A Smart & Action-Oriented Discussion on Emotional Eating with Holly Bertone

Holly Bertone is a former FBI Chief of Staff for Counterintelligence turned Certified Holistic Health Coach. She spent 20 years in high-stakes government roles where she managed major operations while navigating intense pressure.

After battling her own "food monsters," Holly realized that cracking the code on emotional eating was the same as tracking spies - identifying the pattern and neutralizing the threat.

Now, she helps high-achieving midlife women break free from emotional eating, rebel against diet culture, and prioritize their health - without restrictive diets or relying on willpower. 

Through her science-backed approach, she's been featured on major platforms and top podcasts. Her mission is simple: help women fuel their bodies for optimal energy and health.

• How do you describe emotional eating? 

• From FBI to Emotional Eating Coach, and how I was unhealthy as a health coach (and carrying a lot of shame)

• What got us here in the first place (diet culture)

• How do we break free from emotional eating? This is my signature 3-Step Process (See It, Stop It, Shift It) that combines FBI Counterintelligence tactics with neuroplasticity.

• Connect on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/holly.bertone/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hi, this is Pamela Wirth with the Encourage Your Wellness Podcast. And today I have Holly Bertone. She is a former FBI chief of staff for counterintelligence, turned certified holistic health coach. She spent 20 years in high-stakes government roles where she managed major operations while navigating intense pressure. After battling her own food monsters, she realized that cracking the code on emotional eating is the same as tracking spies. So welcome, Holly and we look forward to hearing your story.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Yeah, thanks, Pamela, for having me on the show. I appreciate being here and look forward to connecting with you and your listeners. Absolutely. So first and foremost, how in the world did you choose to work for the FBI? Oh my goodness. Actually, before I get into that, um I really just want to say how much I admire your work and your podcast. And to everyone listening, I really want to encourage you to leave a five-star rating in review because it's going to help you to reach so many more people and would mean a lot to me as a guest. So really want to encourage everyone listening to do that. Very sweetie. You thank you. Yeah. So I actually went all the way back to I was 17 years old. I was a senior in high school. This was 1988. And I did, I took an intro to psychology class. They were allowing uh this the seniors to explore more than just the traditional classes. So I took an intro to psychology class and we had to write a term paper. And everyone else was doing, you know, Pavlov's dog and Freud. And I decided to write a psychological profile on Charles Manson at 17, which is crazy. And fortunately, my teacher was like, okay, this girl's a little out there, but I'm gonna steer her in the direction of pursuing psychology versus shutting down my curiosity and you know, so grateful for him. And that's what started everything. And from that point on, I wanted to work. Um, I wanted to work for the FBI. It was a it was a dream come true. So, how how long did you do that? So I worked for the FBI from 2004 to 2017. So I was there about 13 years.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

And um, the pressure's got to be pretty insane, the situations, the things you hear and see, and yeah, I started when I started, we were still in the Patriot Act kind of era.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

And so I started doing electronic surveillance. So I started in Quantico and it was everything that you can imagine from all the movies and everything, and just absolutely loved it. I got sent up to headquarters in 2007 and started working. They had the the 9-11 commission and the WMD commission reports came out of Congress. So basically, and you know, if you remember back then, going back all of those years, that the agencies did not talk to each other. The agencies did not talk within themselves, and you know, databases were still pretty new, and especially for the for the government. I mean, we were still operating under extremely archaic systems back then. So part of my responsibility in project management was to take the recommendations from the WMD Commission report and the 9-11 commission report and stand up those national security offices. So I helped get the weapons of mass destruction directorate established. And I was still a contractor at the time, and they, I guess, were pretty impressed with what I did. They opened up the GS-15 billet and brought me on as the chief of staff for uh counterintelligence's program management office. So we oversaw basically all of the trend analysis, all of the data analysis, all of the pattern analysis for the FBI's counterintelligence entire division. So all the threats, all the field offices, before we even had systems to do it. We were doing it manually. We came up with some really cool ways to slice and dice all the data and get that pattern analysis and threat analysis up to our executives so that they could make informed decisions about the direction of where we were going on a weekly basis.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Which is is mind-blowing. Um, and going back to that time, there wasn't a lot of time for um, I'll call it work-life balance. Um, probably not working out in the morning, probably don't have access to good, clean food on a regular basis because it's a lot of hurried and meetings and um, and so it tell us a little bit about how you kind of came into some of the work that you're doing now around health and wellness.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Yeah, so and interestingly, I was um I was actually uh triathlete back then. So I was racing in X-Tera triathlons. So I weighed and I'm five foot one, maybe. So I was weighing in at about 110 pounds, which for my height as an athlete was completely normal. And but I ate my feelings on a daily basis. And there was a time in my life years prior where I weighed 150 pounds and you know, just ate nothing but processed food, junk food, pizza, ice cream, uh, chips, french fries, chocolate, candy, I mean, Reese's cup, Ms. MMs. When I was at the FBI, I would dump the MMs out of my desk, speed eat them as fast as I could, and do work at the same time, like as fast as I could. Like it was such a high stress, high-pressure environment. But the I think one of the important things to really share is that it's not about your weight. I mean, I ate the same amount of processed junk food when I was 150 pounds and when I was 110 pounds. And, you know, beyond the scope of this conversation, but the reason that I actually resigned was I was diagnosed with uh breast cancer and then subsequently an autoimmune disease. And my health just tanked to the point where I couldn't handle a high stress job and take care of my health and take care, and I'm I'm divorced and my stepson is is grown now. But at the time, you know, had a had a husband, had a stepson I was raising, and I couldn't do it all. And I and something had to go. And it was one of the hardest ishes decisions that I ever made was to was to leave the bureau. But I was able to focus on my health and I started down that path of becoming a health coach to improve my own health. I had no interest in coaching. And what I found just over the years, and this is a trend that just kept popping up over and over and over again, was the certifications are great. You learn a lot, but there's also real-world application. And the things that they teach you in school are helpful, are knowledgeable, but they're not necessarily going to move the needle. And what I found over and over again in my journey was that what I was learning in school wasn't applying in real life. And it was for me and it was for my the clients who I was coaching. And that's when I decided I was like, you know what, I need to take a different approach to this. And looking at it from that holistic coaching perspective was bringing in those FBI tactics and methodologies, was bringing in my own background, was bringing in different modalities and energy healing and just doing things that are a little more non-traditional. And throughout this whole journey, I realized at one point, I was actually at the bottom of my third pint of ice cream in a weekend. And I realized that I was a health coach and I wasn't healthy. And there was a lot of shame attached to that because I realized that at 150 pounds, at 110 pounds, and as a health coach, it didn't matter the weight. I was eating my emotions. I was still eating a lot of processed junk food. I would eat healthy Monday through Friday, and then I would eat all the junk food on the weekends, I would eat all the ice cream on the weekends, just like three pints of ice cream in a weekend. And I'm like, okay, something has to change. Like, this is not okay. It's not okay to be a health coach, to be a leader, to help other people and have that shame that just surrounds me every single day, knowing that I can't control how I eat around food. And that's when I made the big shift in terms of just working with women specifically on emotional eating. And I pretty much, you know, and I've got so many different certifications, but I pretty much just kicked them out the window. And I was like, I want to get to the heart of what actually works. And I looked at how I faced my own food monsters of 40 plus years of being an emotional eater. I looked at everything that I had learned in the FBI with pattern analysis, with staying ahead of the threat. You know, I kind of joke, I'm like, you've got espionage and spies, you've got cake day at the office. A threat is a threat. We need to stay ahead of the threat, we need to neutralize the threat because those daily triggers are going to be there. And then also diving in, taking my psychology background and diving into the to the brain science of neuroplasticity. And then also looking at this from an emotional eating forensics perspective. So taking that FBI lens, looking at it from that behavioral profile lens. And that's when everything started to come together because I'm like, okay, there is a different way. There is a way that actually works that has nothing to do with the food, nothing to do with the calories, nothing to do with the weight. I mean, there is a time and a place to talk about what to eat. But if you asked a hundred women, you asked a thousand women, if you asked 10,000 women, what do you need to do to lose weight? They're going to tell you exactly what you need to do. So it's not about the knowledge. We already know what we need to do. It's just what we know isn't working. And the older we get, the less it works. So that's why I love what I do and who I work with, because it basically takes all of those skills that I've had my entire life to be able to help women get past the mindless snackings and the the emotional eating and the cravings and the binging and just the the overeating and and just not just more than that, just that shame too that's attached to it.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

So how do you help people kind of understand a little bit more about what's going on with them? Um because some people want to talk about their feelings and some people don't want to talk about their feelings, but um how do you recognize in yourself, let alone how to find the right person to help you? And then once they do find you, what do you do about it? I mean, it's kind of hard to put things into practice sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Yeah. And, you know, I like to say awareness is is really the the biggest thing, but you know, I think so often we get so tripped up over the three things that everyone tells us to do. They tell us that it should be everything in moderation. They tell us that it's supposed to be intuitive, mindful eating. And then they tell us that we're supposed to have willpower. Well, I can tell you from 40 years' experience, none of that worked for me. I can tell you from the clients who I work with, none of that works for them. When you are on the other side of emotional eating, when you have control over it, when you have a grasp on it, yeah, then those things work. But when you're still in the thick of it, when you're still dealing with all of that food noise, none of this is gonna work. And then we feel bad about ourselves, or like, what's wrong with me? But what it actually is, um, their research is at MIT, they found an interesting study on cravings. And what they found is that the moment that that craving hits, your brain has about half of a second to make a decision to eat the food. And that's not a lot of time. And then what we're gonna do on top of that, we're gonna throw dopamine on top of that. And I know everyone's like, oh, dopamine, that's like babies and puppies, you know, the kind of the reward chemical of feeling good and and all the things. Well, dopamine is actually an anticipation chemical. So what happens is that you let's say you have a hard day at work, you come home, you've got cupcakes on the counter. In that half of a second, your brain is making a decision. I'm gonna eat those cupcakes. There are no other options on the table. So your brain makes that decision in half a second. The dopamine kicks in. So that anticipation is from the second you see the cupcakes until the food actually touches your mouth. And that's when the dopamine kicks in. That's why these cravings are so strong. That's why the willpower, the mindful eating, the intuitive eating, the moderation doesn't work when you're on this side of the fence. You know, and you think about those cupcakes too. Like, what happens? Well, you eat the cupcakes and you're like, you feel guilty about it. You yell at your spouse because you're like, I told you I'm on a diet. Don't bring the cupcakes, huh? Like, this is just this is life. This is what happens. This is every single day. And and and we kind of keep looking at it from this perspective of, oh, I'll do better tomorrow. I'll do better tomorrow. And we're we're looking at emotional eating. Emotional eating, we have uh system one, system two in our brain. So system one is the is the limbic system. It's automatic, it's fast, it's emotional. Eating from this perspective is system one. I did system one eating for 40 plus years. And when we were in that emotional eating, that stress eating, that overeating, that binge eating, that's where we are. But the diet industry pushes the willpower, the moderation, the calories, the macros, the points, all of the things, that is a system two solution. System two is our prefrontal cortex, which is logical and slow and strategic. This is what makes very slow decisions. So we're looking at the diet industry coming in from that system two perspective as a as a as a solution when it's actually a system one problem. And I like to say it's it's basically the equivalent of taking a spoon and trying to hammer a nail into a wall.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

So now, how do you help people get back to why they're doing it? Um, kind of talking more about the system one and when to layer in some of these system two. I mean, really, it's like a tool, right? That's more of the tool and the going back to why was the underlying problem here that I need to deal with.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yeah, so I take everyone through a three-step process. And the easiest way to think about it, it's like a well-worn path in the woods. So your brain is operating from this perspective of a well-worn path in the woods. So you've got decades and decades of these beliefs and habits and trauma and experiences. They are embedded in our brain and in our body. This is the path in the woods in our brain that calls the shots. So, step one is see it. And I say awareness is the win. Once you can get that awareness, it's so much easier to tackle the solution. So, step one is see it. This is when we actually use these FBI-inspired pattern analysis. We're going to uncover the hidden patterns. We're going to uncover the hidden triggers behind the emotional eating because I want someone to understand why they actually reach for food versus let's just throw a system to solution at it. But this is also where we get out the gloves and the work boots. We are creating a new path in the woods. So when you think about going out in the woods, you're creating a new path. Well, there's there's bushes and thorns, like you're probably going to get, you know, some blood on your arm. There's snakes and spiders and rocks. Like we actually have to go to work to recreate to create this new path. And we're clearing out, we're clearing out trauma, we're clearing out decades of just reinforced patterns, the neurons in our brain that fire together wire together. So what we are doing is we are telling our brain we are going to make a new path. And the best example I can give about what awareness looks like. And it's easy to do it with someone else, more so than yourself. But when you can start even looking at someone else and kind of viewing it from a curiosity perspective, you're like, oh, I get it now. So uh last year I had a I spoke at MIT and the plane was delayed three hours. So I'm I'm just in the airport and I'm just standing and on my laptop and I'm watching everyone around me. And it was insane because you had a group of people who, you know, they went to Dunkin' Donuts and they just like filled their bags. They had all the donuts and the bagels, and all they did was eat. And then you had another group of people, they went over to the bar at eight o'clock in the morning and they're and they're drinking and they're scrolling on their phones. So when you think of it from that perspective, you're like, oh, this is awareness. Okay, we are in a stressful situation. Everyone needs to get on this plane to get to Boston because everyone has somewhere to go and something to do. We're not just getting on this plane for fun, right? We all have something on the other side we need to get to. So everyone's stressed. And what did they do to relieve that stress? What did they do to take the edge off? Donuts, bagels, and beer and their phones. Okay. So that is awareness. Step one is see it. Step two is stop it. And we're going to pull in some more FBI-inspired tactics here. What we want to do is we want to intercept those cravings before they take over. So you remember I talked about the 0.5 seconds and the dopamine. So when you think about it, your brain is in this path in the woods and it comes to a fork. So it's like, okay, I can either go down the path that's been here for decades, the path that I know, the path that I like, the path that's familiar, because that new path, that's still under construction. I'm not sure if I want to go under the new path or not. So when we're at that fork, what we are doing is we are telling our brain, we, we, we, we do what's called countermeasures. They're they're tactical, um, uh tactical uh pattern interrupts and helps to prevent that threat before it happens. There are tactical interventions. So when we're at that fork in the in the woods, we're like, okay, brain, instead of going down the old path, we're going to go down the new path. And this is, it sounds complicated, it sounds hard. It is literally the process. If you've ever potty trained a puppy, it is the exact same process. That is the exact same thing we are doing with our brain. We are potty training our brain, but instead of to go potty outside, we're potty training our brain to make different decisions around food. And then step three is shift it. So this is when we're actually rewiring those automatic responses. We're actually creating a more healthier and more effortless relationship with food. And so we're, you know, we're coming down that path in the woods, and our brain is now automatically going to the new path because the new path is really sparkly. The old path is now starting to get kind of gross. So we go down the new path, the sparkly path. This is when you had a hard day at work, you come home, those cupcakes are on the counter. And instead of your brain going, I have to eat those cupcakes, no other options are on the table. And you just like have this like almost obsession, like I have to eat the cupcakes. Well, instead of that, what this actually looks like is you come home from a hard day, you see the cupcakes, and you're like, Oh, there's cupcakes on the counter. And it goes from food being this obsession that controls you to food just being food. It's just very neutral. And it's not just a healthier relationship with food, it's a healthier relationship with yourself.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Um, one last thing. I think a lot of people recognize it in other people before they recognize it in themselves. And so um what can you suggest for maybe family members, spouses, um, teenage children, adult children? I mean, it gets harder when you're trying to help influence those you love, I think, in many situations. Any suggestions?

SPEAKER_00 21:25

This is oh, I'm so glad you brought this up. I I mentor with a group called Go Girls Go. They're fourth and fifth grade girls. It's like girls on the run. So we do the mentorship and then we go for a run. And I did a lesson with them because I wanted to teach this at their level and something that they would understand, and especially at such a tender age when we're talking about like food and you know, body image and they're going through puberty. And so it's really the difference between belly hungry or brain hungry. Is my belly hungry? Am I actually needing food? Or is my brain hungry? Like, am I needing to eat to cope with something, to take the edge off, to numb out a little bit? And I actually came up with eight questions that someone can ask themselves, or even ask, you know, a loved one, or you know, from just an observational perspective. So I can run off the eight questions. And really, if we're looking at more than three, and I would say more than three consistently. So if this is, you know, the majority of the days of the week, then we are looking at, and honestly, it doesn't matter whether you call it emotional eating, stress eating, binge eating, food addiction, overeating, like take the label out of it. It's how do we know if this is a problem? And I should be doing something about it. So number one is am I craving comfort foods more often than not? Number two, do I eat when I'm not hungry? Number three, has food become my primary coping mechanism? Number four, do I eat to take the edge off? I like to say, is food my Novacaine? Number five, do I feel guilt or shame after eating? Number six, are my eating habits out of control or does food actually interfere with my life? Number seven, am I gaining weight without any other major changes? And then there's, I like to say bonus points for this one if you're blaming your hormones. And then number eight, do I actually know my patterns, but I just feel powerless. Like I have no control over them.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

I think those are perfect. Thank you so much. And I really, really appreciate having you on. Where can people find out more about you? And I'll be sure to add, um, I know you have a bonus gift. I'll be sure to put that in the show notes for people as well.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

Yeah, absolutely. And and thanks, Pamela, so much for for having me on the show. And I really I have a special gift for your audience since they stayed with me until the end of the episode. And um, first let me just say who this is for, and then I'll I'll share what it is and where you can get it. So this is for you if you are a high-achieving woman who is not in control around food. You've kind of been nodding along the this episode. You're, you're, you're like, yeah, I do the stress eating and the mindlessly snacking, and I've I've got those food cravings and food noise. And this is it's really cool. It's called the emotional eating tactical blueprint, and it's got two things in it. So the first gift is this is an emotional eating psychological profile. I analyzed 1791 food cravings, sliced and diced hundreds of data points. So on the other side of this is you get your emotional and stress-eating triggers so you can actually understand what's going on behind the scenes. Like it is a full-blown psychological profile. And then the second thing is also really cool, is I actually reserve this for my clients, but I want to I want to give it to your listeners for free. And it's called the Crime Scene Files Emotional Eating Edition. And this is set up like a true crime style podcast or a CSI TV show. So if you're like get geeked out, love those kind of shows, you're gonna get totally geeked out over this. And this is when we actually look at how to intercept those triggers and the behaviors. So if you want the emotional eating tactical blueprint, again, totally free, as my thanks for listening. Just go to my Instagram. That's where you can connect with me. And it's at holly.bertone b-e-r-t-o-n-e. It's b-e-r-t-o-n-e. And just DM me the word blueprint, blueprint, and I will send it over.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

That's great. Thank you so much, Holly, for being on. I love how you approach this from a smart and scientific way. It's um refreshing and actually helps people feel like they can get their hands around something that is many times very difficult to uh understand and and and take action on. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Yeah, thank you. And I really just, you know, my goal is to break the shame because so many women struggle and suffer, and you don't have to you don't have to do this alone.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Thank you so much.