There’s a lot of talk about stress and de-stressing, and for many, de-stressing means indulging in food and drink. If this sounds like you, this is an episode you won’t want to miss! I'll dive into how to work through the stress that we accumulate in our bodies–without resorting to food or alcohol to help us cope.

Listen in as I share why so many of us resort to using a glass of wine, a bottle of beer, or a bowl of ice cream to de-stress, as well as why it’s important to feel our feelings and increase our capacity to feel the negative emotions that make us want to turn to food or drink to de-stress. I also share the questions you can ask yourself to help process your emotions and the two areas we all need to work on if we want to learn to de-stress without food.


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In Today’s Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • Why you need to feel your emotions to de-stress without food
  • How to reconnect to your body–and why it’s important
  • How to increase your capacity to feel negative emotions
  • The areas to work on to overcome resorting to food or drink to de-stress

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Read the Transcript Below:

Katrina Ubell: You are listening to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians  podcast with Katrina Ubell, MD, episode number 287. 

Welcome to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians Podcast. I'm your host,  master certified, life and weight loss coach, Katrina Ubell, MD. This is the  podcast where busy doctors like you come to learn how to lose weight for the last time by harnessing the power of your mind. If you're looking to  overcome your stress eating and exhaustion and move into freedom  around food, you're in the right place. 

Well, hello, my friend. How are you today, so glad that you're joining me. I  am super excited for this episode. Are you ready? I have a free resource  that I can't wait to share with you. It's been in the works for several months  now. Completely free, I think it's going to be a game changer for so many  people. I'll explain it all here in just a few moments. 

So, several months ago, I got this question from somebody and it was a  written question. It said, “How will feeling my feelings make me lose  weight?” And I thought, oh my gosh, such a good question. Obviously, I  haven't completely explained this connection. 

And I'm just so grateful to whoever that person was. I don't believe that  they had signed their names. So, otherwise, I would name them and thank  them specifically, but whoever it was — and honestly, many of you have  probably been thinking this. So, I'm so glad to be answering this question  for you today. 

I do want to let you know, though, that I created this free toolkit that I'm  going to tell you all about, that really helps you to get that connection from  how feeling your feelings will help you to lose weight. So, you're going to  definitely want to download this for sure. So, I'm going to tell you about it in  just a moment. 

So, such a good question though: how will feeling my feelings make me  lose weight? It's like I understand the concept, processing emotions, okay,  and then there's weight loss. And how do the two intersect? 

Now, when you think about this from your traditional diet, typical weight  loss industry way of thinking, you're not going to see that connection at all.  And the main reason you're not going to even remotely understand the  connection is because of what the weight loss industry focuses on.

So, they focus on your actions, they focus on what you do and don't do,  what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat, how you should eat, when you  should eat, grocery lists, how you should be working out, all of those things. 

That is what they're focusing on, lots and lots of actions. And if you are able  to take all of the actions that they recommend consistently, you probably  will lose weight. Like not everybody will, but most of those plans, if you do  them, they will work. 

So, the problem though, is that we aren't able to or aren't willing to do those  actions, to take those actions again and again, and again, for the rest of our  lives. 

I was literally just coaching my Weight Loss for Doctors Only group, and I  was sharing with them that, I'm a Lifetime Weight Watchers member. I was  a few years into Weight Watchers with many more years still to come of me  going back. But I knew full well, very clearly, very consciously, that I had no  intention of counting points for the rest of my life. 

And that's what they said. If you want to maintain, you got to keep working  the plan, keep following the plan. And I was like “Yeah, no, I'm not going to  do that.” I always thought there's going to be some way I'll figure it out or  there'll be some sort of exception where I'll be able to stop the point  counting. 

Like these other people (poor them) they have to count the points. I just  won't count the points and I'll just have it all figured out. Which of course, I  never ever did. And it never worked at all. 

So, it's not so much the actions that they're offering to us that are the  problem, it's the fact that we aren't able to or willing to do them ongoing.  And there's nothing wrong if you aren't willing to do it. If you don't want to  do it … I don't want to live a life where I'm — back in the day, I had like a  whole cardboard slider to figure out how many points something was, I was  like pulling out in the grocery store. 

And then of course, now, they have an app. Like I just didn't want to be tied  to that and I still don't. That's not the definition of peace and freedom  around food for me personally. For other people, if it works for them,  amazing, I'm all in. But for me, and for most people who are into what I  teach, that's not what they want to do either.

So, that is what they're focusing on. And what they don't recognize is the  rest of the thinking cycle. And the thinking cycle was created by Aaron  Beck, who's a psychiatrist, he's the originator Founder of Cognitive  Behavioral Therapy. But this has been described for thousands of years. 

The concept that our thoughts — we have thoughts about what's  happening in the world; our thoughts create our feelings or our emotions,  and our emotions drive our actions. And then whatever we do or don't do  creates the results that we get. 

So, when we're just focusing on these actions and what we should be  doing and what we shouldn't be doing so we can get some results, we don't  understand what's even driving us to be taking those actions in the first  place. 

So, often, we're like “I don't know, in the beginning, I was so motivated,  now I'm not motivated anymore, I wonder what happened.” Because no  one has taught us that our emotions are created by our thoughts. So, what  happened was your thoughts changed. 

You had thoughts that made you feel motivated, and then that was really  driving you to take the actions that you should be taking. And then you had  different thoughts further down the road. Nothing wrong with that, but those  thoughts didn't create motivation anymore. And then maybe it was a little  bit more challenging to keep taking those actions that give you those  results. 

So, we have to understand the connection between losing weight and our  emotions. And of course, that it's our thoughts, our thinking, the way that  we think, how we interpret the world, what our beliefs are, that are creating  our feelings. And then our feelings determine whether we lose weight or  not, because they're what is driving our actions. 

Now, let's actually get into the details of this. So, say you have a thought  about something that happened at work and your feeling is really like  infuriated. I was going to go with frustrated, but my experience was that I  actually felt it more intensely than frustration most of the time. It was more  like rage, infuriation, I would just get really, really angry. And I didn't know  how to feel angry, I didn't want to feel angry, I didn't know what to do with  that anger. On a certain level, I thought that being angry was bad. And so, I  wanted to stop feeling anger.

 

So, I'd go into the lunch room and see if any drug rep brought us anything.  Or if there were any leftovers from lunch the day before, or if anybody had  brought in some treat or something, go try to find something to eat to  distract me from that feeling. 

I don't want to feel how I'm feeling, so I know food can help me to feel  differently. It can essentially make me feel better. It can kind of numb out  whatever it is that I'm feeling that I don't want to be feeling. 

And we do this all of the time. Like whatever our emotional experience is,  which is created by the way that we think, if we don't like it, many of us  have created this habit (many of us from early on in life even, possibly)  where we know how to make ourselves feel better, we know how to deal  with this emotion that we don't like having, we eat or possibly drink alcohol  depending on the situation and the person. 

So, now, we're eating extra food. Because we're not physically hungry, our  body doesn't need food, we're eating for emotional reasons. There's an  emotion we don't want to feel, so we eat food so it will distract us from that  emotion. So, it'll keep us from having to feel that. 

A lot of people think of it as, first of all, you're changing your thoughts  because you're thinking about what you're eating. But also, if you think  about a wine glass, a crystal wine glass, how when it just has a little bit of  wine or water in the bottom of it and you wet your finger and you rub your  finger around the outside, how it vibrates, it makes that pitch. And as you  add more liquid into it, it changes the pitch. And then that vibration is  different. And then eventually, when the liquid level is at the very top of the  glass, it no longer vibrates and it's because it's totally full. 

So, if you think of an emotion as sort of a vibration in your body … I’d have  to say that term didn't usually resonate with me for a really long time. But in  this example of the crystal wine glass, you can kind of understand it. When you're empty, physically when your body is kind of empty or more hollow,  meaning it's not filled with food, you can feel like those emotions are just  more intense, more at the forefront, more present. 

And as you fill your body with food, it numbs and dulls that feeling similar to  the wine glass. So, whether you want to think about it in that way — I like  thinking about emotions as chemical cascades. We have a thought, it  triggers a chemical cascade that creates an experience in our bodies. What it feels like to be in our bodies, but this vibration dulling can make a lot of  sense too. 

So, we're eating to try to make that vibration dull, to try to make that feeling  not be there anymore. And honestly, if you think about it from a chemical  standpoint, like a biological standpoint, you're eating food, so now, all of  your physiology is changing. Because now, your body's going into digestion  mode. So, now, your insulin levels are going up and other things are  changing in your body, which can also change the way your body feels. 

So, what we're trying to do is we're trying to stop eating the extra food that  our bodies don't need. That's overeating, that's emotional eating. What we  want to be doing is eating for nutrition, eating because our bodies actually  need food, giving them nutrients, giving the body nutrients, stopping when the body has had enough and listening to that signal, and then moving on  

to something else. 

Well, when we have this habit, this connection that we've had for arguably  a long time, for some of us, for many of us; we are also using food for  another purpose. And that is to change our emotional state to no longer  feel the way we're feeling. So, you have a thought, it creates a feeling in  your body, and then we don't want to feel that, we want to feel something  different. So, we eat extra food. 

So, in order for us to lose weight and keep it off permanently, we have to stop eating the extra food part. And that for many of us, can be the  absolute hardest part. We're like “How am I supposed to live life if I don't  have this to make me feel better?” 

It can truly be like a crutch in the sense of like how little kids will have like  their little blanky, like their little lovey. You're like don't take that away, like  this is how I'm safe and okay in the world, I really need this. And I'm really not even joking when I say that. For a lot of people, it really is like that  security blanket. 

So, how does feeling our feelings make us lose weight then? Well, what it  does is it interrupts this cycle, this thought feeling eating cycle. And what it  does is it creates space between the feeling and the action. It creates  space between that emotion and the actual eating.

And so, what it does by processing those emotions, it provides you with  another opportunity, another way to change your emotional state that  doesn't involve asking food to help. 

Right now, many of us, no one ever taught us this. Certainly, nobody taught  me this. So, we don't know any other way. And maybe eating was modeled  to us or maybe it's just something we figured out when we were younger or  even older. Sometimes we figure it out later, but we don't know what else to do. If we had some other skill or tool that we knew we could rely on to  process those emotions, then of course, we would use it. But we don't  know what else to do. And so, we turn to food and maybe alcohol. 

And I think this is really important because so often I see people getting  really frustrated with themselves or wishing they knew this earlier and being  so upset that they didn't know it earlier. And I'm like listen, it's all okay. Now, you're learning something different. Once we know something  different, we can do better, we can try something else. You were just doing  what you needed to do to keep yourself safe, to meet your own needs, to  make life as you knew it being you okay and tolerable. 

And that's actually smart, that actually makes sense to do that. But what  also makes sense is to try something different once you become aware that  something different is available. And so, that's what we're talking about  today. 

So, what we need to do is figure out a different way of processing that  emotion so we're not stuffing it down with food, so that's waiting for us for  later. So that we actually move the feeling, the emotion through us so that  it's gone. 

I like to think about emotions as just energy, like energy in the body, and  we can stuff it all down and then it's just like stuck in there, stuck in our  bodies waiting, or we can allow that energy to move through us. 

So, this is where this new free tool that I have for you is going to be so, so,  so good. It's called the Overeating First Aid Kit. It's completely free. I'm  going to tell you how to get it here in just a moment. And what it is a set of  three audios. 

It's basically a private podcast, will give you all the instructions on how to  set it up so that the podcast will drop right into whatever podcast app you listen to, whatever you're listening to this on. You're going to be able to  listen to it, no problem, straight through there. It'll just be in a separate  podcast and you'll be able to go back and listen to them again and again  and again. And it's going to be so easy for you. You're going to love it. 

So, there are three audios. The first is for stress eating. When you're  stressed and you want to eat and you're just like give me all the food. The  second one is for nighttime eating. So, for those of you who like me, really struggled. I used to struggle so much with nighttime eating. This is going to  be the one for you. 

And then there's a third that helps you to process the desire to eat or drink.  So, this is going to be great. Anytime you notice you're like “I just want it.”  You may not even know why, you may have no idea what you're feeling, all  you know is you just have this intense desire or strong desire to eat or  drink. 

And so, what you're going to do is you're just going to listen to me walk you  through the process of dealing with the stress, the desire, whatever it is  that's going on for you, so that you actually can process the emotion, and  then no longer need the food. 

Now, I kept them very short because I'm always just a student of my own  brain and other people's brains and how we respond to things. And I know  for myself, if there's an audio that's over 10 minutes, I'm just like “Ugh, I  don’t have time for that,” like always. I'll be like “Oh, not right now.” But if it's  less than 10 minutes, then it feels like oh, I can totally do that. 

So, the first two; the stop stress eating and the stop nighttime eating, I  believe they're between six and seven minutes. They're really, really short  so that you can just listen, you can be like “You know what, I've got six  minutes, I can listen to this. I can listen and work through this.” 

Now with that said, depending on what's going on for you, you may need a  little bit more than six minutes. But I didn't want to make it longer and then  you never do it. I'd rather make it shorter so that you do it. And you'll see,  I'll walk you through the whole process of identifying — the whole process  is so great, but part of it is identifying how intense the desire is or how  intense the emotion is that you're trying not to feel.

And so, then you'll see at the end, how much that reduces. And if you want  it to reduce more, you can just listen again. So, repeating it may be actually  very useful for you in the beginning. Because then, it's still only like 12  minutes long. It's not still that much out of your day, but I think if I made it  12 minutes, you'd be much less likely to listen at all ever. 

So, they're quite short. And the last one, the processing the desire to eat or  drink, we try to keep that just below 10 minutes. So, that one also, is quite  short as well. So, what you're going to do is you are going to listen to this  and just let me guide you through the process by hearing my voice in your  head as you notice that you're needing this help. 

And you're going to start seeing how, when you actually process the  emotion, when you actually work through what is going on for you,  processing that desire, that your tendency to then take the action of eating  the food is going to be less often or maybe even non-existent. Or maybe  you're going to notice, you know what, I don't feel such a pressure or  strong, strong, strong drive to eat that. I still want it, but I'm okay with not  having it versus I can't be okay unless I have this. 

So, I can't wait for you to try this out. The way that you can get the  overeating first aid kit for free is to go to katrinaubellmd.com/kit. So, you're  going to be able to download that. You'll just get the instructions. And then  like I said, you'll set it up in your podcast app. We'll give you all the  instructions on how to do that. And then it'll just live on forever in your  podcast app. So good. My gosh, I'm so, so excited for you to have this  because I think it's going to make a really, really big difference. 

So, it's going to help you to see how feeling your feelings will make you  lose weight because the way that you lose weight is you only eat as much  food as your body needs and no more. And so, when you can process your  emotions and not eat in response to them, you are then actually fueling  your body with as much fuel as it needs and no more. 

So, what you're doing in this process is you are no longer needing to ask  food to take care of you emotionally. You're no longer asking food to make  you feel better because you know how to do that on your own. You know  how to process the emotion through you to move that energy through you  so that you can feel something different. You know how to take care of 

yourself emotionally so you no longer need food or alcohol to do that for  you. 

So, I cannot wait for you to get this

And also, any of my members, any of my clients, you need to download this  too and start using it. This is for you as well. This is for everybody, so, so  good. I'm so glad to have it for all of you. 

So, I can't wait for you to try this. And when I say try it, don't just do it once,  kind of when you were distracted or your kids were bugging you. Like  actually give this a good go. It may take a few times of walking yourself  through this to start seeing it come together, start seeing some sort of  change. 

So, don't just try one once and go, “Eh, I don't know.” Like actually start  putting this into action, start doing it on a regular basis, start with whichever  one you feel like you need in the moment. You can use them all, you can  use mostly one, whichever one you like the best, use that one. Just the  point is use it. 

So, that is how feeling your emotions creates weight loss. Can't wait for you  to try it and start seeing some results. Have a wonderful rest of your week  and I'll talk to you next time. Take care. Bye-Bye.