Over Eating When You Are Alone

Thank you to everyone who listened to last weeks podcast and shared their different struggles with over eating when they are alone.

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Courtney
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I work 1:1 with women to lose weight permanently, using mindset and strategy.  My process is exciting, life changing, and empowering.  Join me!

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Courtney

Transcript

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Welcome to the Courtney Gray podcast the show for women who are ready to lose weight permanently, and love their body love the way they feel. And look, I'm going to teach you how to stop overeating and obsessing about food and your weight. So you can be more confident and empowered to then create an even bigger life. I'm life and body coach Courtney Gray. And each week, I'm going to be teaching you how losing and maintaining your ideal weight can be so much easier than it's been in the past. And by taking care of you and achieving your health goals, you will live in even more amazing life than the one you have lived so far. Let's get started. Welcome to the Podcast, episode 97 over eating when you are alone, the idea from this podcast came from at least I think five, four or five people messaging me and letting me know that last week's podcast was great, but they actually do things differently. So last week, I talked about people pleasing. And you know, when you're in the moment, and someone kind of gives you a hard time and says oh, you should be eating this, or you should be eating that. And then when people please and eat what we don't really want to be eating. These people said I actually do something different. I eat very well in front of people. But then I overeat and usually eat really in a way that doesn't serve my body doesn't serve my goals when I'm alone so that I am grateful for those people for giving me that insight. And I'm like, I'm going to create a whole podcast around that because clearly there are people that need some guidance around this. And I would love to help and I have done this before in my past. So I will definitely share, share what that looks like for you. But first, there's so many things I want to talk about first. First of all, happy Thanksgiving. If you're in the United States, it is Thanksgiving week that this podcast is going to be landing. I have opened up a few extra spots in my schedule the day after Thanksgiving to do consultations. So if you are the kind of woman that you're like, I don't want to wait till January 1 to start taking my weight loss and my health and my mindset and all around my body seriously then schedule a consultation. I opened up a bunch of spots. I have a masterclass coming the week after Thanksgiving. So the Thursday after Thanksgiving, the link for all of this is in the show notes so you can sign up for that. And then I have a new podcast coming. I was working on it this morning. And I'm really excited about it. Episode 100 of this podcast is going to give you all the details about my new podcast that I'm so excited for. So that's just a little sneak peek to keep listening and check out podcast 100. And that will give you all the juicy details about the new podcast that's coming. So let me dive into overeating when you're alone. Are you the kind of person that actually eats well, when you're in front of people, but when you are alone, that's when you overeat? That's when you either overeat or eat too much eat things that you then say, Oh, why did I do that. And there's a part of you that knows that. That is the problem. If you could actually not overeat when you're alone or not eat, you know, at all, after you have said you're not going to eat anymore. If you know that you would be able to lose weight and live in a body that you really want to be in by getting control of that, that I'm really, really glad you're listening. And thank you to all those people who messaged me, I had two clients, and then three or four people from my email list telling me that so I'm really grateful to the idea for a new podcast. So what does this look like? Do you eat a small portion in front of people and then have a whole nother meal when you go home? Do you say you're not really hungry, but then in the back of mind, your mind, you know, that you're going to eat like after the event. And so let me tell you a story that I don't know that I've ever even shared this with anyone. From a story from me from years ago before I did this work when I was in a lot of pain around overeating and not being in the body I want and so one of my really good friends Julie is just an amazing Baker and cook and all the things and she was having a party at her home. And it was a driveway. She lives a few hours away from me. And so I was there and she just I mean she is like Martha Stewart reincarnated. She's just so wonderful at being a hostess and she makes I mean, she makes delicious. All the things desserts, salads, amazing like cocktail, cocktails, all the things. And when I was there, I held it together I actually really ate well. And I have kind of the the self concept of a person that eats well, even back then this is years ago, probably like four or five years ago, and I ate well. And then as she does, she always sends home food for my husband and my kids. She wrapped me up a bunch of cookies and I think there were like chocolate covered Twinkies involved which I'm actually not a chocolate covered Twinkies person. But there were a whole bunch of things and some of the things I loved my kids love her Chocolate covered Twinkies. But anyway, so there were some of these things in there that I loved. And I got in my car and I started driving home and it was late at night after this party. And I was driving there and it was on the front seat and it was talking to me. You know, it is, right. This this delicious food is like, you know, I think I had one maybe two cookies, or these bars that she makes aren't maybe even. Was it chocolate covered pretzels. I love those. And I had a little bit there, but really held it together when I was at the party. But then on the way home, I'm trying to listen to my music, I'm trying to enjoy myself. And I ended up way over eating probably most of what she sent. I didn't eat the Twinkies because my kids were totally expecting the Twinkies, thank God. But I really over ate, definitely over ate in a very drastically different way than I showed up at the party at the party, you would look at me and say, Wow, she's got her act together and me in that car, you would say, Oh, honey, are you all right, right. And so at the time, of course, right after I was mad at myself, my stomach hurt and ashamed myself. And I ended up actually pulling off on the freeway, not a lot of cars were on the freeway, but it pulled off and eventually got the plate and put it in the back of a car to stop myself because it was the only way I felt so out of control. That was the only way I was gonna stop eating. After I did that, I felt better. And I tried to reframe it and try to move on from it. And I really didn't give it much thought. And I think that's why for so many years, I really didn't fix this problem is I didn't give it much thought I felt like let's just fix the problem by taking the food away in that moment. So at the time, I was aware that I was doing it, but I was totally unaware why if you would have asked me why I did it, I would have said the food's amazing. That's all I would have said is what the food is delicious. I love the chocolate, I love the salty all of that. I wasn't really aware of how much shame was there, I wasn't aware that it was really bothering me. I did say to myself a lot when this was happening, like what is wrong with me. But I didn't really look at it. And that's why I wanted to do this podcast. That's why I wanted to tell the story is I want you to really look at what's going on. That's one of the first steps I think of figuring out your eating and getting into a body that you feel more in control of and you feel like you look in the mirror and you're proud of is becoming aware that you do something that you don't want to be doing anymore. And you probably say no, I say to myself, Why do I do this? I'm so stupid. I'm so fat, whatever. No, no, it's from a very loving place to be aware, okay, I'm doing something, and I really want to look at it this. And I really want to decide if I want to change it. Any major change I have made in my life started with really looking at it. And when I say really looking at it, what I mean is writing it down. And by doing a thought download, and I've talked on the podcast about what a thought download is, it really is just getting a notebook. And really writing out all of your thoughts and dumping it out on paper and not filtering yourself knowing that no one else is going to see it but you if you have to, you could throw it away if you feel like what if someone saw it, but really allowing yourself to say, you know, a thought download would be like I did this again, this is what I do in describing what you do. I don't understand why I do this I the I have to get in control of it, and just dumping out all of your thoughts. And so when I look at my life, and I look at so many the different areas I've changed in my life, it came from being willing to write about it and being willing to really look at it like, like I am really judgmental of my husband in this one area. Why is that? What Why am I so judgmental and really diving in? I'm really frustrated that my son is not listening to me in this one area. Why am I so frustrated? What is going on? And what ends up happening many times is we get to a deeper level of understanding why like when you look at like why am I frustrated with my son, at the at the core of most frustration with our kids is we are so worried about them because we love them so much. You know, when we look at why we're eating and we say we're bored or we just love how the food tastes when it really comes down to it we are eating to make ourselves feel good we are eating to escape negative emotion. And so what happens when you do this work and you change this what I was able to do in this one area of my life is you and you change the way you eat when you're alone. It really can be the answer to you losing the weight you want to lose and definitely feeling more in control around food. Now let's give a realistic view of what this looks like is it doesn't mean that you're never going to come home from a party and say Oh, I you know I ate I wasn't planning eating but now I'm gonna have an extra bowl of soup because it's only six o'clock and I'm I I'm still kind of hungry. That's not we're talking about here. This is more of a I'm not hungry at all. I told myself I wasn't going to eat. And now I am eating to escape a negative emotion. And I'll explain more what that looks like in a moment. So here's some questions you can ask yourself, and this might help you in your thought download. Do you eat drastically different when you're alone? Or from when you're in front of people? And do you want to stop? I'm sure your answer is probably yes. For me, I felt out of control. And I felt really bad about it. So I decided I wanted to stop. But it wasn't until I really looked at it. And I really like acknowledges that this was happening. For you, you might not feel that bad, you might just recognize that it is hindering you being at the weight that you want to weigh. For some people, there might be a lot of shame involved. But I think for most people, if you feel in some way that you need to hide how you're eating, there is shame there. And feeling shame is painful. And this is again, part of what comes out in the thought download is really acknowledging yourself that you feel horrible that you do this, you feel like there's something definitely wrong with you. But the reason I'm doing this podcast is there isn't something wrong with you. And there's so many people experiencing this. And that's why I wanted to talk about it. What you're telling yourself when you're eating alone, is that you're doing something you should not be doing. That is why you're doing it alone. And when we feel out of control doing it, not only are we doing something wrong, but we are wrong. We as our person, as a human being as our worthiness are wrong. We're doing something shameful, and we are therefore shameful. So before I move on, let me just say this, you know, food is probably the easiest way in society right now, for us to feel good in the moment, it's often the fastest way to get out of any discomfort we're feeling. And layer on top of this, that food tastes amazing. So you have the dopamine that gets released when you make the decision to eat. Right before you even put the thing in your mouth when you like when I was in that car. And I decided to Yes, I'm having some of this. And I even went to uncover the plastic wrap from this, this package my girlfriend made for my kids, I got the dopamine even from making the decision. It's a yes. And combined with the taste, it is the ultimate reward system. And you've probably been eating this way for a long time. So it is now a habit. When something is a habit, it is wired into our brains, the neural pathways in our brains are wired to keep doing what we have been doing. Because we are wired to do what is familiar. Because at the basic level of survival, doing something that that is familiar is safe. Doing something new is dangerous. That's why we have an aversion to doing something new. That's why we feel like it's hard to do something new. That's why it's hard to change. Because doing something familiar is safe. Safe means that you are surviving at a like basic level. I say all of this, because we need to take the shame away from what is going on here. It's been really cathartic to me to talk about my eating on this podcast, even though I've overcome this way of eating admitting it on the podcast has been it's been pretty vulnerable. But I know I know that there are some people that think wow, like she's a bit crazy. This is crazy. But I think I'm willing to have people go wow, she really had issues with food. Because I'm I'm willing to help so many of you that are listening, like feel seen and feel like I've had people come to me on on the consults. And some of my clients even say you are literally speaking what is in my head. So that is why it is worth it for me to talk about this on the podcast. So we need to take the shame away from all of this. Okay, so how do we stop this? How do we stop this overeating when you're alone? What you want to do is look at this way of surviving, and decide if you want it right. So the way you've been doing it is a way to survive. But it's not a way to thrive. Your primitive brain is having you survived by doing something over and over and over again that you've made a habit. That is a basic survival. And now you can decide you don't want to do that anymore. You don't want to just survive, you want to thrive. I decided I didn't want to do this anymore. I wanted to thrive. And journaling it out doing the thought download is really kind of the first step of like really admitting it and looking at it. So ask yourself, why do I do this? Why do I eat? I'm saying quotation marks normal in front of people, and then why do I basically hide my eating? And then how do you want to eat? I'm taking a moment to tell you that I work privately one on one with women to help them lose weight permanently and create a body they love. This is not a diet program. This is a customized program. Want to teach you how to eat the way you want to eat forever? No more restriction, no more willpower, no more losing weight only to sabotage and then gain it back again. The problem is not you, we women are so hard on ourselves. And we think if we could just get motivated or more determined, if we could find the right diet, plan or cut out certain foods, we will lose weight and be happy. But the answer is changing your brain, and how you think and feel, changing your self image and how you talk to yourself, learning how to trust yourself, this is how you lose weight permanently. It sounds too good to be true. But I promise you it's not. The work I do with my clients is powerful, exciting, and loving. And it's hard work to but the result is change forever. The women I work with are smart and successful in so many areas of their life, they just haven't been able to figure out their body. This is where I come in, head to my website to schedule a consultation. And we can talk about all the details back to the podcast. What sounds realistic to you not ripping the band aid and being like the best eater in the whole world. But what sounds something like doable, something that you could really support yourself and show up and that if you ate that way, you would be proud and you would be healthier, you would probably lose weight, you would feel better emotionally and physically create a plan of how you want to eat, hopefully, like tonight or tomorrow night or something as soon as you can create a plan of how you want to eat. Then when the time comes to eat this way, you are going to experience desire. So you're going to let's say you're going out to dinner tonight. And you're like, Okay, this is how I'm going to eat I'm going to eat this certain way when I go out in front of people. And then maybe you're going to say to yourself, I'm going to eat a big enough healthy enough meal. So when I come home, I'm not going to eat at all, you are going to plan that you are going to experience desire, your brain is going to suggest to you probably in one or two ways that you eat when you get home because that is what is been your habit. So you need to expect it you need to embrace that you are going to have the desire for your your go twos, whether it is cereal, whether it is chips, whether it is crackers, it's it's never broccoli, right? It's always something like ice cream, it's always stuff that's not good for us. So you're going to plan on it having it you're going to get home and your brain is going to try to convince you to have it to just start tomorrow, oh, you've had a long day you deserve it. And one thing that might be helpful too is like decide what is your brain going to tell you? What is going to be the trigger thought that your brain offers you. For me, I've told you before my brain always offers me that I deserve the thing. There's always like I've done so well, I deserve it, what will your brain tell you, if you determine now and decide what your brain is going to tell you when your brain tells you that you won't be surprised. And then you can say, Ah, this, Courtney said this was going to happen. And you can allow the desire for whatever it is because you are going to want to eat alone, if you have been eating alone, you're going to want to and then you're going to have a negative emotion. So you're going to get home you're going to feel some negative emotion, identify what that is, first is going to be a desire, desire is not negative emotion. But first, you're going to feel desire, you're going to want something. But then when you don't eat it, what comes up for you, there's a negative emotion that's going to come up, it's going to be anxiety, or it's going to be it's going to be boredom, or it's going to be like deprivation. When you take the food away, you discover what emotion you're trying to escape from. And when we just eat to not feel that negative emotion, we don't have the opportunity to solve for that negative emotion. So a great example here is many many of my clients eat because they are bored. Let's play this out, you get home, and all of a sudden, it's like six o'clock, you can't really go to bed, you might want to, but you can't really go to bed. And you're like Okay, and so you're bored, right? If we just eat to entertain ourselves, or what I used to do is I would actually make whip up a whole batch of cookies, and you get that dopamine hit and then it tastes delicious. And all those things happen. What you don't solve for is the boredom. What you don't solve for is looking at your life and saying, my life is good, but I want more. I want more hobbies, I want more interaction. I want more connection with my husband, I want to maybe hang out with my kids more I want there's something there that you're wanting and you're not giving yourself the opportunity to expand your life when you're just eating and trying to get away from that negative emotion. And there sometimes it even creates more negative emotion because when you look at your life and you feel like my life is pretty good. I shouldn't be bored but I am kind of bored and all that you had that that's the work. That's why people are not willing to do this work. Because when you have to sit in the boredom, and not turn to work and not turn to scrolling on Netflix and not turn to other things, you have to solve for the fact that you're bored. But that's when life starts to get good. When you can sit with the boredom or sit with the anxiety and solve for that. That's when your life expands. So if you go to eat in the evening, when you're alone, and you stop yourself, and you discover you feel bored, instead of eating to entertain yourself and not feel bored, allow the boredom. And you will have the opportunity to solve the problem of being bored in the evenings, you'll be able to do a thought download and really figure out I'm bored, I want more from my life. And I don't want the more from my life to be cereal. So for me, it was boredom. If I wasn't eating, what the hell was I doing with my life, especially in the evenings. For some, it may be anxiety, if you aren't eating, you're thinking about your kids that you're worried about. If you aren't eating when you're watching a movie with your partner, because you want to lose a little bit of weight, and you're sitting there and they're having popcorn, and you're not and you're feeling deprived, and you're feeling like this sucks. I want to be able to have this but I want also to have the body and health and all that. Can you sit with the sock? Can you sit with the deprivation? Can you sit with that? To be able to become a person that can watch a movie and not have popcorn? And what else can you do in that moment? After he has popcorn after she has popcorn? Can you scratch each other's backs? Can you find other things to do? Can you realize that you don't have to be eating at all the time and just really enjoy the movie. But you have to be willing to take away the food to deal with what comes up. So what happens when you do this work, I want to kind of give you an idea of where I'm at now like a realistic idea of where I'm at now. Because sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that you get to this place where you're like, I don't even want the food in the evenings. I'm a woman that I just don't want the food and it's no problem. And I just think that's a little unrealistic. So let me give you a reality of what I'm where I'm at now that I've done this work that I do with my clients and what comes up for me, if I went to my girlfriend, Julie's house tomorrow, she would make a plate of delicious food to bring home for my kids. And I on the way home would probably have one, maybe two, and I would want more. I wouldn't be tortured by it. But I would want more because her cooking is delicious. But I would allow the wanting of it. And it would be not a big deal. Because I would know that I wouldn't want more because your food is delicious. But I would decide that although her cooking is delicious, or cookies are delicious. What I want more is to sleep well. And to maintain my weight and to feel good and to not have bad dreams. Because I have bad dreams what I eat chocolate at night. But can you hear the difference in the way I talk about it? Now I have no shame. Right now there isn't this calling there isn't this out of control, I shouldn't want it I want it helped me will you know it's not a back and forth, it's not a problem. It's not a problem that I have a girlfriend that makes amazing treats, she sends him home with my kids, I have one maybe two and I want more. It's no problem. Because what I want more is the health is to look in the mirror and like the way I look and like how I feel. So why does all of this matter? Shame is painful, it is a painful emotion. And although it is totally normal to experience it as part of the human experience, I would rather you experience it less because I will tell you, if you want to lose weight. And if you want to feel in control around food, and really change your relationship with food and your body, you need to comment all of that without shame. You can't lose weight and expect to keep the weight off feeling shame about where you are. Now, you can't say when I lose 15 pounds, I'm gonna feel amazing. You have to learn to accept where you are now. And that doesn't mean you're going to look in the mirror and go You look amazing if you don't really feel that. But it's like when you look in the mirror now or if you don't look in the mirror now because you feel shame and you don't want to look at yourself, what can be better than where you're at now. If you look in the mirror and you're like you're disgusting, which a lot of people say to themselves, what can we say? You could say you're trying really hard and you're figuring this out. And you have an amazing body that does amazing things. Right? Maybe that feels better than saying you're disgusting or you're overweight or this or that right? We need to be accepting of where we are now and loving ourselves. Now. If we want to lose weight and feeling control around food and be able to sustain At weight loss, ironically, when we feel shame, we usually overeat in order to not feel shame. Isn't that ironic, right? We feel shame. And then we overeat. And then we feel shame again. And you can see it just spirals and spirals. And that's why people continue to gain weight. And after they lose it, they gain it back. And there are so many people going through this, no one really talks about it. So if I can talk about it to help you get past this, it's totally worth it to me. If I can help you feel more in control around food and enjoy your body and your life so much more. It is so important to me. I have opened up a bunch of times for consultations the day after Thanksgiving, you can also book The week after Thanksgiving as well. But I just thought that would be kind of an amazing time for someone to say you know what, the day after Thanksgiving, I'm going to give a gift to myself of scheduling a time to talk with Courtney and see if she could help me and what that would look like. So if you would like to meet with me, there is a link in the show notes. There's also a link in Instagram and there's a link on my website to schedule a consultation. I would love to talk to you about getting you into the body that you want to be at and having you feel in control around food and peace and stop thinking about food so damn much. Happy Thanksgiving if you're in the United States and Happy Tuesday. If you are ready to lose weight and keep it off permanently, if you have tried diets and you know they don't work and you're ready