Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. Today I am going to teach you how to handle stress eating in the evening.So maybe this is the time of the day when you come home from work or your kids go to bed and you find that this is the time when you most want to comfort eat, you want to escape […0.4s] and all of the stresses and fatigue of the day have just caught up with you. And this is the time when you most tend to over eat or emotionally eat. This is a really valid struggle. And if you’re looking to solve for healthy eating long term, this is an excellent place to start […0.5s] to really look at what is it about this time of the day that is causing you to relinquish all control and intentions with healthy eating and instead over eat or emotionally eat. So how this often looks is you start the day with a clear plan or the week or the month and you feel like you have it all together, everything’s organized. So maybe you have a food plan you’re tracking, maybe even your meals are prepped and you already have everything ready for you to eat […0.6s] healthy.And then the start of the week or the day goes really well, maybe breakfast goes well, lunchtime you’re a little tired, but you still eat the lunch that you packed away. And then on the drive home you start to have this relatable thought process of, you know what? I’m just really tired today.It’s been a long day, it’s been a long week or month and all I want right now is to snuggle up on the couch with my favorite foods, just give myself that relief that I feel like I’m needing.And at first it feels really good, maybe even permissive. Who deserve that moment? But then moments, days, or weeks after you can’t engage in those behaviors and get the results with your body that you want.So at that point you feel really helpless. How am I gonna figure this out when 1, I totally set myself up for success with healthy eating and still don’t follow through? And 2, I really feel like I don’t wanna give up that comfort that I need after a long day or a long week.And what I want you to know right now is all of that is valid. So what we’re not looking to do to solve this problem to push you harder and use more willpower and discipline to keep your shit together, right? We’re not looking to have you do that, because that’s going to burn you out further.What we’re also not looking to do is to take away the comfort that you wanna experience to regulate your stress.So if you’re experiencing, […0.5s] kind of, urges to bring stress down, and just nestle into really comforting activities like eating foods or scrolling your phone or watching Netflix, whatever it is, that is valid.And actually that is a valid need your brain is having. So we’re not looking to take away comfort that you need to regulate either. What we want to do here is learn how your brain works, why you’re having these urges to stressy, why having a plan is not enough for you, and how you can have healthy eating habits to create the results you want and feel regulated when it comes to stress so you’re able to engage in comfort but in a way that does not sacrifice your goals.So this episode is gonna really be for you. If you’re always wondering, why do I not follow through with healthy eating even though I totally set myself up for success? And why do my healthy eating habits fall apart as soon as I walk in the door from work or as soon as it’s evening and I have some time to myself? That is gonna become totally clear in today’s episode. And I want that clarity to bring you relief because you are not feeling at willpower, discipline or micromanaging when it comes to your eating habits.The gap that you’re likely not seeing now is that you are being emotionally depleted. And this is happening consistently week to week, month to month, which is creating this all or nothing cycle with healthy eating that’s gonna further exhaust you.Burnout emotionally is kind of like a domino effect. When we are not understanding a root cause, it’s going to keep building and building until you keep burning out, and then all of a sudden you fail again. And you’re living in this constant state of perpetual stress that’s gonna increase your cravings even more.So I wanted to vote this episode to you. If you see yourself as an ambitious high achieving woman who knows she should be able to eat healthy, but somehow you feel blindsided by the decisions you end up making in the evenings with food.You might be telling yourself, I just need to be more disciplined when I come home. But instead actually what we need to help you do is bring down some of the pressure and the stress that is actually creating these patterns. And I really want you to hear this.This pattern is happening for valid reasons, and here’s why night time might be the breaking point for you. You’re exhausted. You’re tired.And by the time you actually have a moment to be yourself, to sit down, to actually be with your emotional experience, you feel like it’s just this huge, overwhelming exhale from the day.I used to describe it with myself the entire day. I was almost holding my breath in my body, in my chest and my throat. And then when I got home at the end of the day was the moment when I could finally relax, when I could exhale fully and just be in my human experience in whatever way I needed to.What was making that unsustainable is the fact that my body was feeling that tension, feeling that breath hold almost throughout the day.And so when I came home, that need for comfort and regulation was so great that it ended up creating a lot of habits that weren’t useful for my goals, like overeating and emotional eating.And what you need to know is that you are not out of control if you are craving your favorite foods at the end of the day. What’s happening is you are having an overstimulated, overly stressed brain that is seeking comfort to bring the stress down. And your cravings for food are not personal. None of our cravings are.Why we crave food, first, a lot of us is because food […0.4s] is a primal, primitive need, right? So we have to eat to survive. This is why a lot of us will tend to reach for food as the stress regulator to bring comfort, rather than things like Netflix, our phone. Maybe we do those things too.But having cravings for food to regulate stress when stress is not being managed is the most natural thing in the world.It does not make you a special case and means something is wrong with you. In fact, if you are having high cravings to emotionally eat or comfort eat at the end of the day, it means your brain and body are functioning how they should be.A lot of you will find yourselves confused, understandably, because you’ll notice yourself over eating or emotionally eating foods that maybe you don’t need, you’re not really hungry when you eat them, and maybe you’re not even enjoying them much at all.But what I want you to know is that we eat for different reasons. And there are body case that we have that tell us to eat in response to hunger, fullness, or even pleasure.But what I want you to know is that there are also emotional needs that our brain has. And when your brain is focused on emotionally filling up or relieving stress, that has nothing to do with the decisions you want to make around food. It has to do with your nervous system.So why this is important as a lot of you are solving for this problem as if it has anything to do with healthy eating, the tactics there, or your preferences with food, or even what your body needs with food.What’s actually happening is your brain is having a stress problem and it’s looking to comfort and regulate that pattern. And how it can do that is by comfort eating foods that bring you some dopamine, bring you some relief.But this isn’t gonna be solved for by changing a plan with healthy eating or forcing that into place. It is only going to be solved for making your emotional regulation the top priority.And I think sometimes in my experience teaching this concept, it can sound a little fluffy or even complicated cause none of us are taught […0.5s] to emotionally regulate or lower stress naturally. We’re not taught this in school. We’re not even told about this when we’re young.And also the solutions that the diet industry or even the wellness industry perpetuates with healthy eating aren’t emotional regulation tools. That’s not what’s talked about.And so it’s perfectly understandable if we hear that as a solution and we think, well, that doesn’t quite sound like it’s gonna solve this problem, right? It doesn’t feel solid enough. It feels a little fluffy.What I want you to know is none of us have been marketed this generally as the solution. And I want to humbly offer you today that you test this out with yourself and watch how it brings these cravings down. Because that is actually the gap that is occurring here.So here’s the first thing I want you to check in with yourself on. I want you to check in and observe how you are emotionally fueling your days.So I’m gonna explain what I mean. I want you to find how you’re emotionally fueling your days because how our brain works and how life works is, […0.5s] yes, we take a lot of action during the day on work, on your family, on everything in your life. But what we do is fueled by our emotions.How we’re fueling and the emotions you’re having throughout the day where it all starts is your thinking. So I want you to consider how you think about […0.4s] work, maybe or your role as a parent. What are the thoughts you’re having day to day?I’m going to give you an example and show you how this works. So a common thought a lot of us have is I don’t have enough time.Y’all know, if you’ve been with me for a while, I do a lot of talking and coaching around time. Now I want you to check in with yourself very honestly and consider what is the emotion you feel when you think I do not have time?So most of what I see is that we will feel the emotion of overwhelmed. And […0.8s] all of us experience emotions a little bit differently. But for you, how does overwhelm feel in your body? So for me, it feels a little bit heightened. It makes me not wanna sit still.It rises up through my throat. It’s very reactionary and it is not […0.4s] comfortable. And so what we will feel compelled to do when we have uncomfortable emotions is react to them. They’re very tough to sit with.And the more we perpetuate these thoughts that create uncomfortable emotions, the easier will become to disembody and to seek comfort and to have really high cravings to lower that experience, right?And so this is what I want you to think about is the way you’re thinking about your life matters, and how you’re fueling your actions mattered.Because if this example relates to you even, right? And you’re having a lot of thoughts about your day that create overwhelm for you, and you’re not maintaining awareness of that, what’s gonna happen is that overwhelm is gonna build up in your body throughout the day, the weeks, the months, […0.4s] all of the time.And then all of a sudden, when the overwhelm becomes too much in your body, your body’s gonna say, hey, I need to bring some of this down because it is not healthy. I do not have a capacity to regulate all of this myself, because that’s not happening.So your body’s gonna offer you cravings for what it knows will regulate that stress, which is food. This is when you guys come home from work, or it’s the end of the day, and you feel like everything’s too much, that is a cue for you. If you feel like everything’s too much, and you just need to eat.That means your emotional piling is at its max, and your body saying, hey, we need to bring some of this down, and the only way we’re gonna do that is by eating this food, watching Netflix and scrolling our phone.So I wanna offer that when you’re at that place, that’s not when we’re gonna try and make discipline decisions, because at this point, your body is primitively stepping in and saying, I’m gonna offer you some high cravings, so we can regulate your stress.A lot of the time when I’m coaching newer clients, they’ll say to me, well, cat in the moment that I’m feeling these high cravings after work to eat comfort foods. How do I say no? How do I have discipline?And what I want them to learn is actually that’s not the skill you’re gonna learn, because all of us, you guys, we cannot logically overpower what is now a primitive problem.I’m gonna say that again, we cannot logically type a […0.5s] haha ourselves out of a primitive problem. So by the time your stress is really high, cause it hasn’t been regulated at all. We weren’t having awareness of our thoughts.Now it’s a primitive problem where your primitive bigger quicker brain is gonna step in, override logic, and say hey, now we’re gonna take this down, because this is an actual stress on the body.So that means what do we have control over, how do we solve this problem? What we need to look at is where it all started, and that’s what I’m offering you here is look at where the stress of your day, your weeks, your life is starting.What are the thoughts you notice when you feel okay, you’re not at your max yet, and you notice, oh, you know what? That thinking actually creates overwhelm. It creates some shame or inadequacy.I want you to know that high cravings with food do not just happen. They start with your thoughts that you are not yet aware of.And I want you to practice being a bit more aware of your thoughts because I know there’s a lot of journaling exercises and things that are being offered to us in terms of mindset, but that is not my aim for you. Here is to not have a quote unquote good mindset. It’s to be aware of your thinking because when you practice awareness of your thoughts and your emotions, now your body is actually in a place to process emotions so the build up doesn’t occur and get to that high point where now you have no other choice but to comfort yourself through that experience.So really what we’re solving for isn’t comfort eating at the end of the day, it’s removing the need for your body to comfort eat to regulate stress, […0.5s] right?So really, you might think that comfort eating is a choice you’re making, that something has gone wrong because you’re engaging in that behavior.But actually it’s your body’s way of regulating your emotions. That means we need to have you step into that role as a caregiver of yourself and say, Audi, thank you for offering me these cravings and then these behaviors to regulate stress and survive. But that’s not bringing me the results I want with weight loss or my body. So I’m gonna step in now and fill this role separate from emotional eating.Now what I’ll say is this doesn’t imply perfectionism, right? So this doesn’t mean that you’re never gonna have cravings and you’re never gonna emotionally eat. But what we’re aiming for here is to your body […0.6s] to be in the conditions it needs for your weight loss or for the goals you want. It is enough for you to just practice these skills of seeing what thoughts you’re thinking and relieving that stress separately from food and then let the rest take care of itself.I think sometimes when I talk about these practices, our perfectionism brain will come up and turn it into another food plan or protocol or something that we have to do.Right? And I think it is such an amazing thing when women enter my coaching or they start creating results from this work and they see how much lower the stakes are. Your body is so ready to cooperate with you when it comes to the results you want.And I know we all have different bodies and circumstances, but I’m speaking generally about […0.5s] how we see losing weight or how we see eating healthy so much of the time because of the wrong approach. We think it’s gonna be really hard to lose weight, we think it’s gonna be hard to eat healthy and all these things.And really […0.5s] stakes are so much lower than maybe you thought. Maybe it’s so much easier than you initially consider. Because what if you just have to be aware of your thoughts data day and how you’re fueling the stress so that by the end of the day, you need to bring it down.So I want to get a bit practical here. So I know y’all prefer and give you some steps you can take to start bringing down this urgency in the evenings.One really big one is to start being aware of your thoughts. But separate from that, I also want to give you a step by step practice you can start doing to bring down the cravings you’re having the evenings now.So the very first thing is to identify what your relief window is. So like I said, this is the time of the day when all you need is relief because everything feels too much. I want you to identify what predictable time of the day is this occurring.Most of you will be listening here and immediately know what that is. So maybe it’s between 9 p.M. To 11 p. M. When the kids have gone to bed, maybe it’s as soon as you get home from work, maybe if it’s in the car before you even stop in the house and you got drive through, no judgment here, but find what is that relief window where your body is most needing that stress regulation to bring that urgency down.Second, I want you to practice providing relief for yourself during this time separate from food. Now there’s a concept I like to talk about called deliberate comfort versus reactive comfort.And this can mean that the end of the workday that you are going to want some relief and comfort, that you’re gonna wanna bring that stress down. So rather than reactively […0.7s] get that comfort at the end of the day, you’re going to proactively plan for needing that comfort.So much of the time, what happens is we won’t work with the comfort we need, we’ll make a plan to eat healthy, count our calories, have rigidity in place. And then we’ll just hope and pray that that will actually happen, even though predictably you’re gonna know that you’re gonna seek that comfort.What I want you to do instead is to resourcefully plan for needing that comfort at the end of the day. And then incorporate things that provide you comfort, but that don’t take away from weight loss or your body results or whatever that is.Now I’ll give you some examples, and they’re not gonna be very sexy. It’s gonna be very basic things, but it can be this simple. So let’s say for me, I’ll give you […0.7s] my personal example. When I would pick up drive through food on the way home, I would use that as my comfort to bring my stress down.And what I started doing, not that it worked perfectly every time, but I made it a practice to indulgently and deliberately provide extra things that would make that commute enjoyable.So I started picking out a new audiobook every week to get excited about on the drive home. I started picking up a drink at the gas station.I really liked that didn’t take away from my health goals. I created a ritual after work that was […0.4s] really comforting and really enjoyable for me that didn’t actively include […0.6s] emotional eating.It’s interesting because with a lot of type a professional women I work with, I relate to this too. These things are gonna feel fluffy. I wanna offer they’re not gonna feel like enough.And when someone sells you to have more rigidity in your day with plans and protocols that might sound more effective than thinking of ways to make the end of the day more enjoyable for yourself.But what if actually this softer approach is what was missing for you and it’s you thinking you needed a harsher approach with yourself? There was a client I had and it was such a beautiful example of this.She was struggling with emotional eating and comfort eating between 8 p. M. To 10 p. M. At night. And this is the time when her kids would go to bed, she would go upstairs in her […0.6s] space, it was like a little living room area she had, and she would watch reality TV.I think it was Real Housewives or something shameless like that. And she came to me thinking, this was such a problem, right? She’s like cat. All I wanna do between eight PM and ten PM is watch my Real Housewives and snack and comforty and have that moment. And she really felt so much guilt about that. And so we did a lot of coaching.But where the coaching came to generally was, was she giving herself permission to have this comforting time between 8 p. M.To 10 p. M. For her and putting that in her calendar […0.6s] as a priority because she was making the act of comfort wrong. And actually her body needs comfort. It needed regulation. We just needed to bring down some of the other behaviors like emotional eating that were occurring.Why that emotional eating was occurring was she was reactively participating in that comfort at the end of the day rather than pro actively providing herself. It does that make sense? So she was also being really aware of her thoughts and getting to the root problem.But here I want you to consider how could you make the end of the day more comforting for yourself in small little ways, with little actions that would provide you relief now without having to resort reactively to emotional eating.Now step 3 and very importantly, I want you to start regulating stress earlier in the day. So this relates to what I said before, you are not going to solve for emotional eating at night. Where it’s gonna start is providing yourself that momentary relief earlier in the day.So I talk about this in my membership a lot like air being inflated into a balloon. So a lot of us will try and not emotionally eat when the balloons about to pop.So when the balloon is about to pop is when you just need comfort at the end of the day, stress has built up, you really just need the air to come out of that balloon and you can’t function unless you do.Now […0.5s] the air in the balloon has to start somewhere and where it’s starting for most of you again, is the beginning of your days or weeks or whenever.So I want you to start being more aware of your thoughts and emotions and noticing when you’re feeling emotions that are uncomfortable, checking in on your body and acknowledging it.Doing this and just practicing this basic skill is gonna allow some of that air to come out over time. So cravings are lower rather than competing with really high cravings and urges for comfort when that stress balloons about to pop. So a way you can do this and again, it’s painfully simple.I want you to take […0.4s] one to two minutes throughout your day when you have space to just […0.5s] be, to check in on yourself and ask the really simple questions, what am I feeling in my body? And what am I thinking? What human experience is occurring for me right now?How I like to describe this and again in my membership on your eating habits. We talk about a lot of roles that we have, and the role I’m always teaching you guys to get to is the caregiver role in this area, where you’re able to parent yourself in a really firm but kind way that feels stable.And a lot of us have this child brain that just wants to have fun, just wants to have comfort emotionally eat […0.5s] and caregiver, […0.7s] how it does the emotional work to regulate stress. It’s kind of like checking in on the child each day and opening the bedroom door and saying anything you wanna talk about. Sometimes the child might say, no, I’m good.Sometimes you’ll sit down and say, what am I thinking or feeling? And the thoughts won’t be anything crazy. It might be really basic and you don’t notice an emotional charge, but the act of you checking in on how you’re doing is gonna be a practice of regulating stress.It is so much more about you checking in on yourself throughout the day and seeing what’s coming up for you than it is what you find. Does that make sense? So it’s less about finding the right answers for your thoughts and feelings.And it’s more about being someone who checks in on those things before they build up.I know in describing this can feel very general and basic, but I want you to be willing to try this out and see how it works for you to see what comes up when you just check in on how you’re feeling. That is what is gonna allow you to build the skill and start regulating that stress.Now the last thing you can practice doing with all of this is you can actually start to build a relationship with the comforting urges.So here’s how this can work, right? So let’s say what you’re gonna practice now is you’re gonna practice checking in on yourself throughout the day, saying how am I thinking and feeling.And we’re gonna expect at the end of the day that your brain is going to seek […0.4s] comfort understandably. So you have planned for deliberate comfort pieces to make your evening more enjoyable in ways that don’t sacrifice your health goals.And during this time, you’re also going to expect that you might still have urges to comfort eat. And I want you to notice what those urges sound like. So maybe it says, I’ve had a long day and I just need a break. I’ve worked really hard this week and I deserve to eat this right now.Well, I never stick to a plan anyway, and I never lose the weight, so it doesn’t really matter.Anyway, I want you to actually when it feels available to you to just talk back to these urges a bit or at the very least have that internal conversation with yourself, what does that even mean that I deserve this right now?Right? A lot of us will just have these ship in the night thoughts and this mental chatter that makes sense on the surface, but we’re not actually sitting with that and deciding what we wanna make that mean.So for example, a really big thought I had in the evenings when I checked in on where the urge was coming from was this won’t matter anyways. So I had a very detached relationship to the progress with my body I wanted to make, cause I just had so much doubt that I was actually gonna see it through.And so I would just have the thought before I comfortate, well, this isn’t gonna matter anyways. If I don’t comfortate, so I might as well do it.And when I started practicing all of the other steps I’m talking about and that did its work, my urges started to come down. Now I could actually start addressing the mental chatter and having that conversation with it. So for me, it kind of looked like, why do I think this won’t matter anyways?And my brain would have said, because I can never stick to anything long term and then say, why can’t I stick to anything long term? And I would think, well, because I just feel too much pressure with it. I get overwhelmed and then I feel like I can’t do it anymore.Something like that. And here’s the thing. The point isn’t to solve for whatever comes up in this conversation. I want you to notice how addressing the urges when you feel the need to comfort eat lowers the urges. You will will feel less inclined to comfort eat during that moment. And I want you to try this out.I do not want to hear perfectionism when it comes to this because you might have it. So in other words, I don’t wanna hear that you tried this for one or two days and then you’re like, well, I’m still having higher just to comfort E and I still did it, so this must not work.I want you to be willing to devote yourself to caregiving in this way and actually check in on yourself and see what’s going on there. Because does it need to take a long time to see results with this area when it comes to stress?No, in fact, it can happen pretty instantly once you start, but it’s also not a quick fix. And we also need to understand as people who are very capable of the results we want but do not have the result, that we are not owed […0.6s] the result we want, right?If the results are not happening for us with our body in the way we want, it’s not because we should have them. It’s because there’s a gap in understanding as to how that result is created, which is also so valid.So I am really excited for those of you who […0.6s] see yourselves in this work to try these things out. Simply take one step from today, one realization you had that connects with you and put it into practice today.Don’t overwhelm yourself. Just start small and it will be enough to notice little changes with your eating habits, but most importantly with your stress and things feeling easier.I am so happy you were able to spend this time with me today. I am always here to help you make this area of your life more accessible. And if this work connects with you, and you want a 4 step process for this and a community to solve this problem, make sure to join my on your eating habits membership community. It will help you get from wherever you’re at now to the naturally healthy eating habits you want. So you can go to cat rent us com forward slash membership to join us. And I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week. Alright, I’ll talk to you soon