268. Tips to Not Overeat or Emotionally Eat During the Holidays

In this episode, we’ll explore simple, effective strategies to help you enjoy festive meals without overindulging. Discover how to handle cravings, stay mindful in social settings, and manage the emotional triggers that often come with the season. Whether you're looking for balance or just want to feel in control, these tips will help you stay on track while still savoring the holiday cheer.

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Resources From This Episode

>> Insulin Resistance Diet Blueprint - https://www.zivli.com/blueprint?el=podcast

>> Free Low Insulin Food Guide - https://www.zivli.com/ultimatefoodguide?el=podcast

>> Join the Zivli Program Waitlist - https://www.zivli.com/join?el=podcast

>> Test Your Insulin at Home - https://www.zivli.com/testing?el=podcast

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Transcript

Do not allow the actual or perceived judgments or opinions of other people influence your food choices. If you wanna eat the food, eat the food. If you don't wanna eat the food, don't eat the food, but make it a personal choice.


Hi, I'm Dr. Morgan Nolte, founder of Zivli. As a geriatric physical therapist, I saw the heartbreaking effects of insulin resistance. At Zivli, our mission is to help you prevent and reverse insulin resistance for long-term weight loss and disease prevention through a low insulin and inflammation lifestyle. Each week on this podcast, you'll learn simple, actionable tips to lose weight, keep it off, and get healthy. If you're ready to create a body and life you love,

you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Well, hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Reshape Your Health podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Morgan Nolte. And this week we are gonna be talking about emotional eating strategies around the holidays. I don't know about you, but this is one of my favorite seasons of the year. Christmas is my number one favorite holiday, followed closely by Thanksgiving. So we are just heading into one of the most joyful seasons for our family.

especially with our kids ages, like they are just all about, you know, the presents and Christmas morning and decorating. And it's just a lot of fun to experience the holidays through their eyes. And I'm very excited. I know that the holidays for many come with a lot of food anxiety because maybe you've really been working hard on managing your blood sugar or losing weight this year and you don't want to backtrack. I know that for many people,

The holidays can be a time where the food temptation is overwhelming, whether it be your neighbor is bringing you plates of cookies or coworkers bringing in a bunch of stuff that you don't want to eat, but it's just there and it's tempting you. And it's very difficult to continuously say no. So we're going to talk about some strategies on how we can reduce the emotional eating and the overeating and the mindless eating.


during the holidays so that you can stay on track with whatever goals you have going on, whether that's weight loss, maintenance, lowering your blood sugar, we're here for all of it. How I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna break it down into three categories. And this is something that I learned in my geriatric residency training. There's something called reflection for action, reflection in action, and reflection on action. So there's

three times where you can really strategically think about your eating patterns and your habits and your intentions, either before you're going into a meal, during the meal itself, or after the meal. So before we get into those strategies, I just wanted to give a little bit of an overview on emotional hunger versus physical hunger. And this may be new to you.

If you're a Zivli member, I'm hoping that you've gone through our end emotional eating masterclass and that this is a really good timely review for you. Emotional hunger comes on quickly, all right? I want you to think about, you've just had a big dinner, like maybe 30 minutes ago, and then all of a sudden, bam, a pain comes on and you want sugar, you want popcorn, you want candy, you want cookies, you want ice cream.

It's not like you're actually hungry and it definitely didn't build over the last few hours, right? Because you just had dinner. So emotional hunger comes on quickly. It feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly. You're gonna be craving specific comfort foods. It might be salty or sweet. Usually it's something high in carbs. You're not really satisfied when you're full.

because often those types of sugary carb heavy foods don't fill you up. They don't actually trigger your satiety hormones. And even if you eat so much of it or you eat it at the end of the meal that you are stuffed, you're still just like not very satisfied. Emotional hunger, if you give into it, it may cause feelings of guilt or shame or powerlessness over food or over your actions. So it doesn't always feel very good.


after you emotionally eat or after you overeat. And then I like to say that emotional hunger includes nostalgic hunger or like conditional hunger. And that is where I always give the example, we went to my grandparents' cabinet, Lake McConaughey in Nebraska a lot growing up and they would always have like a bowl of &Ms. So I would always crave &Ms when I went out to the lake.

We would always have homemade ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce. So every time I'd go out to the lake, I would crave these sugary foods that I didn't have in my normal everyday environment. That's nostalgic hunger. This really is prevalent this time of year too, with all of the foods that we're exposed to like once or twice a year. The pumpkin pie, the peppermint dessert, the chocolate pie.

All of the good things, you know, that are that they do genuinely taste good. And I don't think that any food has to be off limits. It's just it's important to be watching our portion sizes and be sure that we're having those desserts at the end of our meal, going for walks after all the tips I covered last week to reduce those blood sugar spikes. So emotional hunger definitely includes the nostalgic hunger and then the conditional hunger. So conditional hunger is things like when you go to a movie, you want popcorn.

When you go to a baseball game, you might want like a hot dog or sunflower seeds, those foods that are associated with places. So one thing that I'm conditioning my family for, for better or worse, probably for worse, is cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. That's kind of our tradition is to make the real kind of cinnamon rolls, like from scratch on Christmas morning. And like I said, I eat sugar. I just really balance it out with my other lifestyle choices.

and I don't eat very much of it. So I'm very excited for those, but I also recognize that's gonna be one of my exceptions over the holidays and I'm not gonna give in to every temptation. I'm not going to just make exception after exception after exception. It's something I intentionally choose and look forward to and enjoy and then it's done. So let's contrast all of those emotional hunger characteristics with physical hunger. And this is the kind of hunger that comes on slowly.


It feels like it can wait. Like maybe you had a really healthy breakfast. It's 10, 1030. Lunch is coming up in 30 to 60 minutes, but you're like, yeah, I can do a little bit more work before I go eat. Lots of different foods are gonna sound good. Not necessarily just comfort foods or the sugary or salty foods. You're satisfied and you stop when you're full, because usually you're eating like a meal with protein and fat, hopefully some fiber.

And then it doesn't lead to negative emotions. There are certain people who really struggle psychologically with food that they might be the exception. I've known people like that. I've coached people like that where like they feel guilty if they eat like too much chicken and green beans. But most people who have a healthy meal are not gonna have like shame or guilt around eating that meal. So that's the first thing I wanted to cover before we get into the strategies.

The second thing I wanted to cover or review for people who have heard this before is the emotional eating loop. All right, so I want you to picture a circle with like four points, A, B, C, And we're gonna start at the top with A, which is the Q. So every single habit, subconsciously or consciously, usually habits are subconscious, they have four phases. All right, so we're starting with the first phase, which is a Q. The second phase is the craving.

The third phase is the response and the fourth phase is a reward. So I'm gonna start with something very simple like a text message notification. So let's say that you hear a ding on your phone. The ding is the cue, all right? That's step one. Then you have a craving. You have a craving, a curiosity to know what that message says. Then step three is a response. You check your phone to see what the text says.

And then step four, phase four was the reward. You're rewarded by having that curiosity taken care of essentially. So now let's relate that to eating. So the cues are very, very important for you to understand what are your cues that lead to emotional eating or overeating. And some of the more common ones that we coach people through would be the emotion of being stressed. So a lot of these would be emotional cues, being stressed.


being tired, being mad, being bored, being lonely, being depressed. know, the holidays can be a very sad, lonely, depressing season for some people, and you might be one of those, and if you are, my heart goes out to you. Know that you are still so loved and cared for, even if you're experiencing those very tough emotions during this season. Other emotions or just, you know, cues that we often hear of are wanting a reward.

I deserve it eating. This is a huge one for me, especially when my children were younger. And we did the bedtime battle and then I would go to the couch and have popcorn and chocolate chips almost every night. I don't obviously do that anymore, but that was a big habit to break because it was that I deserve it eating. I just put my kids to bed. I stayed relatively calm. I had a productive day. Now it's my time to rest. Often we are linking.

different emotions with food. So every time we're experiencing an emotion, we're having food. So it becomes very difficult to experience that emotion without having, you know, food because the emotion itself is a craving. Some other cues, of course, would be locations, like if you're at your grandma's house or your mom's house, or you're in the kitchen cooking, the time of day can be a cue. Many people have just

cravings mid afternoon, like three o'clock, four o'clock, they're starting to get hungry for dinner, the time of day can be a cue. People that you're around can be a cue. Maybe you have like drinking buddies or eating buddies. So people can be a cue. Maybe there's certain family members that stress you out. So that's like a double cue, the person and the emotion, right? Anyways, when you're thinking about the cue, there's a few questions that you can ask yourself that's helpful.

It's like, what time is it? Where am I? Who am I with? What am I doing? What am I feeling? So those five questions are helpful for identifying your eating cues. Of course, the craving. So the craving is pretty natural. You want to eat the food. You experience emotional hunger and food cravings. The response is you may emotionally eat and you may overeat. I consider mindless eating emotional eating too, just for the record.

And then the reward is of course that quick dopamine hit because carbs and sugar will actually activate the reward center in your brain. So there is a chemical process that rewards you for eating and that's why food temporarily makes you feel better. But then usually this type of eating is followed by those negative emotions and those negative emotions of like guilt or shame unfortunately can serve as the next cue

for that emotional eating cycle to continue. So I hope that in your head, you're visualizing that emotional eating loop, because it's very helpful to understand. So now that we have a good overview of emotional versus physical hunger and the emotional eating loop, we're gonna get into those three phases of reflection. We're gonna start by reflecting for action. So whenever I'm coaching someone over emotional eating,

This is how my thought process works. I'm first of all thinking, what did you do to prepare for the situation? Now the situation, all right, this is game week people. For a lot of people, it's like actually game week if they're football players. For us, it's game week. Like Thursday, Thanksgiving is game day. So we are preparing mentally for game day. Let's talk about how we're reflecting for action on Thanksgiving to prevent overeating, emotional eating or mindless eating.

And I just have a ton of things listed out here. I'm just going to kind of run down the list. Stop being a people pleaser. All right. Do not allow the actual or perceived judgments or opinions of other people influence your food choices. If you want to eat the food, eat the food. If you don't want to eat the food, don't eat the food, but make it a personal choice. You're a grown adult. You don't need to give in to food or social peer pressure to eat something. Number two is practice mindful eating.

Mindful eating means we slow down. Maybe this week, maybe a great little practice, I guess, if we're talking about skills to practice leading up to game day, so the Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, maybe we practice having at least 10 minutes where we're sitting down and eating our dinner. Like set a timer and challenge yourself to be mindful at every dinner this week and take your time eating.


putting your fork down between bites, taking a drink of water between bites. One of my favorite things is to be sure that I actually swallow one bite of food before I put the next bite of food into my mouth. So practice mindful eating. The next one is to fuel your body by getting at least 30 grams of protein per meal, staying hydrated by drinking approximately half your body weight

and ounces of water a day. And really the best litmus test there is if your urine is light yellow or clear, you're golden. You're drinking enough water. And then ensure that you're getting healthy fats and fiber in your diet. I don't really like fasting during this week. I don't really like fasting going into Thanksgiving. Everyone's different. Some people don't even like that word fasting.

I just, for me, I think that it's easier for me to keep a balanced mindset around my portions if I'm not fasting this week. So, and I'm pregnant too. So I can't anyways, but when I wasn't pregnant, I just tried to have very balanced meals. The next one is to connect with people that you love. I know that sometimes family can be stressful.

And if it is for you set time boundaries, so be like, okay, we can go to this family get together for two hours and then we're gonna come home and chill on the couch and do those, you know, comforting activities. I was gonna say the comforting introverted activities. But connecting with people that you love, whether that's your kids or your grandkids, like really filling your bucket because a lot of emotional eating or overeating

comes from hidden hungers. And one of those can be loneliness. One of them can be overwhelm or stress. So we want to be doing all that we can to help manage our stress this week. Not putting things off till the last minute, exercising regularly, which is another one of these tips, getting seven to eight hours of sleep per night. All of those are going to be important to prevent overeating or emotional eating or mindless eating. All of these are just preparing for game day.


Another habit that I am adopting again is just tracking or logging my food. The reason that I want to do it right now, not necessarily like on Thanksgiving, but just kind of as practice leading up to Thanksgiving is to be mindful of my portion sizes and how much nutrition I actually needed each meal. I just, kind of tend to overeat and being pregnant, I don't have like intermittent fasting to use as a lever to compensate for overeating.

So this is a great opportunity and a great season in my life to focus on proper portions. So I am. And tracking my food helps with that. So I touched on exercise. Another reflection for action is make daily movement a priority. This one's really important for blood sugar management, for your mental health, just for that sense of accomplishment every day. Man, it's really important. We just invested.

$75, I know, 75 bucks, in a Facebook marketplace upright bike because the treadmill was starting to hurt a little bit too much being pregnant. We're about 21 weeks pregnant when this one comes out live. And what a great investment. Man, I have very much enjoyed that stationary bike, but I did it because it's like, I want to move every day, but I need to find something that doesn't hurt. So if you're

having a lot of joint pain, maybe it's just stretching every day. That's my plan today. It's like I've been lifting and biking and walking and I'm having a stretch day today and it's gonna feel so good. So even if you're only stretching for 10, 15 minutes, that is a win, my friend. So count all those wins. The next tip is to find a time for relaxation, rest. One of my colleagues at Zipflee, Dr. Beth, told me this week, Morgan, remember that rest is productive.

That's how I have to think about rest because my natural rhythm of life is to be productive, to be active, to be going. And that's honestly not how I'm built. So I'm really working to rewire that circuit in my mind that if I'm not doing something, if I'm not being productive, I'm not being valuable, that I'm valuable just because I am and I can rest. But here's the thing, relaxation and rest looks different for everybody.


I'm finding that I am more of an active rest person. like stretching is rest for me. Scrapbooking is rest for me. Obviously watching TV is probably my favorite way to rest, but sometimes reading or journaling can be rest. Meditating, there's so many different ways, but really find time for relaxation and stress management. Okay, the next one. Proactive boundaries around sweets. This is a great week.

to practice like, I mean, honestly, it's a great season in general, to start having proactive boundaries around sweets. So if your sweets intake has kind of crept up since Halloween or just in general and you wanna tighten it up, set a boundary. One of my favorite boundaries that I've had in the past is one standard size dessert on Saturday or Sunday. Okay, one standard size dessert on Saturday or Sunday.

I was coaching someone once and she was really struggling with like, my gosh, we have three kinds of pie at our Thanksgiving and I want all of them. And I said, that's fine. Have all of them. Maybe just have one a day, like one on Thursday, one on Friday, one on Saturday. And she's like, I never thought of that. It's like, yeah, that's that there are so many different creative solutions for how you can enjoy your food. But think about the blood sugar spike of one piece of pie versus three pieces of pie. Just have one.

have a moderate portion and then go brush your teeth. That's gonna be a strategy coming up too, but proactive boundaries. Think about how many pieces of dessert you're gonna have ahead of time. I recommend one. And then if you want more than that, spread it out over the days. I'm gonna do some pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Personally, that's my favorite. And I'm gonna have one piece after my meal and then I'm gonna go brush my teeth. So.

Proactive, that's the key word there. Don't be reactive. And then here's the other thing, start practicing mini sweets fast now to build your self-control muscle. So again, if your habits have been slipping and you're having like several pieces of candy a day or a couple cookies a day, just have like a boundary where you're going to start to reduce that amount, even if it's like pop. know, whatever your sweet craving or habit is, start to practice mini sweets fast and create proactive boundaries for yourself now.

so that on game day, come Thanksgiving, come Christmas, come the big family meal get together, you have practiced and strengthened that self-control muscle. And then for our Zivli members, you might wanna be adjusting your personal faith formula at this time to be a little bit more specific about those boundaries. And you could put in something like healthy boundaries around sweets for me look like X. So you could start to journal over that if you're like, gosh, I don't even know like what my boundaries would be.

start to journal over it, the answer will come to you. Then once you have your answer, put it in that personal faith formula to remind yourself because otherwise, unfortunately, you might forget. All right, the next thing from a reflection for action standpoint, speaking of like personal faith formula stuff, and if you're not a Zivli member, personal faith formulas are essentially like a wellness vision statement that we help our members, right? And it really keeps their why top of mind.

It's like, why is it important for you to control your blood sugars or lose weight or get healthy? How does your life change? How do the lives of your loved ones change? We wanna keep that future self in mind every single day. We want your choices now to be driven by the needs of your future self, not the wants of your current self. So understanding your why helps. And then if you don't already have a morning mindset routine, I hope all of our Ziegler members have one and are following it, but I know.

I know the reality is some of you listening probably are not. So here's your gentle reminder. Do it. And then if you need to add some affirmations to kind of bolster yourself and strengthen yourself during the season, some really good ones would be, I prioritize my emotional and physical health every day. I create margin time to learn, play, rest, think, and sleep. I am committed to a healthy lifestyle. You could write down whatever your sweets boundaries are.

And then be sure that you're reading that first thing in the morning. One of my favorites that's been on mine for years is I practice non-resistance, non-attachment, non-reaction, and non-judgment. And that non-attachment and non-reaction are probably the two that play the biggest role in emotional eating this time of year because we're attached to our habits, we're attached to the opinions of others.


We're reacting when others make us upset and then we're going to food to make us feel better. I have a couple of podcast episodes with Dr. Lydia. She's one of our coaches at Ziply too about the four nones is what we call them. So we can link those up in the show notes. I'm not sure what numbers they are, but we'll link them up. Okay, so those would be the reflection for action items. Okay, let's move to reflection in action.

I've done a podcast episode on this method in the past. It's called the stop method, all right? So this is when you're at dinner and you're like, I have had enough, but I'm eating and I'm like at risk of overeating here and I wanna stop eating, but I don't wanna stop eating and I don't know what to do. So this is the stop method. So you're gonna create space between you and the food, which means get up from the table, go to the bathroom, go to the basement, go on a walk.

create space and give yourself time, at least two minutes, okay? To observe how you're feeling, what are your food cues going on, and then make a plan to stop eating. So the plan, so that's the STOP, space, time, observe, plan, okay? The plan could include chewing a piece of gum. I really suggest bringing your toothbrush or some mouthwash to the party so that you can brush your teeth when you're done eating. That's gonna change your cue.

Right, because otherwise the sugary sensation is the food tastes are hanging out on your tongue and just the taste can be a cue to keep eating. So if we change the cue to something minty, that's a normal trigger to your mind. We're done eating for the day, because it's almost bedtime. So trick your brain by putting something minty in your mouth. You could have a glass of big water or a cup of tea or a sparkling water.

That's gonna be my plan. So I'm gonna bring my toothbrush, I'm brushing my teeth, I'm gonna have either tea or hot water after the meal. And then if I'm really tempted, then I'll chew a piece of gum. I also love distraction techniques. So this can be part of your plan. This is what my dad does. He's like, I just get up from the table and I start rinsing the dishes off. And that works, right? Because if the food is out of reach, you're less likely to eat it. So remove yourself from the food. Go for a walk.


Maybe start a game with the kids, look at pictures. You can play with the kids or grandkids. And then again, you can have some coffee or tea or something like that. One thing I really like is to tell myself I can have it later. So if there's pumpkin pie, I'm having that. But if there's another dessert that looks really good, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna have that later. Not, I can't have that, or I'm so bummed I can't have that, or I'm sad. Like all of those are just kind of silly thoughts because you can have...

There's a song that's like, can have whatever you like. So you can keep that in your mind. And any millennial will know what song I'm talking about there. So you can have whatever you like, but you don't have to have it all right now. Okay, so tell yourself that you can have it later. And then remember the three magic words. If someone offers you something that you really don't want or it's not in your plan, just say, no, thank you. Okay, let's move on to

There's a lot of different things I'm scrolling through here. Reflection on action, okay? The best way to think about reflection on action is this is after the fact, like the night or the morning after the party. So you had your big Thanksgiving meal, your home, maybe you overate and you're like, ooh, I wanna do better for Christmas or I wanna do better for the next day, because you're having back to back parties, because I know that's how.

Our family is running this year. We're going to my mom's on Thanksgiving and then my mother-in-law's on like Friday, so the day after Thanksgiving. We're super lucky to live close to both of them. So I love that we get to do that so easily. Use this method, okay? This is one of the best things that I've come up with to help you reflect on why you did what you did and how you can do different, like how you can make different choices next time. So this is called the clear strategy. So another acronym.

You're welcome for people that like acronyms. So C-L-E-A-R, C is circumstance and context. L is line of thought. E is emotions. A is action. R is result. If you're a Zivli member, a lot of these notes are gonna be in the end emotional eating masterclass fun sheet. So you can go to that lesson.

That's another great thing you can do to reflect for action is listen or re-listen to that masterclass. I didn't even think about that, about that till right now. If you're not a member, you can be vigorously taking notes or just come back to the podcast and maybe when you're not driving or when you're not walking, write down the clear strategy. So I'm gonna say it one more time. C is circumstance and context. L is line of thought or line of thinking. E is emotions.

A is action and R is result. So let's give you a little bit of an example here. It's one o'clock and it's time to eat Thanksgiving dinner. And I'm just gonna like pretend like I didn't do anything that I just told you guys to do. I didn't eat anything until this meal. I have not been drinking enough water. I have been stressed out. I stayed up late because I...

messed up my dessert and I had to remake it or something like that. So I'm coming into this day hungry, tired, and stressed. That's the circumstance and context. And then this isn't necessarily true, but let's just throw it in there for fun. Let's say I'm around family members that really stress me out too. So I'm kind of like stress squared. It's stress on steroids today. So the line of thinking is...

I'm stressed, I'm hungry, I'm tired, I just want to relax, I want comfort, I want to unwind, all of those things that's going on in my head, those are the emotions that I'm experiencing. So the action is going to be, I'm probably going to just dig in and scarf my face because I have a lot of hidden hungers of being tired, stressed, dehydrated, undernourished for the day.

hungry. So that's going to lead to some overeating and emotional eating probably. And then the line of thinking could also go well screw it. I've already messed up today. I'm just going to have whatever I want. So a lot of screw it eating comes into play right now too because we have like perfectionists out there or people with the all or nothing mindset and they're like if I don't follow my plan perfectly, then the day is a waste. And I would highly encourage you to get over that mindset and have like a


An all or moderate mindset, not an all or nothing mindset. And one of our Zivli members came up with that in a coaching call once and I loved it. She's like, I think I'm going to adopt an all or moderate mindset. And I said, I really like that. So then R is the result, right? The result is if you just follow that example, you're going to overeat, you're going to emotionally eat. So the reason I like that clear strategies, you can backtrack and you can say like, what?

what are the circumstances and context? What was I thinking? What were my emotions? And how can I prepare and think differently to create different emotions? And that's just by doing all the things that I just recommended that you do regarding reflecting for action. So I really hope that this episode was helpful. I hope it had a lot of nice tips and tricks and strategies that you can implement this Thanksgiving and this Christmas season.

I hope that you really maybe re-listen to this. If you're a Zivli member, go listen to that end emotional eating masterclass because it's going to be even a better deep dive into this topic, a more comprehensive deep dive. You can use the fun sheet as a resource to go through it. But I really just hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family, a wonderful holiday season and enjoy yourself.

You know, this does not have to be a season of deprivation or restriction, but I think that if we can just add a little bit of planning, have some moderation and have strategies in place to support our health, it's going to be better for our physical, our mental and our emotional health. So I will talk with you at the same time, same place next week and happy Thanksgiving.


Thanks for listening to the Reshape Your Health podcast today. To learn more about Zibli, our online course and coaching program to reverse insulin resistance for long-term weight loss and disease prevention, check out our website at www.zibli.com. That's z-i-v-l-i.com. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a rating and review on your listening platform and share it with a friend.

I'll talk with you at the same time, same place next week. Bye for now.