Do you want to lose weight SO badly but keep "screwing it up" anyway?

It's not because something's wrong with you. It's because you're probably an emotional eater. And most diets completely ignore that essential piece of the puzzle.

In "Why Weightloss Feels Hard (and How to Fix It)," I get real about the emotional eating patterns that keep you stuck. (And I'll bet you do at least two of them.) Listen now to understand why:

• You can't relax without food (and find out the "Guilt-Rest Cycle" that's sabotaging you)
• Living in "Hypothetical Hell" has you running to food
• You feel like you have to eat before taking on hard tasks
• Your nighttime eating feels impossible to control

Diets don't work because they take away the one thing you use to cope with life: food. So it's no wonder you run out of steam with your diet, (whether it's after 3 days, 3 weeks, or 3 months).

When you use food to calm your anxiety and stress - or to give yourself a break - of course another diet isn't going to fix that. It's time to stop beating yourself up and start understanding what's really going on.

Welcome back everybody. So I get a question all the time about people will say, well, when you say I'm an emotional eater, what does that even really mean? And I think sometimes we think that emotional eaters must be broken. They must be some kind of depressed maniac or whatever. While they trust me. I was an emotional eater, I was a depressed maniac, I was all those things. But emotional eating is really common. It's usually something that most of us are doing and we don't even realize. It's just making it almost impossible for us to lose weight. So I want to kind of go over a few of the most common reasons why we emotionally eat that just aren't that deep. But once you know them, it's like, oh, well, no wonder when I want to do good at night. I never do. Oh, no wonder on the weekend when I swear to God I'm not going to blow it. 

I end up blowing it. Anyway, I just want to explain this to you because I think that when you are stuck in the loop of I don't know why I can want to lose weight so bad and yet keep screwing it up, I want to answer that because you're not screwing up because something's wrong with you. And if you also don't know you're an emotional eater, then you keep trying to tackle weight loss with a specific diet or an exercise program, a plan points, calories, calories, points, plans, specific exercise plans, stuff like that. They don't fix emotional eating. All they do is give you that stuff. And the worst part of it is that when you're trying to lose weight, if you are an emotional eater, diets take away the one thing you are using to cope. And so now it's like not only am I hungry, I don't get the foods that I love as much. 

I'm having to exercise and do all this other stuff, but I also, I'm left with the reason I was eating to begin with, so I just feel like shit. That's why so many of us end up caving. We run out of steam in three weeks. Some of us it's like three hours. Some of us it's three days. Some of us it's three weeks, and some of us it's about three months. And so it's just really important to know this because eventually you do run out of steam. You can only suffer your way through weight loss and most of the suffering is not because you're drastically under eating. There's a lot of great diets out there that feed you plenty. But if your emotions aren't getting fed, if you don't have something to replace that piece, you are destined to end up caving and going back to your old ways, let's just talk about some of them because I really want you to know this so that you can stop doing diets that aren't attacking the root cause of your issues. 

The first one is a lot of women eat in secret at night. So let me tell you what secret eating is. Secret eating is where you do really good all day long. You can go out to eat and you will eat a certain way in front of your friends, your partner and your kids. They go to bed and the second you're left alone, you eat by yourself. And it could be for one of two reasons. Secret eaters either are they have a lot of shit around the foods they want to eat, they think they're bad. And when you think of food as bad, why would you want to display your bad behavior in front of other people? So we will go in secret and if we think the food's bad, that also cascades into another thing, which is the fuck it eating. It's like, oh my God, if I'm being bad anyway, I might as well get all I want. 

We make secret promises to ourself, I'll do better tomorrow. I'll just get it out of my system this time won't hurt and tomorrow never comes. None of that ever works out for us. So one of the things we have to end in order to lose weight is for secret eaters is we have to do a lot of work on how there are no bad foods. There are foods, there may be some foods that you don't feel really great around when you eat them. There may be some foods that it's harder to pump the breaks when you first get them. There's things like that. But just notice how I am not talking about the food as if it's a morality problem. When you think it's a morality problem, you are going to want to sneak around and do it. It's just like if you were going to cheat on your partner, you're not going to do it in front of everybody. 

You're going to be like, oh my God, look, I know I'm married, but look at this hunky man or this good looking chick I just found. And you're not going to stroll 'em around church. So when we think we're doing something bad, it makes sense that we're going to want to hide when we do it. The other thing that happens with secret eating, and it can be combined with that or it can be on its own is secret eaters often are it's the first time during the day that you're getting time to yourself. A lot of secret eaters don't want to eat with everybody else because when they're with everyone else, they feel needed. They feel like they're responsible, they feel like they should be doing more, they feel like they should be taking care of people. And when we eat in secret, it's because it's the one time during the day that we are signaling to ourself like, oh, you get to be cared for now. 

Oh, now's the time where we can have some me time. And so a lot of people go face down in food at night in particular because it is the first time during the day they're getting this break and that break signal when you eat, it's signaling to you you're being taken care of. So it's important to know this because if your diet is taking away food, then it's simultaneously at night taking away the one and only way you know how to signal to yourself that you matter, that you were worth caring for, that you are getting a break. So really think about that. And then also we have to tackle all of that bullshit that we have around foods being bad. So many of us were raised that way. We were raised to think that there are good foods and bad foods, clean foods and healthy foods, junk foods and good foods. 

I will tell you, it is so much easier to lose weight when food doesn't have those types of labels. When you're thinking about food at a deeper level, is this a food I want to include in my life and why? For me, I love fried chicken livers and mashed potatoes. I swear to God, if I go to heaven, please let there be a river of chicken livers and mashed potatoes waiting on me because I love them and I order them once a week. But I also know I don't eat 'em in secret. I don't call 'em my bad foods. I love them because they remind me of my granny and they taste damn good. There is nothing wrong with a mashed potato like a fried chicken. I know don't like just insert fried chicken. If you don't like fried chicken livers. I know I'm a weirdo, but I love 'em, love 'em, love them. 

But I will just say, I don't say that they're bad, but here's what I do know about fried chicken and mashed potatoes. If I live off them, I am going to have a little bit more heartburn than I want. I'm a little bit allergic to it, which means that my thighs break out in fat when I eat them around the clock, when I eat them past full, when I eat them three and four times a week, I have enough common sense to know I'm going to eat these when I'm really wanting them or I'm going to really sit down and really enjoy them. So when I have that relationship, I'm not having to secret eat them. Now the next thing is another kind of root cause of why we're overeating, why it's hard to lose weight is when you have a bad day. We eat in replacement of taking care of ourselves. 

So a lot of women will have a really bad day, like somebody will yell at you and somebody will cut you off on the way home and your kids will have forgotten something. You'll just have a shit day. At the end of the day, you're spent. The only way that you know how to take care of yourself or to check out and stop thinking about the day is one way. Eat. It doesn't matter what the calorie ranges said, it doesn't matter what the plan said. If you've had a bad enough day and you don't know how to put your ass to bed because you deserve it. If you don't know how to have a good cry, if you don't know how to just decompress and say, you know what? It was a bad day. You get to feel terrible, but now we're just going to take care of ourselves. 

I'm going to lay here and I don't need to do a damn thing. This day is over. I feel like I'm owed this time to just sit back with no expectations. I don't have expectations of me. Neither does the world right now. That's taking care of yourself, that's being there for yourself. But most of us, what happens is we have a bad day and we come home and guess what? We think we got to keep going. We got to fix it. We need to ruminate over it. We need to text our best friend about it. And I'm all for texting your best friend, but not if it's just going to amp you up to go eat something. So we need to make sure that we understand that one of the root causes of why we can't lose weight is I don't know how to take care of myself if I've had a bad day, I only know that if I have a bad day, that means I can't lose weight. 

It's like that movie airplane. Well, I picked the wrong week to quit eating ho ho at night. So we want to make sure that when we are going to lose weight, that we are like, what is my capacity to take care of myself in other ways other than food? If I don't have those, I damn sure better figure that out because if I don't, this is going to be a tough road for me. The next thing is kind of the adverse. A lot of people don't know how to feel good unless they have food. They just kind of go through a whole home life. You're not doing any hobbies or maybe you're just kind of bored in life. It's like every day is groundhog day, nothing's exciting. You and your partner are just kind of stuck in a rut. And when life is just you're sitting around thinking I should be grateful, but it feels like it's not enough, we will eat to have highlights. 

If we are not willing to create highlight moments for ourself in our life, food can quickly become the only highlight we have. We start looking forward to when we're going to go out to eat and eat our face off. We look forward to cookies, we look forward to food. And that is one of those things you want to look at. It's like, do I have enough excitement in my life? Are there ways that I get pleasure in life? What's missing from my life? And what are the little things I could do to give myself some of that? So now I'm not overly relying on food to be the only highlight reel I get. I remember back when I was overweight, I swear to God, I used to laugh with my father-in-law because whenever we would all get together, I would go and spend a weekend at my in-law's house. 

He and I love food. We'd wake up in the morning and there was no highlight reel going on in my life at the time. We'd wake up, we'd start talking about breakfast, and we both always ask the same question. Well, before we decide about breakfast, what are we going to be having for lunch? And we were at lunch, we're like, well, before we decide about lunch, well we have 'em for dinner because we were always thinking about that next meal being a highlight. And there's nothing wrong with looking forward to food, I think amazing to look forward to food or a great restaurant or whatever. But when that is the only thing you're looking forward to and it's the only thing that's given you spikes of pleasure and peace and things like that, that's when it becomes a problem because we don't want that for our life and our body is going to want to have stress relief. 

It's going to want to have moments of pleasure and joy and happiness and stuff. And if the only way you get it is when you're eating, of course you're going to want to eat. And then the second you start a diet, what happens? The only way you know how to have happiness is taken away. And so eventually you cave. The next one is you don't feel good enough no matter what you do. So if you are someone who is always worrying, they're screwing up, you are hypervigilant about making mistakes, you're a perfectionist. You worry what people are going to think. You think if you do it wrong, everybody's going to be disappointed or mad at you. When you are in a constant hypervigilant state, it makes sense that you eat to calm yourself down. You eat to get yourself amped up to do something that you're afraid you might mess up. 

Perfectionists do a lot of pree before they do a task. So if you have a big project at work, you might find yourself needing to eat to start the project because underneath it you're so worried you're going to screw it up and the only way to get over the hump is to eat something to settle your nerves down so that you can focus. So the answer is we have to work on your self-worth. There's a really good book by, I think it's Jamie, I always say her name wrong, Jamie Lee Kma I think is the actual name, but it's called Worthy. It's a very famous book now it's just a very famous book. Look it up. It's really, really good. So if you struggle with self-worth, I highly recommend you check that book out. We will put the link to that in our show notes also for you. 

But you've got to work on that because what happens when you take away your coping mechanism? You spend all of your time anxious worrying what people are going to think and jacked up worrying. You're going to fail. You've taken away the one thing that's going to help you get to work. If you're needing food in order to get projects done to get work done, what are you going to do? Lose weight and lose your job or you're going to be like eat so you get your project work done. We are always going to prioritize a life or death situation. You losing weight ain't life or death most days. So that's another reason why we eat. Here's another one, the inability to rest. Women suffer from this. We are so overly responsible. We are so overly productive. We think we're supposed to be going 24 7. I mean it is a pandemic going on with women on feeling like we have got to be doing something all the time. 

So when you don't know how to rest, and that's not to say you don't know how to go lay your ass down and watch the TV and stuff, most of us know how to rest. Here's what we don't know how to do. We don't know how to rest without feeling bad about it. We don't know how to rest without the guilt. If all it was was rest, we'd all be doing it. But a lot of us, if we don't get everything done each day, if we are just like, fuck it, I know I've been at work all day. I know I've not seen my baby all day, but man, mama's tired. I just want to plop that kid down tonight in front of some TV and I just want to lay on the couch and be a veg. I have had a day. We feel like we are a bad mother. 

Oh my God, all the other mothers are doing all the things. And if you're laying there feeling guilty, guess what you're going to do? You're going to go eat while you lay there because your body's going to be like, no, bitch, we got to rest. So I'm going to feed you while you do it so that you can feel bad about eating, but not feel bad about being a terrible mother. Notice how in your brain has these favorite things. It's like it. I would rather feel bad than I'm overweight than to feel like I'm failing my children. That's feeling bad about your weight's like a level seven, feeling like you're fucking your child up for the rest of your life and that you're the world's terriblest mother is like a level 20. So our brains know how to prioritize. Well, what level of bad do you want to feel bad about you weight, bad about quitting another diet, bad about something that you do all the time, or do you want to feel like you're letting your family down? 

You're ruin your child's development for the rest of their life. So when you can't relax and feel like that's okay, then you probably end up eating at night to get your rest. You're either eating to get the rest or you're eating to push through. So it works either way. Some women will just keep burning, burning, burning the candle, and so they will just eat all night long to keep it going because they're trying to keep up appearances, trying to keep up with the appearances to themselves, the productivity to themselves. Now, I'm not saying that some of y'all lack help and stuff. That's fine. I get that. What I'm talking about though is a lot of us are sitting around acting like we can't rest because we have all this stuff to do. And we've never really looked at it to see who's going to die today if I don't fold these clothes, wash these dishes, what really bad thing is going to happen if something, this is what I know about women. 

If something really bad was going to happen in your life because you didn't do something, most of us will move heaven and earth and kill ourselves to get it done. What we don't do is actually quantify if whatever it is that we're skipping out on or not going to do, is that actually as life or death or as serious as we're making it? Or are we just being hard on ourselves, setting unrealistic expectations, doing some bullshittery. The next one is what I call hypothetical hell. One of my friends, Warren told me about this, he's on the spectrum and has all kinds of a DHD, all the things. And one day him and his husband came to the house. Shout out to Roberto. If you're listening, Roberto lost weight with me through the podcast. He's one of the guys that lost weight through the podcast. We've got a lot of men out there who've lost weight. 

Shout out to my men who are holding it down in the podcast, getting it done. But I about died when Warren was just talking, just being worn. And he just said he lived in hypothetical hell. And I was like, what'd you just say? And he was like, hypothetical hell. And I said, what's that? And he said, it's where my brain goes when anything goes wrong, it doesn't even have to go wrong. Just when anything out of the ordinary happens, his brain is like, what if? And the problem is as in hypothetical hell, the what ifs are always bad. It's never like, what if this works out? Amazingly for me, it'd be awesome if we were doing that. If we were doing that, I'd be like, do it all day. But we don't. We're like, what if I fail? What if everybody sees this? What if I lose everything? 

What if I can't lose weight ever? Our brains go if I say eat till enough. And it's like, but what if I get hungry later? As if you eat till enough at seven o'clock at night and if you got hungry at nine o'clock, you going to die. It's like, well, what if you did? You could always just go get you something you do most nights. Let's just try eating till enough and see what the fuck happens. I tell my clients that all the time. They're so worried about getting hungry later. And I'm like, well, just see if you do. You're already overeating. If you get hungry later and you need to eat, at least you're eating because you know you're hungry. You're not overeating because you're worried you might get hungry. So hypothetical hell is one of those things where when we take away food, if your brain goes there, when it's at work, when it has a bad day, when anything goes wrong, if it goes there at night, some people when they go to bed, their brain lights up with anxiety. 

And that's why a lot of people end up eating because eating is rhythmic. Eating, soothes you, eating grounds you. And you haven't learned a new way to do that. You haven't learned other ways. So if you live in hypothetical hell, and that sounds like you, we have to work on deconditioning. That side of your brain answering the questions, learning how to talk to yourself through it, grounding your nervous system. We got to do those things. Otherwise, all you did was start a diet. They took away food. Your brain acts like it always does. And if your brain is in a lot of pain and it scared the shit out of you left and right, you are going to eat versus staying scared all the time. This is why people quit diets. They see us losing weight is so hard. It's like this is the hard part. 

When we stop overeating, we are left with the bullshit that goes on inside of our head. That eating has been turning down the bullshit. All right? The last one is what I call you dwell in the catastrophe cave. Catastrophe cave is where you run every single time something little happens and you blow it way out of proportion. You have one overeat. I'll never lose weight. One person gives you side eye at the grocery store. Everybody thinks I'm fat. Catastrophe cave is a terrible place to be. It usually is full of nevers, always nothing good ever happens to me. It is very black and white and it is very awful. We got to come out of the cave. So if you're doing a diet, guess what? The moment your brain makes a mistake and you don't know how to recover, you don't know how to talk to yourself, all you do is go to catastrophe cave. 

Now your anxiety spikes. Now your fear of failing spikes, now you're scared. And if you don't have a way to deal with that, you will go back to eating. So I want to wrap this up by telling you, we all have to start addressing what's really going on, especially our nighttime meters. Most women, the number one problem in my membership by far, I do surveys all the time to figure out what's going on, what's going on. So I can create content when I can teach them. They have private podcasts where I can give them little meditations, little things to think about. The number one problem is always we hold it together pretty good. Most of the day, our bodies are kind of like an iPhone. They have a battery all day long. Our battery is getting drained with hypothetical hell, catastrophe cave worrying that we're screwing up. 

We have bad days. We have to make a lot of decisions. It's one of those days where nothing planned goes right? And we come home every night and we have about 1% left. And unless we know how to plug back in and recharge at night, then we're going to plug into the refrigerator. We're going to plug into the pantry, and that's going to be how we're recharging. We have to stop that if we're going to lose weight. So this is the stuff we've got to be addressing. It's not good enough anymore to do keto and Weight Watchers and whole thirties and shake programs and juice fasts and fasting and go in and getting your ass kicked at a burn bootcamp that is no longer good enough for us. The real conversation are these conversations and when we start addressing this, you don't just lose weight, you get a better life out of it. And that's what I want for all of you. Alright, y'all have a good week. I'll talk to you next week. Okay?