The Neuroscience of Cravings: How to Override Your Emotional Brain

If you’ve ever stared at chocolate and thought, “Why can’t I just stop?”, this episode will change the way you see yourself forever.

Emotional eating is not a lack of willpower. It is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you’re broken.

It’s brain science.

In this episode, Kylie breaks down exactly what happens inside your brain when you see food, why cravings feel so urgent, and how your emotional brain activates before your rational brain has time to respond.

You’ll learn:

• The real neurological pathway that activates when you see chocolate
• Why your amygdala and dopamine system fire before logic kicks in
• How stress weakens your prefrontal cortex and increases impulsive eating
• The role of memory, reward tagging and prediction in emotional eating
• Why blood sugar swings and sleep deprivation intensify cravings
• How neuroplasticity allows you to rewire your response to food
• A practical 4-step protocol to override emotional cravings in real time

This episode blends neuroscience, nutritional psychiatry and identity-based behaviour change to give you something better than motivation.

It gives you strategy.

If you’re a woman over 40 who feels stuck in cycles of emotional eating, stress eating or binge eating, this episode will help you understand both WHY it happens and HOW to take back control.

Get Kylie's exact weight loss Blueprint
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BOMBSHELL BLUEPRINT WEIGHT LOSS FOR EMOTIONAL EATERS

Transcript

Emotional eating is not a character flaw. It is your brain doing exactly what brains are built to do. Regulate the body, predict safety, and conserve your damn energy.

If you have ever eaten when you weren't hungry, and please, if you listen to this podcast, of course you have, honey, of course you have, and then you go ahead and think, what is wrong with me? Why can't I stop? I promised myself I wasn't going to eat all this junk food today, but then you did it anyway. Let us establish this right now. Nothing is actually wrong with you.

Emotional eating is not a personality deficit. It's the predictable output of a human brain that's under stress, fatigue, loneliness, pressure, or feeling low on fuel. So today, I'm going to show you exactly why your brain reaches for food whenever you're feeling stressed, anxious, and the dog threw up on the carpet, what is happening in your body and nervous system when those cravings hit, and most importantly, how to interrupt that pattern fast without needing to rely on the willpower.

So let's dive in. What is up, you gorgeous, fabulous creatures, and welcome to another week inside of the Losing It podcast. You're here with Kylie Pax, Australia's emotional eating coach, and I'm so excited to be here with you today because one of the topics that has always fascinated me is neuroscience, and I had the opportunity to speak with a doctor recently who explained the psychology of neuroscience, how it works, what's happening biologically in our body, and I thought, I knew it.

I knew emotional eating wasn't a personality problem. It wasn't a lack of willpower. It is actually a cognitive process that we can control.

So let's start talking about how to do it. Now, one of the things that's always fascinated me is the certain emotional ties that are created inside of our limbic system and the different parts of the brain that are made between specific foods, and then why we don't seem to have those reactions and why those neurons don't fire together when we're looking at something relatively what we would consider benign, like just some grass growing outside on the lawn. Let's say you see a block of chocolate sitting on your kitchen counter.

I'm going to walk you through the process of how your brain actually translates this into information, and once you see this, you will understand why you immediately start salivating and drooling and want to run towards the chocolate like it's your long-lost lover and why you don't feel that way if we're talking about some grass. First of all, we've got to look at the relay station or the way the information actually passes through the different components of the brain. Firstly, the light hits your retina.

Signals travel through the optic nerve and they then arrive at a structure inside of the brain called the thalamus. Very exciting. Write home and tell your parents about it.

Now, the thalamus is like the brain's traffic controller. It decides where specific information goes, and in this case of deciphering what a particular piece of visual information is, it's going to be sent to the back of the brain, which is where your visual cortex is. Now, this here is where the brain begins figuring out, okay, what is the shape of this item I'm looking at? What's the color? Does it have any movement? What are the patterns? And right here at this stage, it is still just data.

It is not yet chocolate. It's just a brown rectangle. It's like a piece of Lego or a building block.

It's really not orgasmic at this stage. Now, the next step that your brain has to do is assign a meaning to this brown square on the kitchen bench, and it asks, have I seen this before? This is where your memory systems start kicking in and compare the image that it is seeing to other stored images that it's got already inside of its memory, and it starts asking, oh, hang on, this is chocolate. Now, here's where things get really interesting.

Just in the same way that you can research certain information online using hashtags, that is what your brain is doing. It's like an emotional storage system. So before your rational brain even finishes thinking, your emotional and reward circuits are already evaluating it.

Now, at this point, that image is starting to bounce back in the direction it just came from. So it is now leaving the back of your brain and is passing back towards the front. This means it's going through a part of the brain which is called the amygdala.

If we're going to be very specific about it, it's actually just your reward system. Honey, please, this is where the parties happen, and this part of your brain is checking, is this square important? Is this rewarding? Is it threatening? Is it something I need to be careful of? Or in our case, is it connected to a past pleasure? This is actually where the desire begins. It doesn't happen in the front part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, where our language, speech, mobility, thought processes, it doesn't live there.

It lives in the emotional and reward system part of the brain. Now, let's keep this train moving. As that image is starting to bounce back towards your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that lives at the front, the most recent part of the brain in human development, it's your thinking brain.

It's where you live. Only after your pleasure sensors have been tagged and hit with a thousand likes, loves, and shares from your internal follower system in your brain, only after that does your thinking brain fully kick in. The thinking brain is your rational brain.

(4:45 - 10:01)

It's where your self-identity lives. It's the goal-driven part of your brain, and it is also the last part of your brain to kick in in this equation. It now is asking, do I actually want this? Does this align with my goals? Am I even hungry? What should actually happen next? Now, this is exactly why you find yourself feeling so emotionally drawn towards chocolate, chips, cake, cookies, ice cream, pizza, whatever is your jam.

Get this straight. The emotional part of your brain activates faster than the rational part of your brain. I'm going to say it again for the people in the back.

The emotional part of your brain triggers before the rational part of your brain does. So, by the time your logical brain arrives at the party, the cravings have already voted, and the vote has been cast, and the election has been won by your emotions. Now, here's why seeing a block of chocolate feels very different to seeing some green grass outside.

It's because your brain is predictive. It has learned over the years that chocolate plus sugar and fat and energy, all of that is going to give me pleasure, whereas grass is not edible, and it has no reward history in your brain. The amygdala, or the reward center of your brain, all that little circuitry lights up for anything that was previously associated with two things, either survival or pleasure.

It's not because you're weak. It's not because your brain is inefficient, or you can't resist food. Think about it this way.

If you grew up celebrating with certain foods, or you soothed stress with particular foods, if you bonded with people over certain foods, and for me it was always chocolate, or something that involved chocolate, then your brain has wired chocolate as very freaking meaningful in your life, whereas grass has never got that wiring. So now it becomes more apparent, right? When you see chocolate, your brain predicts, oh, that's going to be sweetness. It's going to have a certain texture.

There's going to be a certain amount of dopamine that's released, so I'm going to experience relief and comfort, and maybe even energy. If you're feeling low in the middle of the afternoon, when most of us do start craving sweet, your body might even start having a physical response, like salivating, before your conscious brain has even kicked in and made a decision. That craving is your body's prediction of the pleasure that is to come.

It is not occurring because you are weak-willed, or don't have enough willpower. Now let's just add another couple of components to the situation. When you're tired, or overwhelmed, or anxious, or depressed, or you're hormonally stressed, the emotional part of our brain gets even louder.

It goes off to Costco, buys itself a megaphone, and literally starts screaming through the streets of your brain, whereas your rational brain goes offline. It gets quieter, or it completely shuts down. That's not you being weak.

That is pure neurobiology. And bear in mind that anytime you do eat as a relief for your stress, or anxiety, whatever situation you're in, your body responds as if you ate 104 more calories than you actually did each time. So when you're thinking, why do I keep gaining weight when I eat while I'm stressed? I thought my body should have all this nervous energy and I should be losing weight.

Literally not how it works. Literally not how it works. So think about it this way.

When you're seeing that chocolate, whether that's on your kitchen bench, at the office party, out with your girlfriends having a coffee, your brain doesn't politely wait for your rational or thinking mind to come online. The image has already gone through your visual system. It's matched to a memory.

And before your brain has even finished forming a sentence, your emotional and reward circuits have already tagged and fired what you're looking at as meaningful. And so that desire that you feel, that's just your amygdala and the dopamine system already lighting up based on the pleasure you've experienced in the past, the last time you ate that food. Your prefrontal cortex, your thinking brain, your human brain, that part plans.

It chooses your future. It sets goals. It has big dreams and aspirations, but it's also late to the party.

And it arrives a split second later. And that split second is the difference between you feeling like you can control yourself and you can't. So you're not fighting a lack of character here.

You're managing timing. The emotional brain is always going to fire first and the rational brain is spinning its wheels to catch up. So I'm going to give you today a simple four-step protocol that is going to help you manage your cravings.

Because now that you understand why it's happening, we can make a plan to alleviate it. But this plan, like most other successful plans in life, relies on speed. You've heard the saying, neurons that fire together, wire together.

Yes, it's true, but it's only part of the story. Those neurons are only going to fire and wire together if it happens in immediate and quick succession. What that means is you need to act and you need to act fast and you need to act multiple times.

Doing this once isn't going to cut it. Doing it two or three times still won't change anything. The next time you feel a craving, you need to follow these four steps and you need to do it quickly, immediately, and multiple times for this to take hold.

Firstly, you're going to call it what it is. You're not going to say, I need that chocolate. What you're actually going to say is, oh, my emotional brain just fired.

It's not you not being able to resist. Is that a double negative? That's such poor English. It's not you struggling to resist.

It's your emotional brain firing. And that one sentence changes everything. Because now you can stop believing the craving and observe the part of your brain that is causing it to fire in the first place.

(10:01 - 14:59)

Now you only need to ask one simple question. Am I physically hungry? If you're not hungry, back away from the food, honey. You eat when you're hungry.

You don't eat when you're not. If you're purely seeking relief, this isn't going to cut it for you. You want to know what it's like.

Your mother used to say it to you when you were little. You would come into the kitchen, mom, I'm hungry. She would say, there's apples in the fridge.

I don't want an apple. No, because you're not freaking hungry. The second thing you're going to do is regulate your body before you make a decision.

Never make food decisions in a dysregulated state, ever. Here's what I mean by that. You need to insert a 90 second tripwire.

Whether that means you stand up, walk outside, splash some cold water on your face, whatever you need to do. This is not about avoiding the food. This is about giving your prefrontal cortex, the front part of your brain, the logical part of you, a hot minute to wake up.

Most urges or cravings that are not based in anything substantial will shift when you shift your emotional state. They get weaker. Not when you argue with them.

Not when you try to resist them. When you shift your emotional state. The third thing you're going to do is make that big ass identity move.

You hear me talk all the time about eating code number four, which is act like the person you want to become. You're going to become unrecognizable, act like a 1% woman. Well, this is where most women miss it.

Instead of asking, what is it that I feel like doing? You need to ask, what does the woman that I want to be, what is she doing right now? What decision is she making? How is she standing in her power? You don't need to do it perfectly every time. You don't need to do this forever. Just try it out and see how it works.

Is that dream goal version of you inhaling fucking chocolate while she's standing at the kitchen counter? I don't think so. Identity drives behavior. You will always return to who you believe you are, which means if you see yourself as a little ferret that squirrels around in the kitchen and eats everything in sight secretly behind the family's back, you're going to keep doing it.

You've got to start seeing yourself as a badass who doesn't bend, who does move her body, who actually gives a shit about what she puts inside her body and make your decisions based on that. The fourth and final step is we're going to close the loop cleanly. No drama, no punishment, no I'll start again on Monday.

If you do go ahead and eat the chocolate, then you're going to choose to eat it and freaking enjoy it. It's what I always say to a client. If you're feeling that internal battle and you think that's it, I can't resist, I'm just going to go ahead and eat it.

That is so fine. It's ridiculous how fine that is. But the only stipulation, if you're going to eat it, you better eat it and enjoy it.

Do not eat it with guilt. That goes back to exactly what I said before. You want your body to store an extra 104 calories just because your lame ass wouldn't let go of the guilt? I don't think so.

Remember, shame strengthens the emotional part of the brain, whereas reflection, compassion, understanding strengthens the thinking part of the brain. So now you understand something powerful. The craving that you feel when you look at a particular food isn't proof that you're weak or that you can't resist.

It is simply proof that your emotional brain fired first, which means the goal was never to not feel desire. Honey, please, that's impossible. The goal is to give your thinking brain time to come back online.

Because here's what most of us do. We feel the craving and then we panic, then we shame ourselves. I shouldn't be feeling this way.

I promised myself I was going to do better and then we either give in just to shut down that shame spiral or we white knuckle our way through and eventually end up binging down the track. Both of those options keep the emotional brain in charge, which is exactly what we don't want. I'm asking you to zoom back out.

When you do that, the solution becomes very freaking simple. When your emotional brain fires, it does you zero use to argue with it. You are now going to regulate it.

Think about it this way. If your smoke alarm goes off, you don't stand there and shout at it. You get rid of the smoke.

So when you see chocolate and you feel that pull, instead of saying, why am I like this? What's wrong with me? You're going to say, okay, there's no problem. My reward system just lit up, which is perfectly normal. I'm now going to give the front part of my brain 90 seconds to catch up.

That is how you move from reaction to regulation to identity. And that is how you become unrecognizable. Thank you so much for joining me here today.

As always, if you found today useful, helpful, or even mildly entertaining, please remember to take a second, hit subscribe or share with a friend. This is how we're going to empower more women around the world to never beat ourselves up again, because honey, you are far too fabulous for anything like that. And as always, remember the only person who has the power to change your life is you.

When you zoom out and understand a little bit more about how your brain and body function, you can easily then look at the situation and say, this isn't a character flaw. There is actually nothing wrong with me. Because when you look at it that way, you're able to take your power back.

And when you do that, girl, that's when you've got what it takes. I'm sending you tremendous amounts of love. I'll see you again next episode.

Until then, gorgeous ones, bye for now. Thank you so much for tuning in. Remember to shimmy your butt over to KyliePax.com and join me inside of the bombshell blueprint so you can stop emotional eating and start losing your way now.

You'll also find helpful notes and resources inside my past podcast that will help you lose your weight without losing your sanity. I will see you next week.