Episode 218 - Ayurveda : Why we eat emotionally when nothing is wrong

🎁 Get the best Christmas gift from the comfort of your own home 🎁 :

👉 🎁 Buy a 1:1 Ayurvedic consultation here 

👉 🎁 Get real serious and book a package of 3 here ( & get a discounted price!)

Book your therapy session with me here

Join the Community Newsletter 

Check the Ayurveda & Psychology Community Website here

Email me here 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Ayurveda and Psychology podcast. I am Charlotte Scoksberg, psychologist, Ayurvedic practitioner, and yoga teacher. This is a space where we explore the path of self-realization through the physical, mental, and spiritual spectrums. In each episode, I share practical tools from the ancient wisdom of yoga and Ayurveda, as well as the modern approach to the human mind of clinical psychology. In order to help you reconnect with yourself, understand your nature, and live with more awareness. In this episode that focuses on Ayurveda, I want to speak about emotional eating once again. But today I want to speak about it from a new perspective, which is when nothing seemingly is actually going wrong, when we're not feeling specifically anxious or sad or stressed, why do we still go for the snacking, the emotional eating? Before we get into the episode, if you are new to the podcast, let me welcome you to this worldwide community and to also remind you that you can connect with us as well through the newsletter, and you find the link for that in the show notes. If you are coming back to the podcast, here is what I know about you. You're committed to a life worth living, and you are certain that this is achieved from knowing yourself because this anchors you and creates self-empowerment. Anyone who comes from an anchored and self-empowered place will go out into the world and create meaningful relationships. From the very first one, that is the one with themselves, and then extend that to the relationship with others. If you are here because someone in your life shared this episode with you, I would like to congratulate you because you are someone who people care about. I hope that you will enjoy the episode just as much as the person who sent it to you. And I would like to claim that we have such a perverse relationship to a lot of things, especially when it comes to feeding ourselves and deserving. We have come to a point, I believe, for many of us, where the idea of restricting something equals punishing. And for that reason, as soon as we are not just indulging in whatever we want, it feels a little bit as if we're depriving ourselves of some kind of happiness, some kind of freedom. And yet this is also what leads us to fail all the protocols and open up the cupboards as soon as we get this need, this itch for something. I'll never forget one of the very famous seminars of Alan Watts when he talks about this seeking of meaning to life, really, seeking of some kind of faith that is going to resonate with us. And it takes you through this whole kind of journey around it that starts with the person being in the sweet shop, in the in the candy shop. And as it comes to the end of the cycle of this, it's like, but you're still looking for that goodie, for that sweet. And so I believe that there's a lot in there. And Ayurvedically, we would actually speak of the seeking of rasa or the taste for life, if you will. And so today I want to speak about why having a strong acne or digestive fire or metabolism really comes down to something psychological. And yes, you heard that right. So the string of thoughts that I would like for you to get on board with is that most diseases can actually be traced back to an original weakened metabolism, which happens through impaired digestion simply because we cannot absorb nutrients from our food and therefore provide our tissues and organs with the fuel that they need in order to function properly. And of course, over time, this leads to malfunction of these tissues and organs. Just like your car will not work so well in the long run with anything but pure petrol, right, poor gas, in the tank. And so if we kind of water it out, the car might work at first, but over some time it's going to start to have a strange noise coming from the under the hood, if you see what I mean. And so one of the ways that we ruin our own metabolism is actually by something you all know, I'm sure, pretty well, because you've probably heard it as a child, kind of this don't spoil your appetite, meaning don't have something sweet in between meals, don't go and eat something we're going to have dinner in short while. And so if you do that, you spoil your appetite. And actually, if we just go around and snack here and there throughout the day, we will notice that our appetite is not really what it should be, and not what it was maybe at a point where we were not eating in between mealtimes. Personally, it's a really good sign for me that I need to change something in how I eat and what I eat as well, actually. If I don't really notice hunger, but I notice other signs of weakness. And so when I say other signs of weakness, I mean of weakened agony, but it also means that I feel weak, and maybe even that I tremble and I feel nauseated, finding it hard to focus. I just don't really feel awake. Ideally, when there's been at least, let's say, four hours since my last meal, I should get hunger signals from my body, from my stomach, that tends to, well, make us think of food basically. Right? It motivates us to move towards the kitchen, right, or something. And so if it's in a good place, if it's strong, it should allow me to notice this, but still keep doing what I'm doing, even if this means that I start to actually walk towards the kitchen, open the fridge and see what's there, but it shouldn't basically just act like your phone when it's going down underneath 20% of battery and going, um, I'm not really functioning at all anymore. Now, if instead I notice kind of two hours or maybe three without eating that I start to notice this low energy. I might even notice a bit of a headache, and I can't really think straight. All I can is to want to reach for something that is going to bring my energy back to something more normal. So I tend to think about something that is full of fat or full of sugar because it's fast energy, right? And so that's why we go and reach for something quickly, and that is, of course, because our blood sugar is doing some kind of roller coaster ride. And what's actually happening is that my metabolism is not doing great. But without going more into the functioning of metabolism, because I've spoken about that in the past, and if you want to look more into that and how to improve, actually, improving your digestive fire, according to Ayurveda, you can therefore go straight for episode 72 that focuses just on that, and even episode 74, which explains some of the ways that we actually ruin it for ourselves without realizing it. And so why does all of this matter actually in what I'm talking about today? Well, the digestive process takes around two hours, which means that we should really not feel hungry during that time because the body is actually still absorbing nutrients and working on the last meal. And once the system has settled, it is really a good idea to allow for a bit of quote unquote fasting to happen, basically allowing for your digestive system to rest for at least one hour. That way we stabilize and we have the chance to actually use what we ate in terms of fuel for our tissues. And the stronger our metabolism is, the better we should be able to feel after a meal and all the way until it's time to eat again. So we could say that what I mentioned earlier there is probably quite an ideal situation where we would wait at least four hours, which means that the two hours of digestion has happened, and then there's a couple of hours of rest for the digestive system before we give it more work. And so, for that reason, whenever we snack, and especially kind of snack throughout the day, the way we tend to do when we are emotionally eating, we're not really allowing the digestive process to do its job in peace. And so we don't let the organs rest or fast, if you will, at any point at all. And we really just exhaust the system. Now, this is just when it comes to the system, the blood sh blood sugar levels will roller coaster as well, up and down all the time, and make us feel all kinds of signs of this, like feeling tired, feeling thirsty, feeling hungry, feeling achy, and so on and so forth, as the blood goes up and down, or as the sugar, let's say, goes up and down in the blood. But if our system is made in a way that we should really need to eat something every four hours, or maybe even more hours, that the body uses the nutrients best when we let the system do its thing in peace and then we keep going. Why on earth do we still feel snacky or peckish between meals? Well, it's really for the same reason that we are drawn to a lot of stuff that totally lacks nutrition because we don't eat to nourish our bodies anymore. We eat for plenty of reasons, but rarely for explicitly that one. The original purpose actually of eating. And that is really our biggest problem. Eating has become a hobby, a pastime, a distraction, like all the other dopamine-releasing activities that we've become addicted to. I want to speak to you about a patient I once worked on this with, and it was really interesting because let's say that their original goal for coming to therapy was this addiction to the to eating. It was really that this person wanted to lose weight. And in one of the sessions that we had, where we went really quite deep into analyzing step by step what what is going on in the moments when well, when we indulge, when this person was indulging, all of a sudden my patient just stopped and looked me straight into the eyes and said, You know what? Actually, it was never about the food. And this is really true, actually, for all of us. Because the mindless chewing on something, the midnight snacking, the craving for something sweet, all of them are never really about the need to eat something, or it's not even about the food in itself. If we only ever ate because we actually were hungry, then metabolic disorder, which is a big thing now, right, would not be a thing at all. If we would only ever eat because we needed to replenish ourselves on nutrients, we would absolutely not eat ultra-processed foods because there's no nutritional value in it. And so why do we do it? And what solutions do we have to make a change? I have in several episodes actually spoken more specifically about emotional eating. And so if you haven't listened to them and you want to go a little bit deeper into that as well, then do check out my episode number 33, which is on emotional eating as itself, as a concept. But also episode 71 and 73, that go into various aspects of why we become emotional eaters. And episode 73 that's even more specific on our need of control and how that relates to food. Because today I wanted to speak about the other aspects of why we find ourselves opening the fridge, hoping to find the answer to the meaning of life in there. For more than psychological reasons, food really has a calming effect on our nervous system, and more specifically, it stimulates the vagal nerve. So, yes, you might reach for something because you are upset, but actually, what happens is that your body is asking to be regulated. So there's really a nervous response of regulation in this seemingly absent of the mind way of reaching for something, snacking between meals. What it makes me think as well is that when it comes to especially the snacking at night, I don't know about you, but I find that in the evenings we have more a tendency to reach for things that we not necessarily think about in the daytime. Think about it. I know that there are for sure moments, let's say maybe just after lunch, feeling like, oh, I need something sweet to kind of like finalize the lunch. Or if we didn't have that, then maybe sometime mid-afternoon there can be this moment where we feel like we need some energy in order to continue. But all through the day, we have this, I believe, capacity to kind of go, no, there it's not really the time to reach for a chocolate bar or cookies. And somehow, when the sun has gone down and the evening comes, I have the impression that we are really good at justifying why we would go for the sweets. To not even go into the whole thing about the midnight snack, where it's almost as if because it's nighttime, it didn't really happen, if you see what I mean. Like it's almost as if we can manage to gaslight ourselves, right? To lie to ourselves, that that getting up at midnight and feeling like I need to eat something and then just eating all kinds of strange things that we find, we could almost pretend that it didn't really happen. It's not really the same because it's night. Like when I'm telling you this, I'm sure that it makes you laugh because consciously we all know that this is not true. But observe yourself next time this potentially would happen and see if there's not a little bit of what I'm saying also in your psyche when you do this. And of course, there is a perfectly biological, therefore, explanation to this, because we have a heightened state of anxiety at night, due to, of course, the fact that, well, the sun goes away. And more specifically, if we stay up past 10 p.m. Now, if you have not listened to my episodes on the Ayurvedic daily routine, I would invite you to listen to that because in those, I explain what I'm just about to say now, there is a very specific reason that Ayurveda suggests that you should be sleeping by 10 p.m., so in bed, well before that, so that you're sleeping by 10 p.m., due to the cortisol cycle that exists inside of us. Right? So all our hormones have their cycle, and cortisol has its own. It is starting very slowly, some 2, 3 in the morning. It peaks usually between 6 and 8 a.m., which is why it motivates us to move around and do things. Then it kind of goes up and down a little bit, and it dips sometime in the afternoon, but it definitely dips, mainly going down to as low as possible, between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., which is why we feel a tired feeling around that time. Many don't listen to that and keep going, and so they experience the second wind sometime after 10 p.m. if they didn't go to bed. And that is because if we don't go to bed, the body will feel as if there must be some kind of threat happening, and so by 10 p.m. it starts to produce cortisol again. And so if we produce cortisol, we get more heightened. And the possibility of anxiety rising is absolutely much higher than as if we were if we went to bed, right? Of course. And so in that case, our nervous system will seek for regulation, and our vagus nerve will need simulation in order to reset. And so the cravings for certain things happen much more easily. But there is also something else that plays a part in the emotional eating pattern. And that is the need to fill empty space with something. There has actually been research on the feeling of boredom and the difference between not really having anything to do but being content and not having anything to do and feeling controlled by it. And so we experience boredom. Because when we are bored, there is a desire to move away from the state that we are in because we are not feeling as if we're engaging with the present moment. And it feels as if we are completely unable to do so. We want to feel something, but we cannot. And it can definitely make us feel anxious. When we are experiencing this, we will therefore try to seek any way to stimulate ourselves. Those of you who listen to me regularly, you might have listened to the episodes on adrenaline junkies. And so we are definitely addicted to feeling things, and so we can get completely like junked out on adrenaline. Anyway. Now I want to come in with an anecdote here. Because these two aspects of our nervous system explain also the frustration that people can experience when they are not in control over their eating. And so that happens, for instance, when you go on a retreat. Whether it's the Ayurvedic retreats, like the ones that I've held a couple of times now over the past couple of months, or it can be a yoga retreat or a yoga teacher training, for instance, or meditation retreats, like the more, let's say, strong versions like the Vipassana retreats, right? The 10 days sitting in silence and so on. What they all have in common is that they are a practice of dealing with our cravings, of making ourselves look at certain aspects of ourselves and very much our relationship with eating and food. The participants in the retreat are not really in control of what they're going to eat and when they're going to eat. And so it triggers a whole lot of things. And all this desire of the emotional eating, the anxiety that might be linked to it, definitely confronts them in these moments. You strip them of all their habitual distractions, and they find themselves confronted with, well, just themselves. This can be really hard, and the need therefore to stimulate the nervous system as a way to change the way they feel tends to be really heightened, especially in the beginning. You are absolutely out of your comfort zone because you're not in control of your schedule, and therefore you feel powerless and helpless in the moment. When everything is taken care of for you, and you are just to stay calm and enjoy the moment. Actually, this usually feels for our brain like unfamiliar territory. And what have you said in the past about unfamiliarity? It's not something that the brain really feels comfortable with. It will always reach for what is known, what is familiar. We're not used to not having something to kind of focus on or to fix on or to fix at all. And so the need to eat becomes a problem to solve. All of a sudden, we can't even solve that. There is nothing to be sold, nothing to be fixed. And who are we when there's nothing to do? So there's a whole lot behind the idea of reaching for food when we are not hungry, actually. Ayurvedically, the concept of rasa comes in because really what is going on when we are constantly reaching is that we're searching for flavor in many ways. Rasa means many things actually, depending a little bit on the context, but it means taste. And it can be the taste of food or it can be taste for life. The desire to eat, when there is no need to eat, it becomes really a misoriented seeking of flavor for life. And when it comes to our constitution, this is why imbalances usually starts here. Now, I see this a lot actually around me. When I meet people who are struggling with their relationship with food and who might want to lose weight, for instance, or do something about their insulin resistance, or whatever it might be. What tends to often be a common denominator is that what I suggest for them to eat feels boring to them. They need more and more stimulation, more and more flavor. And so nothing is sweet enough, nothing is salty enough, nothing is crunchy enough. And what lays behind that is once again not the actual ratio of sweetness or salt or crunchiness in the food. Instead, it's to learn again how to appreciate the subtlety of real taste. The real taste of a broccoli, the real taste of rice or beans or whatever it is that you're eating, without added sauces and so on, just like there is a need to learn again to taste the flavor of life. But if we are depleted, if we are numbed out, if we're exhausted, everything seems grey, naturally we will seek this stimulation somewhere. And what better sensory experience than putting things that have put extra flavor on into our bodies? Do you see what I mean when I started out by saying that metabolism and weakened metabolism, so the way we misuse food, really comes down to a psychological issue. In the Ayurvedic perspective on this, various people with depending on their constitution, will also be drawn to various things and for various reasons. So for instance, depending on our tendency, we will often be drawn towards what kind of field quote unsquote has ourselves. Vata will might be drawn more maybe towards snacking things like small cookies and to feel grounded, sweet things that are not necessarily heavy. Pitta will seek more stimulation of the strong way, like strong flavors and stimulants, caffeine, chocolate, spicy food, alcohol, and kaffa maybe more the feeling of something sweet and heavy that is going to generate a well-being in the body that will feel as if they're trying to stimulate themselves, whereas actually it's doing the complete opposite. Because this is, of course, the thing. When we are already out of balance and we're reaching for things, we will reach for things that feel like us, like our tendency, which means that it's actually going to go deeper into the imbalance. So these are not the moments of doing the intuitive eating that was such a trend some years ago. I don't know if it still is. Because what they want is the grounding, they want the clarity, they want the stimulation. But they will just get more of what they already have or are. And for me, when I think of this, it resonates very much. You might relate to it as well. For instance, I know that if I am depleted and I'm trying to work more and I'm feeling stuck and I'm not seeing clearly, I want to produce more. And then reaching for that cup of joe, right? Reaching for a cup of coffee feels as if it's going to make you more sharp. And of course, what it does is that it's going to borrow energy from tomorrow, as they say, and therefore make it worse in the long run. It kind of is the same for the tired but wired, where it feels as if you can't even put two thoughts together and you feel very actually ungrounded, even if that's not necessarily the wording that you might use. And so it becomes very easy to reach for really ultra-processed things like that high-carb sugar sugar and fat cinnamon bun that was not baked at home, but you know, at your Starbucks or something, that probably is very processed. And it feels as if in the moment it's going to push the energy back. Make you feel calmer, soothe your emotions. Or the boredom on a rainy Sunday afternoon where it's really gray and cold outside and you don't really want to go. And all you can think about is just like Netflixing and sitting there with a big bowl of ice cream or something. And all of these examples, I'm sure that many of you can relate to them. And what are they? They're the seeking of sensory stimulation in order to take you out of a situation you don't feel good in. Basically, that need for the vagus nerve to be stimulated. I want to interrupt the episode for just one minute to take the time and speak to you about the fact that we are getting closer to the new year. We are in December and we are crazy close to the holidays. Have you thought about giving something more conscious to someone in your life or maybe to yourself as a Christmas present? Do you know that I offer one-on-one Ayurvedic consultations? Do you know that you can also purchase a package of three consultations in one go and get a discounted price? How wonderful wouldn't it be to receive a gift as such, someone in your life who might feel really low on energy, who has been having problems with their digestion for a long time, or just feeling a little bit off since quite some time. Offering them an Ayurvedic consultation is first and foremost really good for them and gives them a little bit of a nudge as well in the right direction. And it's so good for you because you don't even have to get out of your home in order to get that present. So you find the details in the show notes of how to get this. Back to the episode. And the fact that we become the way we are is a symptom of our times because, of course, this exists in our brain since you know 200,000 years. And it's far older and more ingrained than what exists since the last, let's say, 60 years, where we could just, you know, reach for something in the fridge, or even more now where you don't even have to go outside, but you have your Uber Eats or whatever app exists in your country that you can just go on, order whatever you want at any time of the 24-hour day. So know that there's a biological explanation of you needing to soothe and calm your body and your mind when this happens. And so there are, of course, many options in how to break free from that, but something that we need to understand is that it's going to take effort because it means breaking free from a pattern of a habit that you have. And that habit is an addiction, which means that it feels more comfortable to do that than to do the alternative. So it's always easier to eat something than to actually choose deliberately to break the pattern. For instance, very often we tend to use eating as a way to shift between various activities in the day. It kind of is as if it's the bridge between two sequences of a day. And so if we begin by mapping out this pattern, and if we can confirm that, yes, indeed, we tend to change from one moment to the next with something to eat, we could therefore consciously apply another bridge. I personally do this. I find that sitting down for meditation, doing some pranayama breathing exercises, or one of my preferred activities, to lay down and listen to a self-hypnosis recording. For me personally, I know that this is really helpful when I have a lot of appointments. If I'm fully scheduled with several clients or patients in the day, it's a really good way to resit after everything that has been happening during that hour. So I lay down on my bed or on my mat and I put my headphones in and I listen to the recording. Another really good way, and this is more on the craving feeling than the activity, something that work tremendously well, I promise you, because I've tried it myself, is to just have a bottle of hot water with you, and you take small sips of warm water all through the day. It really works like magic. And if it seems really bland to you, the idea of just having the hot water, you can make a herbal tea like the CCF tea that I often spoke spoken about, or make a ginger tea, kind of depends on as well the time of the season. So at the moment, if you're in the northern hemisphere, a ginger tea can be a really good option in December. So there you go. Those were some of my thoughts around emotional eating and how to maybe deal with it and look at it from a different perspective. I'm going to continue on this topic in the next episode, but approach things from a psychological aspect. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Ayurveda and Psychology Podcast. If this content resonated with you and you feel ready to go deeper in your healing journey, you can book a personalized session with me or explore my programs at the website. You can also follow me on Instagram at iurveda.psychology where I share rituals, tips, and weekly reflections. If you enjoy this episode, share it with someone who might need it or leave a review. It helps this community to grow. I'll see you next Friday with a new episode. Take care and stay grounded.