Ever find yourself eating mindlessly, lost in the rhythm of hand to mouth, without even realizing how much you've eaten?
Or maybe you've caught yourself turning to food to cope with stress, anxiety, or even in the midst of celebration.
In this episode we talk about our eating habits, breaking them down into four types - -- -mindless
-emotional
-habitual
-physical eating.
We examine why we often eat food without a real physical hunger and the role distractions, emotions and routines play in our eating habits.
We also explore the tricks and traps of emotional and habitual eating and how they disconnect us from our body's hunger and fullness cues.
The episode provides practical tips on using a hunger and fullness scale to tune into your body's unique cues. If you're looking to transform your relationship with food and exercise, this episode is essential listening to help you develop a mindful and conscious approach to eating.
Ever find yourself eating mindlessly, lost in the rhythm of hand to mouth, without even realizing how much you've eaten?
Or maybe you've caught yourself turning to food to cope with stress, anxiety, or even in the midst of celebration.
In this episode we talk about our eating habits, breaking them down into four types - -- -mindless
-emotional
-habitual
-physical eating.
We examine why we often eat food without a real physical hunger and the role distractions, emotions and routines play in our eating habits.
We also explore the tricks and traps of emotional and habitual eating and how they disconnect us from our body's hunger and fullness cues.
The episode provides practical tips on using a hunger and fullness scale to tune into your body's unique cues. If you're looking to transform your relationship with food and exercise, this episode is essential listening to help you develop a mindful and conscious approach to eating.
Hey friend, welcome back to the Strong Her Way to Eat, Move and Live. Here we talk all things food, freedom, fitness and life transformation, helping you heal your relationship to food, exercise your body and, ultimately, yourself. I hope that you are having a great day and an amazing week so far. Today we are going to be talking about four types of eating that we do. Now you might find that, as you're listening to this, maybe some of them overlap or you do one more than the other, but these are just general types of eating that we engage in and most of the time it's not. We're not eating because we actually have that physical need. So the four types of eating that we do Number one there is mindless eating.
Speaker 1:Now, mindless eating is what happens when we've essentially checked out of what we're eating, how much we're eating. It's kind of that hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth, over and over and over again. So with the mindless eating, we don't realize how much we've eaten. It's just kind of like you're blacked out and you could go through an entire bag of chips or the whole thing of Oreos and not even recognize it. This oftentimes happens when we're distracted either by the TV, the phone, maybe in conversation. A lot of times, though, this can happen when we are lost in our thoughts. There are so many times where I could be watching TV or have the TV on, but I'm not actually watching what's going on. I'm consumed with what's happening in my mind. I'm really thinking about something, or maybe rehashing something over and over and over again. So that's mindless eating. It's essentially where we are lacking any sort of intention or mindfulness. While we're eating, it's super easy to overeat, to just kind of keep eating well past our hunger cues and our fullness cues. We're basically just eating, blacked out, not at all really present with what's going on.
Speaker 1:The next one that we have is emotional eating. So this can really happen on either side of the coin. A lot of times, I think, when we initially think about emotional eating, we think of that as us eating just when we're feeling negatively right. So we're feeling stressed, we're angry, we are feeling anxious, and so we eat. But emotional eating can also happen when you are feeling a quote, unquote positive emotion and you want to feel more of that. So you keep eating, thinking that the more you eat, the more pleasure you're going to experience. Now we all have emotionally eaten. Maybe we emotionally eat, and we'll always kind of emotionally eat to a certain extent, no matter where you're at in your journey. For many people, food is really just a way to comfort people, right. We use it as a way to celebrate. So oftentimes, right, it's like okay, you know, I'm having a crappy day, let's go get a treat. Or like let's go out to eat. Or you know, hey, I just I don't know graduated school or I just signed a new client, let's go out to eat to celebrate. So emotional eating again can happen either when we are feeling negatively or when we're feeling positively. So that's something to just kind of keep in mind, knowing that our brain is always looking to avoid pain and seek out pleasure, and so food is definitely one of those quick ways that we can get that dopamine hit that keeps our brain avoiding the pain and feeling the pleasure.
Speaker 1:Habitual eating. Habitual eating happens kind of on autopilot. It might be more of a routine type of eating, maybe eating based on the clock. I would say that habitual eating isn't necessarily the same as mindless eating, but because it happens on autopilot, without you having to think too much about it, it very much can also be a mindless experience as well. Habitual eating is also what I would sometimes refer to as eating by the clock, right? So it's like your body might naturally have rhythms where it's breakfast time, so I should eat. It's lunchtime so I should eat. It's dinnertime, so I should eat, regardless of whether or not you're actually hungry, right? So this a lot of times kind of shows up, based on maybe how we were conditioned or what eating looked like as kids. But a lot of times again, like I said, since it is habitual eating, we're not necessarily eating because we're hungry, but we're just eating out of the habit, right Out of the routine. Or for a lot of times too, I think about this with kids where maybe they get home and they have an afternoon snack and it's not necessarily because they're hungry, but it's more the habit of I get home, I put my backpack down and then I go grab a snack. Where you get home from work, you go grab a snack, just because you've kind of built in that habit. Now I would say and this is getting a little bit deeper into this into habits essentially but a lot of times habits are developed because of the whole avoiding pain, seeking pleasure, and our brain kind of files these behaviors away. Because if it doesn't have to think about what it's doing and it just can automate the behavior, then it's also satisfying the third part, that our brain really likes to conserve energy, and so therefore, those habits get formed, they get hardwired in, they get automated. So be on the lookout for habit eating.
Speaker 1:Are you eating just out of the habit, of some sort of a routine or a schedule, and not necessarily paying attention to your body's hunger and fullness cues? The last one is physical eating. So this is when you are eating because you are actually physically hungry. You've slowed down enough to check in with your body. You're eating mindfully, you're eating slowly, you're present in the moment. Now it is easy to overeat, either when we've gotten too far between meals and we end up being too hungry. We're dealing, or maybe we're not dealing, with something right. So either we're dealing with something and so this would be us, maybe emotionally eating, or because we are actually not dealing with the problem again, we're just looking for that distraction to eat. So then it's, it can become easy to eat more than our body's need. So, again, physical hunger is when we are actually physically hungry, but keeping in mind that it can be super easy to overeat if we've gone too far past the point of hunger, right when we're feeling super ravenous and we eat really fast to try to get our blood sugar back up and then we end up overeating as a result of that.
Speaker 1:A good rule of thumb for eating without counting your macros or points or calories etc. Is to use a hunger and fullness scale. So this is going to be something that varies for each person, right? A one for you is going to maybe feel different than a one for me. A 10 for you might feel different than a 10 for me, but you want to just spend some time kind of testing this out and seeing. You know, how hungry do I feel at a five? How hungry do I feel at a 10? What does it feel like if I'm a three? Now, typically, on a hunger scale, one for everybody is going to be ravenous. So this is maybe you haven't eaten all day, or it's at least been several hours, and maybe you felt hungry and then the hunger feeling kind of went away. But as soon as you start eating, you notice that that hunger kicks back up and you just find yourself eating fast. Maybe there's a little bit of mindlessness that is happening here at this point as well. It's super easy to overeat at that one, that two and even the three.
Speaker 1:Now, on the other end of the spectrum, a 10 is going to be where you are feeling sick. You've eaten so much, you're super stuffed. A lot of times this might be what you experience at a Thanksgiving dinner, and a nine is going to be kind of pushing right up against that. When we eat too quickly, it is super easy for us to get to that nine or 10 without really thinking, especially if you're kind of conditioned to think about eating until you feel full rather than just eating until you feel satiated or satisfied, which is going to be right there around that seven or that eight. So a good rule of thumb is to not let yourself get too hungry past a four. So four would kind of be that stopping point eating slowly, eating intentionally, being mindful with what you're eating, and thinking about eating just until you don't feel hungry anymore or until you feel satiated or satisfied, which is going to be right around an eight. Now again, this is going to take a little bit of practice to get to know what it feels like in your body, but this is going to be one of the easiest ways for you to eat. You know the correct amount of food for your body without overeating or getting to the place where you're so starving, and that is going to also help with your overall hormones, right your blood sugar that kind of stabilizing as well.
Speaker 1:So, again, those four different types are mindless, habitual, emotional and physical. Keep in mind that chances are you're going to experience all of them at one point in time. Maybe you notice that some of them are connected. The big part here again, with any sort of habit change or behavior change, is we want to start to look for patterns, right, we want to start to notice the triggers or the things that are happening on a consistent basis that maybe have us emotionally eating or when we find ourselves in that kind of autopilot, mindless eating. What's going on there?
Speaker 1:Right, typically, again, keeping in mind, our brain is always looking to avoid pain, seek pleasure and conserve as much energy as possible. This is why it likes to automate certain behaviors, because then it doesn't have to think about it and then, if you think about it, you know, on the other side, if we are eating to avoid having to process or work through negative emotions, then it kind of tricks the brain into thinking that the problem isn't there, at least temporarily For a lot of people. We can experience so much more guilt and shame after the fact of mindless eating or emotional eating or just doing any sort of a behavior that seems to contradict the goal and the target and what we're wanting to be more intentional about. Doing that we end up just beating ourselves up even more. So again, keep in mind, we all do all four different types of those eatings from time to time.
Speaker 1:Our job isn't to beat ourselves up. Our job is to simply just become more aware, start noticing more of those habits, those patterns, specific triggers, and then seeing if you can try to plan ahead for those moments. Think about how you want to interrupt the habit loop, or how you want to be a little bit more mindful and intentional with mealtimes or food, or just looking at all of the habits that kind of surround a meal for you as well. Do you typically eat with the TV on? Maybe you try eating with the TV off. Do you eat too fast? Then maybe you want to try having those opportunities where you're putting your fork down between every single bite. So it's just looking at. Okay, what are my current habits, my patterns, my behaviors, identifying the triggers. And then what small tiny change or tweak or intervention can I try? It doesn't have to be huge, we don't want to beat ourselves up for it, remembering that it's going to be a practice, it's going to be something that we continually try and hone and come back to over and over and over again. But the cleaner and the healthier your relationship to food and to yourself is, the easier it's going to be to move through, making these changes at a quicker pace and making more like lasting and internal changes, rather than just trying to utilize willpower or simply just trying harder to do it better or to not screw up again. So hopefully this is helpful for you.
Speaker 1:I know that when I was able to really kind of identify these four main buckets of the types of eating, that I did and I could see kind of okay, these are the types of scenarios or circumstances that triggered this for me. Or you know, a few episodes ago I shared about my experience of nighttime eating. It was kind of the habit of I would put my kids to bed and then I would go get a snack, but then I would be engaging in mindless eating while watching TV, all because I felt like I needed a break, right. So there were three of those four different types of eating happening kind of in one one scenario. So again, some of them are going to overlap. You're probably going to experience all of them from time to time. The better we can get at identifying the patterns and the habits that aren't working, the more we can kind of tune into our body's natural hunger and fullness cues and really practice honoring those. The easier it's going to be for us to eat more based on that physical hunger, while minimizing the mindless eating, the habit eating and the emotional eating.
Speaker 1:So hopefully this was a helpful episode for you, super quick, super to the point. If you want to talk further about any of the concepts on this podcast or any other podcast and really just look at how you can apply these directly to your life with the help of a coach, then I would love to invite you to hop on a free, no Strings Attached Console with me. You can schedule that by heading to aliciacarlsoncom slash contact. If you want to stay in touch on social media, come find me at aliciacarlson underscore on Instagram. I'll have those links in the show notes below. Hope that you have a great rest of your day. I would love to hear how you are applying the information that you are learning here to create some wins in your life. So please feel free to reach out with those and until next week, have a lovely rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for tuning in. Bye.