Heal Emotional Eating & Reclaim Your Health

Tricia Nelson

Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Beverly Yates, ND

It’s wonderful to have you as a part of our summit. Thank you for sharing your expertise and your time with our audience. One of the things I’m always curious about is knowing my speaker’s background before sharing the things that will be relevant, so the audience knows you are completely qualified to talk to them about this topic.

Tricia Nelson

I’d say my best qualification is that I was an emotional eater to the extent of eating out of the garbage. It’s not exactly a clinical qualification. I talk about it in my TEDx talk. I have a TEDx talk that so far has gotten over 1.5 million views, and I start my TEDx talk by talking about bingeing, throwing out the rest of my binge foods, and then going back later to get them out of the trash when I had a little bit more room in my stomach. 

When people ask me what my qualifications are, having had this problem of being food addicted but certainly an emotional eater, I think there’s a crossover there. But having that problem is what drove me to do the work that I do. But having the problem and having a solution for it. Having found a solution, I lost 50 pounds and have kept it off for several decades now. That has qualified me more than anything. 

Of course. I’ve been blessed to work with over 1,000 people to help them heal their relationship with food. I have a bestselling book, Kill Your Hunger: Seven Simple Steps and Emotional Eating Now. I have programs that help people get off the diet track and start understanding why they feel driven to go to the refrigerator time and time again, and how they can find a peaceful relationship with food where it doesn’t, drive binge eating, where they don’t have to do crazy machinations, around dieting and starving, and all this. They can coexist with food without having it own them. 

I’m very grateful. I’ve been doing this work for over 30 years now. Heal Your Hunger has been my latest version of the work that I do. I do it online with people, and I have Heal Your Hunger, which has been around for about seven years now.

Beverly Yates, ND

This is so great to know. Thank you. You and I are both experienced in the work that we do; we’ve got 30+ years in the saddle, so to speak, and in the work of helping others to uncover what their root cause issues are and address them. We also sometimes find that central to that is understanding our inner world, our emotional world, and our spiritual world, and what it is that we’re trying to address when we do the things that we know aren’t helpful to ourselves, but we’re just stuck. 

You’ve just shared with us some parts of your journey with emotional eating, and how did this lead you to start Heal Your Hunger? It’s one thing to go on a journey and help yourself. What led you to decide you wanted to help other people?

Tricia Nelson

Yes. Well, the person who helped me many moons ago, I started helping him help others after I discovered, essentially, freedom. so we worked together for many years. Then I started healing hunger about seven years ago. It’s how we used to work with all addictions, frankly, so it’s always about the underlying causes. Whatever addiction it was, it was the deeper root cause. But to me, I feel there’s the least amount of understanding around people who eat in excess and are addicted to ultra-processed foods, carbs, and sugars. 

I just feel my experience was phenomenal. I taught others for so long that what I now do is codify that process, the way I healed, and I’ve taught it to other people online in a format with modules, which makes it most accessible to people wherever they are in the world. It’s just a pleasure to do that. I have a podcast as well. I just find that taking the guesswork out of it, you hear things like intuitive eating, eating in moderation, and these kinds of things, self-love. We hear a lot of terms in the healing arena of healing oneself.

But I needed step-by-step practical steps to heal. I couldn’t just love. What is love—self-love mean anyway? For me, it means boots on the ground, loving, having loving, caring, and self-caring actions throughout your day. Just getting it into a step-by-step process to take the guesswork or the nebulousness out of it has made all the difference in the world. That’s why I love sharing it with other people, because, I don’t have to diet and I can still lose weight. I don’t have to diet and I can be peaceful with sugar without bingeing. Yes, the answer is yes. It’s just a pleasure to be able to share that with other people.

Beverly Yates, ND

Excellent. I know many people are on that journey on their quest to find peace with food and be able to nourish themselves, eat, and enjoy life without going to excess. In today’s world, we have so many more pushes, pulls, and triggers around this, that’s for sure. Please share with us how someone knows if they are an emotional eater or a food addict.

Tricia Nelson

Yes, I feel it’s a spectrum. I feel we are all hardwired to have an emotional connection with food; otherwise, we just blow off eating. We’d be, I don’t feel like it, but, we, I feel, a good spirit gives us an emotional experience with food, starting with breast-feeding, where it can be a nurturing, loving, connecting, bonding experience. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what keeps us going, keeps us nourished, and keeps us seeking good nutrition. I feel we all can have an emotional experience of food, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. It’s just one. It takes us to places that aren’t healthy. 

I consider it to be a spectrum on the low end would be just, you go overboard once in a while, not a big deal to the high end of the spectrum, which is more in the food addiction arena where you have symptoms that are, classic addictive symptoms where you eat more than you can handle, there are negative consequences. There’s a negative health consequence. There’s a warning from your doctor. You’re diabetic. You can’t eat sugar, so that’s when we do it to our peril; that’s when you’re more in the addictive range when it affects your finances because you’re buying binge foods or you’re buying different-sized clothes. I had five different sizes of pants in my closet because I was up and down. The scale is a yo-yo dieter. That’s when it’s more of an addiction that’s costing you. 

I qualify that as control and consequences. What’s your level of control? Can you pull back and maybe go on a cruise? It’s all you can eat, and you take advantage of that. It’s spent the money, and might as well take advantage of it. Your pants are tight when you get home. You’ve gained 5 pounds, but you jog extra, you cut out sweets, and boom, those 5 pounds are off and you’re in. It’s been a good trip. That’s somebody on the low end of the spectrum versus the high end of the spectrum, where once you blow your diet, it could be months before you feel you’re back on track. That’s somebody who can’t course correct. They don’t have a lot of control. Once they start eating, they binge. Also, the level of consequences, such as 5 pounds and tight jeans, is a lot different than diabetes, pre-diabetes, and gut issues. Joint pain, or, God forbid, having limbs removed because of it. That’s a high number of consequences. The longer we have this behavior of emotional eating or food addiction, the higher the cost.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. All that damage over time accumulates. This leads me to ask you this next question with the thought that we hear all kinds of data and numbers around the idea that diets fail people. We hear that 98% of all diets end up with the person who’s on them failing. They’re not able to continue it. It’s not sustainable. Maybe it wasn’t the right fit, whatever it might be. Why do you think it is that 98% of all diets fail?

Tricia Nelson

Yes, it’s an abysmal statistic. It’s pretty accurate. 98, 97, 95. We don’t know for sure. But the point is, it’s an abysmal statistic that nobody would put their money behind if they were abetting a betting person. They’d be; those are crappy odds. Yet we are wise; keep spending money on diets. It comes from desperation. I’ve been in that place where you’re, and my house is on fire. I need to put the fire out. I know diets don’t work, but I’m going to do it this time. But we just did this this time because we’re just so desperate. 

But the thing is, I feel what’s missing in the weight loss conversation in the health conversation is this emotional eating piece. People want to improve their health, but they don’t realize how emotionally connected they are to the unhealthy foods that they eat. They don’t realize that these foods are keeping them afloat. I have people tell me, What would I do for fun? If you take away my chocolate, what’s the point of life?

That’s an indication that something’s wrong. It’s our form of entertainment. It’s our form of companionship; it’s what we do on a Friday night for good times. It comforts us. It’s because we are so emotionally connected to food, especially unhealthy, comfort foods. We call it comfort food. It emotionally comforts us, and it does soften the edges of life. Life is not easy. Especially now more than ever. There’s so much pain in the world, and our yummy, sweet foods comfort us. We have to work on that, finding new forms of comfort, obviously, and realizing that it might be comfortable at the beginning. But when you can’t fit in your pants and you have health issues, how comfortable is that? 

We have to do a reframe on that because, to me, diets are failing because we’re not realizing that you can’t just stop eating your favorite foods. One of the reasons for this is that, if food is our main coping tool, if every time life gets hard, we open the refrigerator, it’s, What can I eat? Every time we get off a painful phone call, a tough phone call, or are about to make a hard phone call, we’re wondering, What can I do? I’m hungry. All of a sudden, that’s an emotional hunger. We have to address that and find new ways to bolster ourselves, strengthen ourselves, or just get comfort so that it’s not food as our primary coping tool.

Because if you take those foods away, if you go on a diet, you don’t get to eat your favorite yummy, carby processed foods. The doctor takes all those foods away from you. What are you going to do to cope? We all have new diet syndrome. When I’m doing a new diet, I’m feeling good, looking good, and getting looser. But then, after a couple of weeks—for me at least—it took about two weeks. It would get hard, and I’d be. I just got to have popcorn or whatever. To me, it gets hard because we don’t have the push of the new diet syndrome, and we also have all the feelings that are coming up that we were stuffing with food, and we just don’t count for that when we’re dieting. We don’t have new coping diets or new coping tools. They just take away our coping tool, and it’s, Go get them, tiger. Not enough.

Beverly Yates, ND

I love the way you express this. That’s true. Diets are often about restriction, and they do not give people guidance about what to add back in and what to be aware of. Especially this emotional eating piece, because I think it’s a huge issue for a lot of people. I think it’s one of the reasons why some of the prescription medicines have such an element of success because it’s helping people deal with some of the physiology behind emotional eating, too. Whether it’s food, noise, or whatever it might be, as long as people can find a way to do it that’s sustainable without tearing up the rest of their bodies, This is a good thing. 

Please tell me your thoughts about this. Is there more to emotional eating than simply eating too much or eating for emotional reasons? I’m imagining there might be some more complexity to this.

Tricia Nelson

There is. In my book, I talk about something called The Anatomy of the Emotional Eater, and it’s a play on words, of course. What this says is that 24 personality traits make up an emotional eater’s personality. We think of emotional eating as getting a pint of Ben and Jerry’s when somebody breaks up with us, we have a loss at work, we have a job change, or whatever. 

My experience is that it’s not about that as much as it is about, on a deeper level, the way we deal with life. We use food to cope with life and life’s challenges. If I got paid a dollar for every time I heard I was doing great until the pandemic hit. I was doing great until I lost my job. I was doing great until my husband died. Emotional Eater is just living from one catastrophe to another. That’s usually the time when they went off the rails, which just again proves the point. It’s emotional eating as emotionally driven food. 

But the thing is, beyond that, my experience is that we have a personality profile. We have a personality composite that, when we start to address it, changes our relationship with food. I’ll tell you what that means by giving you the top personality trait of an emotional eater. Drum roll, please don’t do that now. Whatever it is, it’s people-pleasing. The top trait I’ve discovered in my research is that emotional eating has nothing to do with food but has to do with our need for validation through our work, through trying to please people. 

Other traits are caretaking or big tech caretakers. We also have racing minds where our minds just don’t stop thinking. We often use food, bread, and carbs to give us serotonin comfort, and so there are traits that make up the emotion of personality. To me, instead of just trying to diet or making it a food solution or a diet solution, if we start dealing with the life problem that we have, which is, people pleasing is a problem for us because when we are seeking validation through trying to do the extra project at work or, be staying up extra late to bake the brownies for the soccer team or we’re always saying yes to these extra bits of work. 

Well, what happens is that we get maxed out, our schedule gets super busy, and we’re running ourselves ragged. Our adrenals are challenged. Not only that, we’re resentful because nobody’s ever as pleased as we imagined they were going to be when we went the extra mile. It’s the perfect storm, and I deserve a binge. Screw them, I stayed up. I put an all-nighter for that project, and they’re, Thanks. You’re like, Thanks. That’s it? It’s a common narrative for us that it’s our life problem that’s causing our eating problems. 

To me, that’s where there’s a real solution. Just trying to have a death grip on your food. It’s not going to work because when you have your life stuff happening where you’re overworking, you’re taking care of other people doing their work for them. We frequently work as caregivers, nurses, and therapists. It comes from our childhood. It comes from trauma. You grow up with alcoholism; you grow up with some dysfunction in your family. Oftentimes,  you grow up too fast. You’re the parent as your child. As a child, you’re taking on a parental role. Then you take that into your adult life. You marry an alcoholic, and you take care of it. You do way too much for your kids. You don’t let them grow up and bruise their knees or whatever. 

These are habits for us that cause overworking, overdoing, overscheduling, and feeling overwhelmed. What do we do when we’re feeling all those things as we use food to get through it? That’s just an example, Beverly, of how we do have to dig into it. We do have to see that we have a living problem that’s causing our eating problem because that’s where we can make changes. We can start saying no. People ask us to do things that are familiar to us. Just say yes or no; learn the word no. Two letters, NO, and the thing is, putting boundaries on our time, stopping, overdoing, and saying, I have a limit. I could do everything for everybody, so long as I didn’t mind overeating. 

But once I wanted to stop overeating, I had to go back to it and see that I couldn’t afford to do everything for everybody. I need time for myself. I need to meditate in the morning. I need to have some relaxation at night that doesn’t involve being out until 9 p.m. before I get home and just go into the kitchen to become a zombie. With the ice cream, these are real changes we can make, but they will impact our eating, and that’s why I think that’s the gap that we need to start addressing.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. One of the things I have shared with my patients over the years is the whole idea around the use of the word No, that the word No is a complete sentence. Yes. It’s just important that people have boundaries. Many people who have type 2 diabetes tend to be the rock of their community. They tend to be that go-to problem solver, a person who gets it done, and they carry others on their shoulders. But the problem is that over time, they just wear out and break down. Because they’re often in those first responder superhero caregiver roles, like what you’re saying, Tricia, it is too much. I hear you. Okay. How does someone differentiate between emotional hunger and physical hunger?

Tricia Nelson

Yes, it’s a great question. I find it useful to have a regular. Well, I’ll call it a cut to the chase. I call it three-meal magic, which is eating three meals with nothing in between. This is how I recommend people eat. Not just from a diet standpoint or from a dietary standpoint, but also because typically emotional eaters are used to snacking throughout the day, just a constant graze, grabbing some nuts, grabbing some Hershey’s kisses from the bowl, whatever. and when we do that, we’re not aware of what emotions we have. I have people say, I’m not the best eater, but they probably are because, in my experience, people chronically struggle with weight and probably have some emotional eating in the mix. But the thing is, it works to keep us numb to our emotions. 

If you have three meals and nothing in between, you start to get acquainted with some hunger, which is scary at first. It’s hunger and pain. What do I do now? Danger, danger. But it’s good to acclimate to some hunger and realize you’re not going to die. If you are on a regular schedule of meals, you can talk. Talk that panic down by saying, No, we’re going to have lunch a couple more hours. We’re going to have lunch. It’s because we train ourselves to realize we’re going to take care of ourselves. We’re not going to eat erratically. We’re not going to do big starvation and then binge. That’s not healthy. I often say to people, eat or think about it: if you had a daughter, a sweet daughter, would you be going to go 6 hours without eating so that you can drop a few pounds? Never, never. so eat the way you feel most caring as if you had a daughter and were welcoming to her. 

I’m not saying intermittent fasting is a bad thing. All we have to do is take in all of the information. It can be hard for emotional eaters who have used food to save their lives. Once upon a time, as children, having traumatic situations, we needed to be loving and caring and not give ourselves that panic or the extremes. I’ll intervene first by doing 12 hours between my dinner and my breakfast. But knowing I’m going to get breakfast takes me out of that very high hunger mode and that very deep, emotional panic that somehow I’m going to starve to death. It’s just that I still have that trigger. It’s just that if I get too hungry, I’m just hangry, and I’m not the best person to be around. 

But, just have that panic. I just beat myself to three meals. I find it very nurturing and loving. It also enables me to identify when I am having feelings. I have feelings. I just lost somebody close to me. I have all kinds of grief, but I know what grief is because I’m not eating through it now. I can identify this as grief. I’ll sit down and cry when the pressure and the grief get so big. I sit down and I cry, and it’s so healing, and then I’m lighter. But if I were grazing all day long, I wouldn’t even know I had grief. Becoming friends with our emotions, realizing they’re not bad, and healthily working through them. This is how we heal.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. I think it’s so essential that we have the idea and understand that our feelings are exactly that. There are feelings, and we don’t have to act on them by eating. We can just understand that there are feelings and be okay with whatever we’re feeling, whether we’re joyful, stressed, or feeling grief, whatever it is. It’s so interesting, that interplay. 

Okay, Tricia, now let’s go on to our next thing. Why is it in particular that people will crave sweets and carbohydrate-rich snacks and foods and that thing when the going gets rough?

Tricia Nelson

Yes, I certainly did a lot of carbs, chips, popcorn, bread, and muffins. I was a big carb eater and, of course, a sugar eater as well. I just love sugar. Carbs do as, of course, you, and I’m sure you’ve taught all your clients how carbs metabolize sugar in our bodies. It’s like we’re talking about the same thing. Carbs and sugar are sugar. I loved all that stuff, though, because what it did was put a blanket on my emotions. When I was having a hard day, I did not crave asparagus. 

Beverly Yates, ND

Would that be great?

Tricia Nelson

Wonderful. Bring it. The thing is, I didn’t crave light, watery, plant foods because they didn’t, but I still kept feeling, and so I wanted heavy, carbohydrate foods because they put a blanket on my emotions. It deadened my emotions. something I think is useful for people because people are. I’m not an emotional eater. I don’t know what that girl is talking about. The thing is, the PEP formula is what I love to teach people. PEP is an acronym for PEP. We all know what heavy carbohydrate foods do to us. We gain weight; we get diabetes. It caused a lot of problems. But what we don’t think about is what it does for us. Especially when we’re addicted. 

PEP is an acronym. The first P stands for Painkiller. We use food as a painkiller. I said it deadens our emotions. It’s anesthetizing us when we’re in pain. What pain will any pain take your pick? It could be physical pain, but usually it’s emotional, and life has plenty of emotional pain to deliver. Again, you had a death. A death in my family. I’m sad. I feel intense pain; I’d much rather not feel it. But it’s life. Life requires me to accept that this person has passed away. That’s hard, and it’s painful. If I weren’t healing from eating, I’d be eating through it. But I’m not. I’m going through painful feelings. But painkillers—a big reason why we eat them—just deadens us. We feel no pain temporarily, of course, 

But the second letter E in PEP is Escape. We use food for an escape, but from what? From our very busy minds. Racing minds are very typical for emotional eaters. We overthink everything. What did he mean by that? Why does she look at me that way? Why did I get the promotion? Why are they saying they’re talking about the bubbler? They must hate me,? We’re just that our minds refuse to shut up. But when we eat, it calms our minds. It gives us that those carbs give us the serotonin hit. We feel more comforted and calm. But there are better ways to calm your mind: meditation, prayer, writing, keeping thoughts in a journal, and talking to a buddy. But the food is that quick fix that gives us an escape. I used to get all my goodies, sit in front of the TV, and then I was, later in life, going to go into my little escape here. It gives us an escape temporarily. 

The last P in PEP is Punishment, which is somewhat counterintuitive because we think of food as a reward.  I’m going to reward myself with this little binge in front of my favorite TV show. But if you overeat, if you go, you should overshoot the mark. You don’t just eat some ice cream and some cereal. You eat the whole thing of ice cream and the whole box of cereal. Then you feel terrible. I have done this too many times to count. I feel terrible. Then the problem is that I don’t feel like I rewarded myself. It feels like a punishment the next day. I’m bloated; I can’t fit in my jeans. I don’t want to get together with my girlfriends because my face is puffy. It just begs the question, Why would I do that? Why would I hurt myself? Why would I eat foods that give me gut issues, or would you help me tip the scales from pre-diabetes to diabetes? Why would I do that? 

But the thing is, with emotional eaters, there is a mechanism where we overfeed as well. We feel guilty about everything. It’s very common. We beat ourselves up mercilessly. Food is a way that we abuse ourselves, and we don’t think of it that way because it’s, No, I’m rewarding myself. It’s so nice and fun. But there is a built-in punishment when we’re hurting our bodies that way. We just have to take a look at that. 

PEP is a way people can start digging into the emotional eating conversation. If you think I’m full of it, take the PEP test. Next time you’re going to the refrigerator and you’re just staring. I would do this five times, and I stare at the refrigerator. There’s got to be something that will fix me. But next time you’re doing that, just stop. Close the refrigerator and say, Is there something I’m uncomfortable with? What happened during my day? Is there something that happened that I’m not addressing that’s just making me feel uncomfortable? Was there a conversation that didn’t go well, or am I just feeling like I have to get away from it all? There are too many obligations or too many responsibilities, or am I feeling bad about something, literally that I can maybe address or write about or pick up the phone, call the phone, and get perspective on? 

There are emotions underneath our cravings. We’re just not trained to think about that. It’s a new language to think about emotional eating—to think, is there something else going on? It doesn’t have to mean that you were abused as a kid or hit or anything. Some people had charming lives, but they still used food for comfort, to soften the edges of life, and to get through tough times. We just have to start being a little bit more aware of that so that we can put an end to a pernicious habit that has been hurting us and causing our health challenges.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. These are things I’m quite sure the people listening will resonate with as part of their own lived experience. If we just take that moment to reflect, then go, I can recognize that in myself,? Or maybe you see that in a family member or friend, and you go, that’s what’s going on. It’s great to have these insights. Why is it in particular that people tend to have food binges at night or something else called nighttime eating?

Tricia Nelson

Yes, that was a big thing for me. I’d say about 75% of emotional eaters are nighttime eaters. That’s when it’s hardest. After 4 p.m. or so. My experience is very practical in that, at night, that’s when we’re not as distracted from our emotions. You don’t have all these people pulling at you. You don’t have tasks to do. We love to be busy; we are emotional eaters. The thing is, at the end of the day, things quiet down. People in the family go to bed, and then it’s quiet, and that’s sometimes where we get uncomfortable. 

But if we’re eating all night, do we all feel anything? Feel no pain. That can be part of it. Also, it’s a hard spot for a lot of those emotional eaters. It’s hard to go to bed. That’s a self-care thing that we deny ourselves, sounds like we are just literally going to bed, so we stay up too late. We push through our tiredness to the next, and we ramp up again. We’re on Facebook, we’re watching, and we’re binge-watching Netflix, but we also do it with food by our side. The thing is, it’s hard for us to go to bed, and again, partly it’s because when you get quiet and still, then you start thinking, then you start feeling guilty, and then you start beating yourself up. It’s just hard for us to be with ourselves, with our thoughts, and with our emotions. I just find that that’s what happens at night, and our willpower is the lowest at night as well. First thing in the morning, we’ve got some women bigger, but by the end of the day, we’re tired, which is a lot of it too. We’re just tired, and we’re eating for energy, or we’re eating for reward. I did so much today that I’m going to reward myself. But I find it’s also just hard because we’re with ourselves more and we’re not distracted.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. I think the time of day and what affects us when and where, depending on how we live, can give us some good clues about where we might have an opportunity to explore and get a handle on things. If you’re looking to reverse Type 2 diabetes, being willing to be open and to consider that other things might be a factor that could be helpful is just useful. It’s powerful. It’s very personal. hat’s one of the biggest causes of self-sabotage?

Tricia Nelson

That’s a big one for us. Doing good, and then blowing it. That’s a big problem. I think part of it is just not realizing that sheer willpower isn’t going to do the trick. In my experience, we have to have more than that, not realizing that we do have to deal with our emotions. We do have to have a self-care routine that helps us. I recommend something to my clients called The 6 Self-Care Success Secrets, which are: writing or journaling about your feelings; meditation; prayer; reading spiritual literature; talking; and getting feelings out by talking and walking. These are the 6 Self-Care Secrets, and these are the magic formulas I find to help us put legs underneath our resolve. 

We all want to get healthier. We all want to stop eating sugar so we can lose weight, lose the bloat, get off, and move away from type 2 diabetes. But the thing is, it’s—that’s—we can’t just do it on sheer willpower. My experience is that if we put money in our spiritual bank account first thing in the morning, with some self-care routine, it doesn’t have to be the things I mentioned. It could be a breathing exercise, it can be a walk in the woods. It’s just something like yoga or stretching; we need that quiet time, that time to just be with ourselves. Be with God. If you’re spiritual, read spiritual literature, and put money in your bank account. That way, later in the day, you can take withdrawals. But if you don’t start your day making deposits, you have nothing to withdraw from. You’re in the red. 

When the stress builds up, you’re in the red, and it’s food that you’re going to turn to: coffee and chocolate. It’s the quick-fix foods that give you energy. You can get that same energy if you’ve done that work first thing in the morning. Too often, we bolt out of bed. We’re on our phones or checking texts and emails before we’ve just gotten grounded. Writing and journaling can be such a good way to get grounded while also connecting with your spirit. I’m a strong believer in just having a higher power that can support you. It’ll be there for you, and that can come in many different ways for people. I’m not religious per se, but I believe that it’s not going to be by our might that we’re going to turn the ship around because we’re talking about big changes that might be lifelong habits, and it doesn’t take longer than 21 days to change a habit when it’s been emotional eating, something you’ve been doing for 30, 40 years.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. This all makes sense. We’re all humans, and we have our strengths and weaknesses. Everyone needs and deserves support. That’s one of the things that usually needs some improvement when someone has type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, type 1 diabetes, type 1.5, or any blood sugar issue. It can sometimes highlight that there may be some overwhelm or that the person just needs more support and more information, more resources, maybe better nutrition, access to safe places, exercise, information or meal timing, understanding how to recognize their stress, and ways to improve their sleep. Those five pillars are so sensitive for blood sugar control. I can see how all of this is intertwined with the idea of emotional eating and then people’s lived experiences with this. Okay. two more questions as we go to wrap up our wonderful interview here. I thank you for this episode and your time, Tricia, and for sharing your expertise. What are three things that you recommend that a person do to end emotional eating now?

Tricia Nelson

Yes, well, I would start by taking an honest look at your schedule. Overeaters are overdoers. We talked about this earlier; we’ve got to put boundaries on our time because we can’t be super people. We’ve got to put boundaries in our time. We need to delegate to others. Take what you’re looking at in your schedule. Are you taking on other people’s problems? How are you doing? Are there things on your calendar that could be offloaded through delegation or through saying, I’ve done. I’ve been on this board for five years. It’s time for me to circle off. Can you start limiting all your civic duties? You don’t have to be a superwoman. It’s important to start taking a close look because we will run ourselves ragged and our bodies can’t take it. Our bodies can’t take it, and we deserve better. I think that by getting real about our schedule and giving ourselves time to rest time for self-care, and time for preparing healthy meals, we’ve all got time for sleep. That’s all that’s important. That’s one thing we can do. 

But also, as you just mentioned, getting proper support. My experience is that, again, if you’re changing a lifelong addictive habit, chances are you’re not going to be able to do it alone. Having community with other emotional eaters is vital because, from my experiences for so long, I was a pariah in the story I told at the beginning about eating out of the garbage. I thought I was the only one who had done that. then I put it on YouTube in my TEDx talk, and there’s all these thousands of comments. I’ve done that, too. I thought I was the only one. It just helped so much to have a community. 

We can laugh about these crazy behaviors with food when we realize they’re not so strange or different. We’re not terrible people; we’re people who have to get rid of a habit that started early on and just stuck to us. What are we going to do now to get rid of it? The community is so comforting and helpful. Then also, I would say, getting back to the Three-Meal Magic, making sure you’re feeding yourself, making sure you’re getting those meals, and because going too long and having erratic ways of eating just perpetuates the whole problem. We just don’t deserve that. 

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. I agree with you about this so much. I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of people with type 2 diabetes have erratic eating habits. Often, because they are so busy and overscheduled and have such demanding lives, they skip lunch, which usually leads to catastrophes at dinnertime. You said it beautifully. Thank you, Tricia, for making that point.

Tricia Nelson

Absolutely.

Beverly Yates, ND

If people would like to connect with you, where can they get more information? What’s your website? All that good stuff.

Tricia Nelson

Yes, my website is healyourhunger.com. My podcast is the Heal Your Hunger Show. My book is called Heal Your Hunger. Then I do have a pretty fun Instagram channel, which @tricianelson_  in the end. I have vignettes and videos around emotional eating and different scenarios that lead to emotional eating. They’re all me; they’re my partner. Every night when we’re cooking dinner, I’m taking a video. We have pictures, and videos of me cooking and eating, and all that stuff @tricianelson_.

Beverly Yates, ND

Great. Thank you so much for being a guest here. Friends, you know what to do. In these episodes, the people have been so kind to share with us their expertise and their time. Please share this with others who could benefit from this information, as we all link arms together. I’m still on the path to having the goal realized by 3 million or more people who are directly helped by this work. Reversing Type 2 diabetes, and pre-diabetes, and getting a better handle on blood sugar issues because of this rising tide of illness, we’ve got to turn it around, and it’s going to take each of us to do our part. Thank you.

Tricia Nelson

Amen.