean back and check in as to how she’s feeling now.I get it, guys, this sounds really simple and basic, and it’s like, cat, what the heck are you talking about? I’ve struggled with this for years.You think checking in on my emotions is gonna help me as if I haven’t already done that, you guys don’t lie to yourselves. Try this, […0.5s] and actually it’s not a light switch, but notice how it helps you be in your body more, and it allows your body to do the work of regulating your stress.Now maybe the same client goes home, and then before she goes in the house where the kids are gonna be jumping all over her, she’s gonna have things to tend to.She thinks, let me check in on myself again, how am I doing right now? How am I feeling? And then maybe overwhelm is still there, I’m gonna have all these things to do. I have no time to myself, whatever those thoughts are.And again she says, I’m having overwhelmed now, here’s what ends up happening in this hypothetical example that is all too common, […0.5s] is the first day that this woman practices this gonna be an A+ is she immediately gonna stop emotional eating?Probably not. I’ve seen it, but probably not. It’s gonna take some time for the skill to develop, for her body to acclimate, and for her stress to come down.What happens when this woman has been doing this for a week, two weeks, three weeks, and she’s checking in emotionally throughout the day and letting her body process those cravings are going to lower, they are going to slow down, they’re going to diminish. And here’s what this is gonna look like when you get home.It’s not gonna look like you all of a sudden harnessing all of this will power, discipline and feeling like you conquered a mountain […0.6s] and said no to the foods you love. It’s not gonna feel like fireworks all of a sudden.What will happen is a client will come to me and say, cat, I didn’t even think about that. I didn’t even consider that. That’s not even what was on my mind. I just served myself dinner, and I ate less than I would have before. And it wasn’t even a second thought.This isn’t magic. This isn’t anything crazy. It’s just practicing stress regulation in the most simple way to solve that root problem. And so what I want you to practice is shifting out of the all day hustle that precedes your evenings. Because if you are emotionally eating at night, that’s not when it started.It started in the beginning of your day when you decided […0.5s] not to check in and see how you were doing. Now most of us don’t know how to do this, so there’s no shame. None of us are taught to do this.But now hearing this, I want you to consider this as an option. If you are having cravings at night, because your body needs to regulate stress with food, it’s because that stress is piled on all day when we could have sat with it […0.5s] earlier on.So practice shifting out of this all day hustle because most people will go all day ignoring their emotional needs and then be totally surprised when food is the only relief available in the evenings. But your body is always trying to pay attention. 2. What emotional needs are happening throughout your day?So build small check in points. How am I feeling right now? What do I need? Am I tense? Am I tired? Am I hungry? Check in with what your body is trying to relate to you physically and emotionally because the less you bulldoze through this, the less you will binge eat 100%.I also want you guys to practice pausing before you eat. This is a very tactical thing you can start doing right away because it doesn’t mean you have to not eat, but check in and pause and connect with your body and how it’s feeling. Ask simple questions. Am I physically hungry? Am I anxious? Am I overstimulated? Am I overwhelmed?What is it I’m actually craving right now? Is it food from a physical perspective where I’m just hungry? Or emotionally?Am I feeling like I need relief? Chances are it’s mostly the latter, and that’s okay. I just want you guys to practice checking in and being aware of it. Checking in and being aware of this does 80% of the work for you.And I know with how hard you have hustled to eat healthy and make this work in the past. That might sound like craziness, right? But it does most of the work for you just to practice checking in. If you eat with intention. Just know your reasons for it.If you’re genuinely hungry, feed your body. Do not make nighttime eating wrong. Do not put it in this box of shame where to eat at nighttime means you shouldn’t trust it, […0.5s] but […0.5s] know your reasons why you’re eating. Sit down, take a breath, let your meal be a calming experience without rushing through it.And just sit and say, here’s why I’m doing this. And I don’t even care at this point if you have solved for the emotional eating or not. I’d rather you at least know the reason, because that’s gonna help build your awareness. Say I am eating this because I am hungry, or I am eating this because I need some relief. Another thing again, this is very practical. I recommend creating a nighttime ritual that isn’t food centered. So really food has become the go to soothing ritual for many of us, for many people. And I recommend seating practices that bring you comfort and regulate your nervous system, but that don’t include food. And here’s the thing, you guys, you’re not gonna be as emotionally attached to these things I’m about to recommend to you, but it’s about intentionally comforting yourself without relying on things that do not serve you, that do, that do not compromise your weight loss goals. So maybe schedule some reading time, some stretching, a shower, dim the lights, listen to a podcast, lay on the couch doing absolutely nothing. After the kids go to bed, take a bathroom break.If the kids are clamoring to get at you, I don’t care what it is, but the point is to […0.6s] deliberately include things in the evenings that are for you. And it’s meant for you to regulate your stress without sacrificing the goal you have. So this might even just mean it’s […0.5s] eight PM or nine PM, whatever time it is, and you’re finally done for the day, kids have gone to bed or whatever your scenario looks like.And this is when you feel craving for something sweet and old you or past, you would go to the pantry or order something on Doordash or whatever it is. And that’s okay. But now let’s consider instead before you make any decisions. You’re just gonna check in […0.5s] and see how you’re doing.You’re gonna think, am I physically hungry right now? Do I just feel like I need comfort right now? How am I feeling? What would feel good in my body and support me in my goals? So maybe you still grab something sweet, […0.5s] but you sit down with it, you breathe, you enjoy it, you stop when you’ve had enough.Maybe you also include other deliberate forms of comfort more intentionally that serve you, but this is the difference. We’re not removing comfort, we’re not removing foods you love, and we’re not making you wrong for any of it.It’s just handling these cravings by looking inward and meeting yourself where you’re at versus bulldozing, disciplining and willpowering. That is the shift that will change everything for you. And […0.6s] and nighttime cravings are not a character flaw. It does not mean anything about you. They are just a signal, and it’s your body asking for attention.So the more you have connection points throughout the day with yourself, the less food will be the only outlet at night.A common analogy I give my clients is your cravings or your emotional needs are like an unannounced visitor knocking at your door. And it knocks softly at first, but then if you do not let it in all day, it’s gonna be banging loudly by the time you sit down on the couch at 9 p. M.And really I want you guys to consider that example of that hypothetical woman […0.5s] who starts her day. I want you to consider having awareness of who’s outside the door and letting her in […0.5s] when you wake up. Get some awareness on how you’re feeling, see what’s going on.So she doesn’t feel the need to knock and knock and knock. And you’re only seeing her when it’s an emergency and now you got to emotionally eat just to get her to calm down. Does that make sense?Sometimes I explain this analogy a little bit better, but I am here for you, my friend. Try this out. Don’t try and fix this all at once. Try out some things I seated today for you. Practice being aware, practice checking in […0.5s] and notice what it does to your cravings.Try to understand more than you’re trying to fix and strategically as a type, a person who understands how you think. This […0.5s] more mindful approach may not be as rigid, but it’s going to be a lot more strategically effective in solving this problem. Alright, so I love you.If you want to start building these habits in a really doable, non restrictive way again, make sure you join my free course at catrentus com forward slash course. We will spend more time together.You will see me coaching on screen, so we’ll have a lot of fun and I’m so happy you’re here. Thank you for being here with me and I’ll talk to you next week.