How do you stop compulsively eating snacks in the late evening when you're not even hungry?
I just talked to the woman who is in a pattern of snacking at night, and she says this is her biggest struggle.
She comes home after work, after a long day at work, and she's now able to stop snacking immediately after getting home. She's now able to help her kid out with homework and put dinner on the table, and even a good meal.
However, she then still finds herself snacking after dinner even though she's not hungry. so I just had a great conversation with her and really feel inspired and I want to share with you her next steps as well as what's really working for her.
The big picture is that several mind body tools are coming together in a holistic way.
1. She's really understanding that she has to feel her uncomfortable emotions and there's no way around that.
2. She's realizing that if she feels her uncomfortable emotions and processes them via journaling or what she'll do is basically talk to herself but she's really realizing that she has to process her emotions.
3. She's had a fundamental eating enlightenment that food is self care which has been one of the biggest transformations because eating nutrient dense food is becoming a high priority because she sees that eating regularly is key, and she has successfully incorporated next day meal planning into her daily life and it feels good.
4. She's in tune with hunger more now and is stopping to feed herself like the other day when she was running errands, she realized that 5 hours had gone by and she was ravenous and so she actually stopped at a Starbucks and got a protein box because it was going to be a few hours before she got home and this sustained her and prevented a binge.
So this is where she is at, and she's made a lot of lot of progress decreasing her binge eating but in this video I also want to explore what her next steps are to stop emotional eating or the snacking at night.
Our conversation which was so inspiring really focused on the pleasure and pain principles of emotional eating. That's what the focus of this video is about.
To build on the 4 basic skills and also o understand pleasure and pain principles.
I'm going to share with you how I incorporated these principles to transform my weed addiction. I also was doing other self care trainings so don't think that you can skip points one through four and just rely on pleasuring pain, but this is an extremely useful teaching.
The overall lesson is to link pain with emotional eating, or in my case weed, and pleasure with self care or healthy eating. How do you do this?
First, to link pain to emotional eating or weed, you have to drop the judgment. You have to realize that you have conditioned your brain to numb, or avoid an uncomfortable feeling by eating or smoking weed.
So you have to realize that this pattern is going to repeat itself, but if you realize this pattern is going to repeat itself, you can drop the judgment, and if you drop the judgment then you can actually stop disconnecting while you emotionally eat or smoke.
So for example, I would smoke because my heart would hurt, so I would run away from the pain and into marijuana. By realizing this habit was deeply conditioned and did not judge myself, I would actually just mindfully observe myself smoking weed but I would refuse to disconnect and fantasize and run away from the pain.
Even though I was doing something to numb the pain, I would refuse to disconnect in my usual ways. I would try to really see if the pain went away, and I discovered that often times the drug was simply away from my mind to disconnect, but even while I was high, if I stayed present, if I had an intention to be present, then I could still feel that the pain my heart was still there and that the weed wasn't helping nearly as much as I thought it was.
So this helped me start to associate pain with weed, and the second principle is pleasure.
Basically we have to have self care give us pleasure. And for me with weed, this looked something like where I would ask myself what do I need right now?
I would try to meet my emotional needs instead of smoking. And then I would pay very close attention to how I felt afterwards. Overtime, by taking care of my emotional needs and by refusing to numb out totally with weed, the momentum started changing. I just didn't want weed as much.
Then there would be days when I just wouldn't even smoke at all I would have no desire to smoke. This became incredibly hopeful, this gave me real conviction. And the process just continued to where I am at peace with weed today.
And that's the principles that she's now starting to work on too so I hope this makes sense and let me know any questions you might have.
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