Breaking the Cycle - Healing from Emotional Eating featuring Margie Odom

Are you ready to ditch the yo-yo dieting forever?
Are you ready to overcome your challenges to weight loss?
Are you ready to unload the emotional baggage that may be interfering with your weight loss goals?

In this episode, Elizabeth and Margie delve into the psychological and emotional factors that may be holding you back from achieving your weight loss goals.  They explore how unresolved issues and patterns that developed duriing childhood can significantly impact your relationship with food, your body, and your ability to maintain a healthy weight.  By uncovering these underlying influences, they provide valuable insights into how to break free rom these cycles and create lasting change in your health and well-being.   


Margie Odom, a dedicated professional in the field of mental health and emotional well- being.  With years of experience grappling with her own weight challenges, Margie understands the struggles of maintaining a healthy weight and the failure of traditional diets. Her journey led her to a pivotal realization: to shed physical weight, she first had to address the emotional weight she carried.
As an accomplished therapist, coach, author, and speaker, Margie leverages her own triumph over yo-yo dieting to assist others in breaking their cycles of emotional eating.

Her book, The Weight Within: Healing Emotional Eating from the Inside Out, and her innovative coaching programs have empowered numerous clients to liberate
themselves from their internal burdens and embrace their fullest lives.
Margie's educational background includes a bachelor's degree in psychology from Emory University, a master’s in counseling from the University of Georgia, and specialized coursework in Marriage and Family Therapy at Western Kentucky
University. Her approach is marked by a blend of candidness, wit, and an unwavering commitment to learning, traits that greatly benefit her clients dealing with emotional eating.

Discover more about her journey and methods at

If you're ready to bring more comfort into your daily rhythm, visit CozyEarth.com and use my code: Unapologetic for up to 20% off! 

Get Patched! 

Start Breathing & Find Your Flow! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Welcome back to today's episode of Unapologetic Living. My name is Elizabeth Elliott, and I am your hostess. And I'm excited to have Margie Odom on our show today. Welcome, Margie.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Margie is a dedicated professional in the field of mental health and emotional well-being. She is an accomplished therapist, coach, author, and speaker. She leverages her own triumph over yo-yo dieting to assist others in breaking their cycles of emotional eating. Her book, The Weight Within: Healing Emotional Eating from the Inside Out, and her innovative coaching programs have empowered numerous clients to liberate themselves from their internal burdens and embrace their fullest lives. Margie's educational background includes a bachelor's degree in psychology from Emory University, a master's in counseling from the University of Georgia, and specialized coursework in marriage and family therapy at Western Kentucky University. Her approach is marked by a blend of candidness, wit, and an unwavering commitment to learning traits that greatly benefit her clients dealing with emotional eating. Discover more about her journey and methods at www.weightwithin.com. So when I read that, Margie, I was thinking very much as the sort of tagline says, um, that maybe it is when we see, I mean, you know, we do have an obesity crisis right now. And I definitely think that we can blame um the food industry for some of that with just the the known um chemicals and obesogens and carcinogens and you know the different toxic uh ingredients that are found on many of the products and the processed foods on our shelves. But I also have thought that maybe sometimes there is a deeper issue too, which may have an emotional or psychological component to either um uh challenges on a weight loss journey or even subconsciously adding weight. And I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

For sure. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

I feel like I think that you know many people who struggle with up and down weight loss and who've had some kind of burden around their weight for a lot of their lives would tell you it's a combination of food cravings, uh, psychological cycling, you know, all kinds of things and a multitude of triggers that are really hard to recognize sometimes. It's not really as simple as like, oh, I'm angry, so I want something crunchy, or you know, things that we've talked about with emotional eating before. It's really a lot deeper than that.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

And so you work with clients, and I guess you've had your own personal experience with some yo-yo dieting um to help them dig deeper into understanding why they eat or why they're certain foods. Like I know it dawned on me one day, you know, I love chocolate, and my mom would pack us a little Twix or uh Kit Kat something in our lunch every day. And at that particular time when I can really recall this, she was undergoing chemotherapy and cancer treatments. And and I do wonder if sometimes, you know, that two o'clock, right? It was around two o'clock, that you know, we would get this little treat if that had something to do with whatever emotions I was trying to maybe grapple with as a 12-year-old.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Subconsciously, I treat, you know, without even thinking.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Right. A hundred percent. You can have like an emotional attachment to certain foods, to sugar, to time of day. Um, learning, you know, that food is comforting is not always how it starts. Like that in your case, it sounds like just that little comfort during a really tough season of your life was just, you know, I I mean, I'm not gonna even say it was all bad. I mean, you know, that that was something that your mom did that was really sweet and it's a positive memory, too, probably for you. It's it's um, it's also though, like sometimes we just learn to comfort ourselves in the wrong way instead of really processing our emotions as a kid. And so what it looks like when we're a kid might have nothing to do with food, or it might have everything to do with food. Sometimes the food piece starts later, or maybe you learned early that, you know, oh, I watch these other people not deal with their emotions and they choose to drink alcohol, and you don't really like the taste of alcohol, but you know that processing your emotions is something you don't know how to do. And you know, it kind of evolves from there. There's lots of different ways that it comes to be, but what's the common thread is I didn't really learn how to just feel what I was feeling and feel safe in feeling what I was feeling. So I was always looking for some other way to cope.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

And so how and when did that shift for you? What made you or inspired, you know, looking through a different lens, you know, for yeah, for things to change?

SPEAKER_02 7:06

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say for me, um about eight years ago, my mother passed away. And um a lot of times, you know, as a therapist, a lot of times we all do our own work. A decent therapist is doing their own work, but you know, what does that really mean? You're doing your own work. How deep are you going? Are you just talking about things? Are you actually working on trauma? There's all different levels to therapy. All of them are good. We need different things in different seasons. And at that point in my life, I had a lot of things around my grief that were very confusing. Um, and so I did go see a very good therapist at that time who really enlightened me on a lot of what I had been dealing with in my childhood, even though it wasn't like classic abuse, that there was a lot of things that were emotionally neglectful and some might call emotionally abusive. And I actually realized I had a lot of resistance to hearing that or accepting that as true. Um, I felt very defensive for my family, and um, I didn't really want to go there. But once I did go there, um, I realized that I was coping in these ways. I started to see the connection between my own yo-yo dieting pattern that had been frustrating me for years, and this unresolved trauma that I was sort of shoving down with food. Um, and once that came to light, I had been reading all kinds of, well, there wasn't a ton of literature yet at that point, but there was starting to be. I had been reading about emotional eating for years before it was even really a term people knew because I knew I had the issue. Um, but I what I had read was very um kind of cognitive behavioral. It really wasn't lining up with the trauma history or really didn't make sense. And when I was trying the methods that people were offering, I was like, well, this doesn't work. I'm not gonna recommend this to people. Things like distract yourself with a bath if you want to eat. And like that, that's great for someone who's not a trauma, traumatized individual who's comforting themselves with food. But if you are really trying to recover from, you know, using food as a source of comfort, you have to come to understand these deeper roots. And that's what was happening with me in that window of time. And then, you know, as I progressed in my own healing, um, I started to become better at helping other people with emotional eating and really starting to see these commonalities that emotional eaters share, things like being a people pleaser and struggling with boundaries and um all or nothing thinking, um, things like that that were just these common traits. And then I started thinking about the trauma roots to those, and that really kind of spawned a whole field of work for me and caused me to look at emotional eating through a whole nother lens. I've always been the kind of helping professional that when I do something that helps me, whether it's in the therapy world or more in the spiritual world or alternative world, if it's helped me in some way to heal and move further along in my journey, I'm like a training junkie. Okay, I'm gonna go find out how to do this and help my clients in the same way. And so I started to learn techniques that were really helping me and that I could teach my clients that were really starting to actually get them out of these patterns of emotional eating. It's very exciting. But it really started with my mother's passing.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

So you do feel like, whoa, I've got little dogs here that are like um do you feel like I might have to put somebody outside the um the death of your mother, the passing of your mother was a catalyst?

SPEAKER_02 12:45

Yes, absolutely. Not just in not just in this arena of emotional leading, but in just making me um really go deeper for myself and for my clients, um and just to really dig into some tools that were not standard talk therapy tools.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

And do you feel like you you said you were reading about emotional eating? Were you reading about emotional eating prior to your mom's passing?

SPEAKER_02 13:18

I mean, a ton. I mean, I was that person that was treating it and simultaneously trying to deal with it at the same time, you know, hanging your shingle, saying, Hey, I I mean, lots of therapists do this. It's kind of like we don't like to tell people that. But a lot of the things that we treat, we've contended with or, you know, have um and may still be suffering with, but um, you know, because we have it's near and dear to our heart, and we we really want to help people with that cause too. But um the problem for me was that um I felt like I was, you know, had imposter syndrome. I'm trying to help you with something that I have not healed. I've come a long way in that thinking process that what does healing really mean? And do you have to be 100% perfect all the time to call yourself healed? Like what does all of that really mean? But back then I had a lot of that imposter syndrome going on, but I was just, you know, I love to read and learn. I was just digging and digging through information, like reading books. What can I do to help myself and then help other people? And I just kept trying things and I'd get super help hopeful, like this is gonna be the thing. This person's so smart. And then, no, this thing is just another thing. It's a temporary season, it's not getting to the root of the problem. And me, you know, being 10 pounds up, 20 pounds up, 30 pounds up, whatever it is, was only just a symptom. It wasn't because, you know, I was obsessed with food. I wasn't really obsessed with food.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

So, okay, can I ask? Uh, did were you struggling with um the weight that you had and the up and down um emotionally? Were you did you uh like if you looked in the mirror, was it bothered? What what I mean, because you know, some may not have that struggle with with the others. I know I like grew up, it's like my mother was on the scale every day. I don't really get on the scale, but I know that uh the messaging we received as children was we needed to make sure we were I I don't know what it was exactly word for word, but you know, you in order to be attractive, this is this is you know the right, and we got it from our dad's right from our mom, right? With her weighters, it was the same three to five pounds for her whole life. And you know, so the message was there, whether they sat there and told us word for word, look, if you don't they didn't, but we all got it. All all my sisters got it. We all got the message.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

Yes, I uh so I grew up in a diet-obsessed household. It was really more fueled by my father than my mother. Um, my mom, she was more of a like a uh depressed, introverted person, and she um she didn't really put a lot of energy into her appearance, um, nor did she really teach us how to present ourselves at our best. We had to kind of fig, there's three girls in my family, we kind of had to figure that out on our own. And then um my father is, you know, a very vain individual. He's still living, he's quite old, and he's still vain about his weight. Um, and it's uh it's unfortunate. But we there was a diet-obsessed household, so we didn't have any um, you know, like fun snacks. Like I remember for our birthday, we could choose a junky cereal, and that was the only time we got to eat that. So you would like really look forward to it. Or if I went to a friend's house and they would have like a junk drawer of snacks or like snacks, I was just like, oh, I can't believe that you can eat this whenever you want. Like it just floored me. So there was like a um fascination or or kind of like a I really liked to eat things that were like not what we had in our home. But I think more than that was the messaging around being an attractive person. Um, it was a very competitive household. And um, you know, my father was very insulting towards other people, very judgmental. So, you know, you internalize all those messages. Um, he also would talk about my friends and talk about them either in positive or negative ways, but he never gave me any feedback about me. So I always just assumed it was negative feedback because that's sort of how I'm wired. I'm like, you know, if you're not telling me I'm doing a good job, I must not be doing a good job. So I just kind of had a lot of uh negative voices in my head from a young age. And because we were really competitive, it wasn't like this supportive sister environment, like telling each other, you're beautiful, you're great. Like we didn't really have that, unfortunately. Um, and I would consider myself the most sensitive person in my family, a sensitive soul. And um, so but I took it all very hard, you know. So um, and I also worried about how unhappy everybody was all the time. And I always really wanted everybody to be happier, and so I internalized all their negative emotions. Um, and again, how do you cope with those? Well, you go be with your friends, what's at the friend's house? Like you said, oh, there's a candy bar. I'm grieving. There's a candy bar, and that candy bar in this little moment, this little season, that feels pretty good. So I felt the best when I was actually away from home and with my friends, and that's when I got to eat junky things too.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

So I have you know various questions around that. So you appreciated being away from home for various reasons um that made you feel good, but then in in in going there, you also got to eat junky food that you didn't have the freedom to experience at home unless it was on a birthday or a special celebration. So do you think that shaped the way you chose your food or made food choices as you, you know, got older and that impacted dieting?

SPEAKER_02 19:56

I think as I got older, you know, getting my license, having the freedom to like I remember for me in high school, we all would meet like at a Burger King or a McDonald's or something. This was like our way of hanging out, you know, and we would eat there. Um, and again, like for me, that was a big deal. I don't think it was such a big deal for my friends because that wasn't like so taboo in their homes. But for me, there they're definitely, I didn't realize it back then, but I I can definitely look and reflect on it that there was definitely this feeling of I need to have as much of this as I can because I'm not gonna get to have it again when I get home. Um, I wouldn't say I was really an overeater, um, or that I was even really connecting. Like if I eat this, it'll make me fat or something like that. I didn't really have a weight problem in high school or anything like that. I don't remember really um being self-conscious about my weight until college. Um, when you like gained the freshman 15 and all of those things. Um, you know, drinking at night and eating pizza at four o'clock in the morning and all this kind of, I mean, that's when it started to show up on my body a little bit. Um, and I went on my first diet around like soft. Well, I went on a diet in high school, but not really to lose weights because my mom was doing one, but like really to lose weight was college and it was uh like my sophomore year of college. Um and then, you know, it was the fat-free craze. So there wasn't really anything. Okay, well, terrible. It wasn't really, I would I would eat jelly beans and think I was doing good because they didn't have any fat in them. So, you know, all that sugar probably did wonders for my blood sugar now. But um, you know, it's like I definitely see connections. But I think for me, yes, there was connections around like kind of get as much of it as you can, but I think it was more about I was self-soothing and I didn't realize it. You know, I I didn't realize I even needed to self-soothe.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Right. And and do you okay, and and in self-soothing, I so yesterday I I posted this short little um video, maybe not yesterday, the day before on Instagram. I have one of those emotion wheel pillows. Yes, because I realize it's hard for me to like attach or pinpoint or articulate what it is that I'm feeling. So I found that I can definitely know anger and happy and you know. Fear or sad, but then if you start to work your way out on that wheel, you can maybe isolate the feeling a little bit better. I mean, I still struggle with that. I might not know exactly what I'm feeling, and I might you know gravitate towards you know it's funny that you say that. So I am like that with sourdough bread. And I don't do it that often, so I'll I cannot put any breaks on that food. So I'm making sourdough right now because it's around the holidays. And just on my counter and knowing come January I won't eat it again for a while, it's like I'll eat as much as I can. But I couldn't pinpoint the feelings around why, you know, that's a pattern that I have that I have not definitely have not broken is the inability to the inability to put the brakes on certain things.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

Well, and when I hear that, I think of two things. I think of, you know, well, I'm thinking of all kinds of things, but what your association was was with sourdough and all that kind of stuff is going through my mind. But um I'm thinking about um this season and how it's such a mixed bag of joy and grief at the same time, um, and how we have so much more to do um in terms of gift giving and preparing and showing up at social events, and and all of that adds to what's called our allostatic load, our our our our kind of walking around stress level. And um that really impacts how quickly we need self-soothing. You know, the better balance of our baseline stress, the lower it is, the less likely we are to need to turn to something to cope or soothe. Um, and the higher our stress level gets with everything that we have going on. Now, I know you personally are really good at intervening on your own stress and you have lots of techniques, but it can catch up with any of us, right? So um it's like if you're running around all day getting gifts for people and um you have to clean up or you have to go to, you know, get an outfit for something, or you know, do this podcast, or all of the different things that you have to do, you know, it starts to stack up on you. And when it stacks up on you, um, lo and behold, your brain starts going, we got to soothe this. This is unhealthy. Oh, look on the counter. There's a really good soother right there, super easy. Our brains are lazy as all get out. They'll just be like, nope, that's a good soother right there, go for it. And then every transmitter in your brain is saying, eat that sourdough, Elizabeth, right now. Yeah, you know, and hard to, yep, it's hard to resist. It's almost impossible to white knuckle your way through something like that.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yeah, it is, it's very difficult. And so I don't want to make assumptions, but you help people with navigating such patterns.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of what I teach are um, I help people become really like an expert on their own stress level. I have a lot of techniques for that, so that you're really monitoring yourself as you go through the day and you're anticipating holiday stress and things like that better and intervening on your own behalf so that you it doesn't stack up on you, you know, that you can go through those things and do self-care for yourself as you're going through to kind of keep yourself in a good position where you're soothing in the right way so you don't lean on the wrong things. Your brain doesn't go sourdough, sourdough, sourdough, because it's already kind of gotten that alleviation in another way.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

Mm-hmm. So, okay, so you mentioned three, I think you mentioned three uh similar traits that you found in in individuals. Uh people pleaser, all or nothing. What was the third one you mentioned?

SPEAKER_02 28:37

Uh boundary issues, there's more, but those are three good ones, yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

And you also shared something about your personal experience with working. I don't know if you said counselor, but you know, unpacking maybe a childhood that wasn't as um ideologic as you remember it to be. Not that you remember I remember reading a book, I think it was by Bell Hooks. Is that I can't even remember the title, it's over here. I haven't even finished it, but she writes in the beginning about how uh a lot of individuals can look back at their childhood and tell you it was good. Um and when you when they actually start to unpack some of that emotional neglect and the things that you don't realize have had such an impact on the rest of your life. No one's a victim. I mean, I I've not I you know, I don't believe, but um but that you know those early formative years are and things that take place in those early formative years can have such an impact on the way that we move, like the blueprints and the patterns in which we pick up and take on.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Absolutely. Yes, I I think so. I mean, I I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

No, go ahead. I'll remember.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

No, I was just I was just going to say, like, I do I find that all the time in my practice, whether people are are wanting to work on emotional eating or just you know, other issues, emotional issues. A lot of people will say, Oh, I uh my childhood was great. Like, we don't need to talk about that. That that's not important. And and it it's you know, it's interesting to me because there probably were great things about it. Like my job is not to be like, oh, it wasn't so great after all. Like, I don't want to do that, right? But it's to help people sort of come to see how their self-concept is affected by, you know, all the things they experienced in those early years. Our entire personality, generally speaking, there's some exceptions, forms by the age of seven. And so we barely remember that much before the age of seven. And all these things have happened to us who that have like led us to survive and cope in certain ways. And when we um become adults, we've we've learned to survive and cope in so many ways. So we reflect back and go, no, that wasn't so bad. It was okay. I I you know that's how we cope. But then when you really start to pull back the layers, it's like, oh, there's a lot more to this than I thought. And so when you talk about those common, no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Oh, no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

I was gonna say what you when you talk about those common traits, like of them of an emotional eater, often they are the family nurturer, the the one in the family that is um sort of taking care of everybody else. They want to help um in any way that they can, they'll overdo, make sure their family's comfortable without even worrying about themselves. And internally, they think, oh, it's great. We have these great relationships. And then when they get to really sit down and think about what's going on and reflect, they realize, wow, not just in my family, but in all these relationships, I am bending over backwards and doing all these things and giving so much of myself to other people, I don't even make time for me. I've always thought that would be selfish to do, and it's not selfish, it's actually critically important for you to be well. And people just don't, they just they learned to be that role and they just keep playing it out over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

And so I know that uh because I can, you know, I I know people who um share that experience, and I know people who uh can relate and and wonder if they can ever actually, you know, can I actually break this habit? I don't know if it's if a habit habit. I guess it's uh what would you call it a habit?

SPEAKER_02 33:12

A cycle. Call it a cycle.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

You mean the cycle of taking care of other people?

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Well, just this that you know, that it just any sort of like when you notice, okay, you pick the same relationship repeatedly, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:28

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

It's just anything that you find is a repetitive theme.

SPEAKER_02 33:33

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

If that makes sense. Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

And it's it makes complete sense. It's it's what we do. We just we again, we've got this battery of surviving and coping skills, right? And it's like um we have strengths in those, and then we have roadblocks in those. And if we learn to work to our strengths, that's when we start to move in a positive direction. But a lot of times we have blind spots around our roadblocks. We don't even realize, you know, this isn't how everyone else copes, or just because this has worked for me this long, has it really? Because I still have all these other things in my life that aren't going well. And I don't know why. You know, I'm so good at work, I'm so good with my friends, I'm this, I'm that, but I can't find a partner to save my life. Why is that? You know, this kind of stuff. And it's it's because we we don't know how to allot our energy and how to cope differently.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

And then and you know, yeah, it's like same with like something like weight loss, right? Do you also find uh do you think uh that individuals there's ever um a subconscious effort to gain weight to keep a distance?

SPEAKER_02 34:55

100%. I see that a lot too. It's like they really want to lose weight though, but like they've been hurt uh or you know, abused in some way, uh, violated in some way, and they just are scared to be that vulnerable. And that is very common. I think it's about 60% of people um have had some sort of um emotional or sexual violation that's causing them to try to protect themselves. And so um, you know, and and some people have those and don't know that they have them, right? Because it happened at a younger age and they've blacked out, blocked it out, excuse me, not blacked out, blocked it out, um and don't realize it's part of what they've survived. Um and so, you know, there's there's all kinds of violations though. Like like I was talking about my father's vanity and things like that. I mean, in reality, just him talking about my friends and their looks and things like that, I would consider that a violation of me and my self-concept. And um, and so I can even relate to you know, the periods of time in my life where I got super thin through unhealthy means and how I then felt very vulnerable, exposed um during those times. Like this very confusing thing of, oh, I'm getting attention, but I don't like the attention, but I want the attention, like very confusing times for me. So I think that's really common and and it does cause a lot of self-defeating weight gain from the subconscious mind for sure. It's like a protective layer.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Yeah. So now you work with people beyond just hope losing weight. You work with couples and helping them get their relationship, I don't know, back on track or on track. Um who else work with?

SPEAKER_02 37:02

I work with all all kinds of adults. I I stopped working with kids a long time ago. Um, I work with adults. I do would say that couples are about half of my practices. That's quite a lot for a therapist. Um and um the other half is a split between emotional leaders and um and then like anxiety or just life situations, you know, things that people, a lot of people come to me because they recognize they have trauma and they want to deal with their trauma. I have extensive trauma training. So when people, you know, they're at that place in their life, it may not be, I don't like the way I'm coping. It might just be like, no, I know this trauma's held me back for years and I got to do something about it. And I love that we've evolved to that in our society where people actually acknowledge and say, I gotta do trauma work because not very long ago, people just would be like, I'm not traumatized. I don't have, I didn't, I wasn't in a fire, I wasn't present for 9-11. I don't know what you mean by trauma. We've come so far with that, um, where people now recognize there's so many different forms of trauma, and almost everyone is touched by trauma in some way, right? Um, but yes, and in a lot of my clients that do that are working on emotional eating. So I do get a lot of therapists referring clients to me because their client is an emotional eater. Um, when that happens, usually they'll do my online program and work with their own therapist, and I might do just a couple of check-ins with them just to make sure that they're progressing through the program effectively or talk to their therapist and make sure they're using the coding skills that they're learning and it's going well and all that. Um, so that's that's those are clients I don't consider necessarily like on my caseload, but um but you know, uh they're working on emotional eating and I'm part of their journey.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

So okay, so emotional eating, would you um uh categorize or lump um food addiction under that?

unknown 39:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 39:14

Yeah, I I I'm not a big fan of that term. Okay. Um yeah, I think if we're being honest, there are additives in food that are addictive, um, especially in America. Um and so um some people fall prey to that. Um but I feel like we need to recognize that food issues are trauma-based. Um and so you're more of a compulsive overeater. Now, there's people who will argue with me on this. They'll be like, there's food addicts, you're wrong. It is a it is a classification. I'm just saying what I believe. Um, I think people have binge eating disorders and compulsive eating disorders that stem from trauma. Um, and that um, and I believe addictions of all kinds stem from trauma. Um, but when you say food addict, it's like, well, aren't we all we need food to survive, right? So we all have to have food. We all, if we don't have it, we're gonna crave it and we're at some point gonna get so hungry that no one could stop us from eating. Um so, but but there are yes, additives and food. Like I especially watch younger generation, people like early 20s, mid-20s, they're more of the fast food generation than anyone. And they they really are addicted to fast food and things like that, but I wouldn't necessarily call them food addicts. I hope that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, and then what about um those with anorexia or bulimia?

SPEAKER_02 41:00

Mm-hmm. So again, like anorexia, which is not my specialty area. Um, so I I'm just speaking about with limited knowledge here, but I see anorexia as a means of coping with an environment that you don't feel you have control over. Okay. Um, so you learn to control food as a way to control your environment. Okay. And then bulimia is, you know, I think most of the clients that I've worked with have had bouts of bulimia, um, not all, but a lot of, because they saw it as a potential way to lose weight. And then for some, that becomes a whole battery of how they cope, and it's all intertwined and mixed in, right? Um, but it's just really fear of weight gain. Fear of weight gain and and then the self uh, you know, harm of making yourself throw up, basically the self-harm of eating the wrong foods, the self-harm harm of making yourself throw up, it's acting out to deal with emotions. But you don't necessarily, that's not really your specialty when it comes to No, like if somebody was was said, called me and said, I have bulimia and that's what I want to fix, I wouldn't be um working with that person, I would be referring them. Um, working with the person that may have had about bulimia in the past. Um, but really what it is is they recognize they're at a point where they recognize they can't just keep trying to use diets as solutions, solutions to something that is much deeper, and that finding the right food plan is never going to solve the problem, that they actually have to get to the emotions behind the problem. Um, and then once they have, then they can change their relationship with food and choose healthier foods the majority of the time, not every single day, all the time, but the majority of the time and not feel burdened, restricted, angry, resentful, all the things that come with trying to make healthy choices when you're not right with food.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

I know I struggled with uh I would just say, I don't know what I would say, disordered eating in high school. I'm 46. I definitely went through that fat-free craze. And I mean, I would put back a bag of candy corn. It was fat-free.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We thought we were doing great.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

Oh my gosh. Yes, you know, and I think bio, and I thought that was okay because it was free. And that's right, crazy. Um, and I know very much so that I I and I saw some counselor for for that at the time, that so much of it had to do with, you know, my home life and not being able to control the home life in which I was was living in. And you know, um, my dad was having an affair and my mother was going through breast cancer treatments. Life was not anything that seemed enjoyable at that point. Right. There was a lot. And then there were other layers to that as well that I won't get into necessarily in this conversation. But um I definitely turned to and and you know it's followed me. It's not, it's not entirely gone. And I'm sure I've got some of the obsession around food onto my kids with the organic and the you know the farm raised and the you know, like it's shifted some, but it's still there. Um and um so you know it's interesting, and then also how these patterns are passed down from generation to generation with yes not necessarily ill intention either.

SPEAKER_02 48:08

Absolutely. I mean, I would say in my house now, um, you know, I grew up with all of this uh healthy food um awareness and like, you know, I would I had gotten to the point, you know, as a young woman, whereas I was certainly not going through the McDonald's drive-thru or anything like that because I had been eating fat-free and I, you know, was restricting heavily in my early adulthood because I wanted to be thin and all this stuff. And and then I met my husband who um has a he's blessed with a wonderful metabolism, and also, you know, he eats healthy sometimes and sometimes he doesn't. He's gotten a lot healthier as he's gotten older, but um, you know, he doesn't have the same mentality around everything having to be organic. And um we joke a lot about expiration dates. I could talk about that for 10 minutes, but I won't. But like, let's just say he's comfortable with the um fuzzy expiration date, and I am not. And so, you know, it's like that kind of stuff. Um, it's very interesting because sometimes I get really on my high horse about it. I'm like, we've everything needs to be organic. Like, I can't, or I'll get frustrated if he goes to the grocery store and he comes home and it's not organic or whatever. And, you know, um, I think my kids, as a result, what they saw was this yo-yo, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid, right? We're we're we're eating healthy, and then oh, but wait, it's baseball season and we've got like game after game, and so we're just gonna stop at Subway. Okay, mom might be eating a salad, but everybody else is eating a big old sub and chips and the whole deal, and um it's really confusing, and then you know, you go home, and so you know, I'm sure as much as you just said that, just as much as I tried to avoid passing on all of this, um, sure that I did, and I've seen that as they're young adults, and also there is a gene um called the GAD gene, which is um the I guess I would call it the emotional eating gene for lack of scientific knowledge. I'm sure it has a better name, but the GAD gene, you know, um can be passed down and also it's one of those genes that's uh can go without being expressed, but if there's some trauma, which again, like I said before, who doesn't have some, um, that can sort of make the gene express itself. So um I know my father's an emotional eater. I'm sure I have a genetic predisposition for it, and probably my kids do too. And unfortunately, it's just a very hardy gene. So, you know, um it just it is it that is much like people have genes for alcoholism, you know, um, it's it's past. And so we have that predisposition, but again, that does not mean that you are branded for life to be an emotional eater. It means that it's harder for you than other people and you have to learn how to cope differently. And like you said, it's sometimes still gonna show up. Sometimes I'm just gonna eat that sourdough. By God, it's okay. Right. And sometimes I'm gonna, you know, have my like right now, I have my these weird candy that I like at Christmas time, like spearment leaves and stuff that are really kind of old-fashioned, but I like them and I know when I put them on the counter, I'm gonna be dipping my finger in there and eating them way too often. But I still purchase them and you know, I've made that conscious choice. So I have to know that I'm going to do that. And I always say, like, if you think that that's gonna go away completely, then you know, I I can only take you so far. And maybe you can advance beyond that, but that is as far as I can take somebody where it's not, it's not that it's gone forever, it's that 80% of the time you're not stuck there, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:19

And a new level of awareness around it. Like you said, a conscious choice, right? I know that I'm gonna indulge in the bread and I might be constipated tomorrow or whatever. I mean, that that might happen to me, you know. I can feel like glue in my gut, and I'm oh sweetness, right? But um, you know, but yeah, I make the choice. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna enjoy this.

SPEAKER_02 52:46

Or I think you could do worse than home-baked sourdough. That's a pretty decent choice.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

Yeah, and you know, knowing I think I what one of the things that I have less of is the guilt. I felt a lot of guilt when I was younger. And so yes, that over time and you know, doing some of my mo my own work around it. Um there's way less guilt.

SPEAKER_02 53:14

Um, yeah, it's so painful. I mean, I I I think like that's the thing. It's I think the most painful part is that people are, you know, in they're stuck in this cycle of self-abuse, basically, where they're, you know, they're dieting, they feel great, everything's going really well. I like, you know, starting to like my body, I feel pretty good. I went down a size, you know. And then like life happens. Like I had too many parties in a row. I had to go to this wedding reception and I went on a vacation, and like a little bit of weight starts to come back on. And instead of just being like, eh, it's life, it becomes this heavy, like guilt-ridden, like, and then I'm gonna beat myself up. And gosh, I just can't get it together. And I just can't believe I let this happen to myself. And my pants are tight. And next thing they know, they're at this very low low. And guess what? They decide to do. Oh, I'm gonna go on a restrictive diet. That'll fix everything, right? And then they just keep looping and looping and looping and having these terrible feelings because they can't stick to a restrictive diet. No one was ever meant to stick to a restrictive diet. You know, we're not designed for that. That's like um, you know, it's uh our biology is such that, you know, through evolution, we have not changed. You know, we were born to have um like a storage mechanism so that when there was times of famine, that we would have food stored up. And when we do have access to food to feast on that food, so when you activate, you tell your brain we're in a famine, the brain's like, okay, okay, we're in a famine. And and then, you know, lo and behold, the wedding reception buffet is in front of you. Your brain goes, okay, famine over. Like you're gonna eat that food. You need to store up, you need to get some fat on your body. And so you're fighting biology when you try to tell yourself that's not true. And um, and so the more you restrict and the more you stay in that restrictive mindset, the more your body goes, okay, next time I need to probably store a little more. And then you gain even more weight the next time when you start feeding again. So that's how people get stuck in this constant cycle, and you're fighting biology, and and the only way to really stop it is to sort of acknowledge that a restrictive diet will never solve this problem. That's why sometimes I say, like, yeah, if I if you're calling me because you're bulimic, I'm probably not your girl because um, you know, my philosophy is you're not solving this with a diet, you're not solving weight loss, it's not our goal together. Our goal is to get you out of this awful cycle, and then you can go on to lose weight, and it'll be a lot easier for you. But my goal is to stop the psychological barriers that are really holding you back, and that's what I needed. Um, and so that's my pleasure to help people get out of the cycle, that whole burdensome, guilt-ridden, awful self-beating up cycle that people get stuck in.

SPEAKER_00 56:24

Well, um, I love that I I can in my book that I wrote uh in the first couple of pages, I remember I was taken back through an EMDR session to physically, and I shared this part in the book, hitting myself because I could not maintain caloric restriction. It was rough, you know, but I just remember, you know, like literally, just like beating, I was literally, I was literally beating myself, not just even in the head, like I was already mentally that critical part of me was like and then but I never um in this EMDR session that I was physically also with my fist. And so, you know, it's interesting that you, you know, use that word, but uh, you know, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's done that.

SPEAKER_02 57:14

Um no, yeah, it's just so awful. And I appreciate you sharing that with me. And I know I've I've had many times where I've stood in front of the mirror and grabbed at my body and you know, the places I was dissatisfied with and just said horrible things to myself about, you know, I was disgusted with myself and I couldn't believe I let myself get here and just really, really mean, critical voice. Um, it's like trying to motivate somebody by kicking them. Yeah, it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 57:47

No. No, and thinking, I don't know, yeah, then criticizing for being critical. It's just a critic in and of itself is one, you know, of a of a different kind. But um, so where can I know you said you do work with people one-on-one, you work with couples, but when it comes to the emotional eating in particular, you have a program that's online and then you also have a book. So where can I do where can people find you so they can break the you know through the psychological barriers they may have when it comes to emotional eating?

SPEAKER_02 58:21

So my book is um called The Wait Within Healing Emotional Eating from the Inside Out. It's available on Amazon through Kindle or paperback. Um, I don't have an audible version yet. People ask me that all the time. I don't have that yet. I would love to get that on there. Um and then uh my programs are on my website, which is weightwithin.com, W-E-I-G-H-T, weightwithin.com. Um, I also have social media. I fully admit I'm not super active on my social media, um, but I do have um the weight within on Instagram and weight within on Facebook. Um and I have a YouTube channel as well. That's the Wait Within. But um my Weight Within website has uh more information about my online program. Um and then general therapy for people local to Louisville, uh, Kentucky. Um, you can always look me up through odomtherapy.com. But um, if you're not in Louisville, Kentucky and you want to work on emotional eating, I recommend the Wait Within website. So thank you for asking.

SPEAKER_00 59:26

Okay, good. And all those links will be in the show notes below. Thank you, Margie. It was great. I love this topic. It was great. Um reasons. I know, I know I've struggled with emotional eating and I know I'm not alone. And it's always nice to uh, you know, come together and connect with other people who um, you know, you know, that you that may share a similar story. It just helps. I I think it helps along the healing journey also to know that simply you're not alone. You know, absolutely there's almost always somebody out there who can we can resonate with on some level and and see you know the similarities and and that you know healing and uh transformation are truly possible. So I appreciate your 100%.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

Yes, and thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Uh love chatting with you and hearing more about your story and just um you know feel honored to be here. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:26

Yeah, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful day.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:30

You too.