Updated: January 31, 2025
Episode 408: The Truth About Why Overeating Feels So Hard

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About Today's Episode
Did you know most women try to lose weight 140 times before they turn 40? 😳
And what do you usually get from all that dieting? A brain full of food rules, a ton of guilt, and the feeling that you're destined to fail.
I used to think I was broken, too. Every night after my husband took our crying baby upstairs, I'd grab a tub of ice cream. And it wasn't because I loved ice cream (though it is delicious). It was because those few minutes of eating were the only time I felt like I wasn't completely failing at life.
Today's episode - The Truth About Why Weightloss Feels So Hard - tells you what I wish I knew when I was losing weight:
- Why traditional diets set you up to fail (and it has nothing to do with your "willpower")
- The real reason you reach for those cookies, chips, or ice cream
- A simple question to ask yourself that tells you more than any calorie-counting app
Your ice cream binges, wine at night, or secret stash of cookies aren't the problem. They're symptoms of something deeper. Once you know what's causing your overeating, you won't need another diet to fix it.
Ready to stop feeling broken? Want to start understanding why weightloss can feel so damn hard?
Listen now.
Transcript
Hello everybody. Welcome back. So today, here's what I want to talk about, why weight loss feels so fucking hard and why it is not your fault that it feels so fucking hard. So I did some research not too long ago and I found an interesting statistic that talked about how most women are going to start 140 diet attempts in their lifetime before the age of 40.
So 140, it doesn't mean different diets, but you will probably try to lose weight 140 times before you even turn the age of 40. And do you know what most of us get out of all that? We get a lot of guilt. We get so many bullshit food rules packed into our brain, and we get this sense that we are doomed to fail at weight loss, especially because a lot of times not only are we doing all of these diets, but then we end up regaining weight and we don't understand why because we thought that's going to be the time. If that sounds familiar, let me tell you, it is not your fault that you failed all of those diets. Losing weight doesn't feel hard because you're broken. Losing weight's hard and it feels hard because you have been taught all the wrong shit about why your overeating is happening in the first place.
See, most diets, they don't address what really is going on underneath the surface. They just take away certain foods. They give you a calorie range to tell you, eat this, don't eat that. And when you remove food without replacing why you were eating to begin with, you're just doomed to fail. And we're going to get more into that in a little bit. And so back when I weighed 250, I literally felt like I was failing at life in general. I wasn't just failing in weight loss. I felt like everything was a failure. I was a stay at home mom. And guess what? I hated staying at home. I know we're supposed to be sitting there like everybody on the internet thinking that keeping your kid, it is the most glorious time of your life. Angelic soft photographs everywhere. Well, I didn't feel like that. I felt like nightmare on Elm Street every day was Thomas the tank on repeat.
It was really hard to feel engaged when the person who's talking to you either is crying because they're hungry or they can't talk and communicate their needs. Now, don't get me wrong, there were beautiful moments when my child was little, but on the whole I was very unsatisfied. And so I felt stuck. I felt miserable and I felt like, is this what my life is turned into? And because of all that, because of sitting there every single day, I didn't have any way to feel better unless I was eating. So then because I was eating to compensate for all this, I felt completely out of control with food too, because I'll just tell you Logan, he cried constantly. We couldn't go anywhere without a meltdown. He hated strollers. So that meant that every time we went someplace I was going to have to carry his ass.
And at 250 pounds, I just barely could do it. And I'd worked my whole life. And now I was at home with a baby who was crying all the time. We couldn't go nowhere and I was physically exhausted and I was emotionally drained. And so what happened with me was every single night Chris would come home, that's my husband, and he'd take Logan upstairs and I would immediately grab a tub of ice cream. And it wasn't because I loved ice cream. Now don't get me wrong, I love me. Some ice cream and ice cream tastes fucking fabulous, but that is not why back in the day I ate it every single night. It wasn't because I just loved it. That is the lie. I told myself to cover up the truth. I didn't want to admit I was eating ice cream every single night because I dreaded the next day.
I felt guilty for not having the amazing experience with my child that all my friends always had. I felt like I was failing in life. I felt like I was failing as a mother. I felt like I was failing as a wife, and I felt like I was just failing as a human in general. And so for me, that ice cream that was a few minutes every day that I felt numb, normal, relaxed, where for a little bit I was enjoying my life. And so because I was eating ice cream and just gaining weight like a crazy person, I also thought I was broken most of the time. I felt very lazy. I felt like I was just fat. I thought weight loss was harder for me than it was for everyone else because I just couldn't seem to do what other people did. Just eat less, just move a little more.
And I was like, that is not my problem. My problem isn't that I just don't eat less. My problem is every time I try to eat less, I feel like something's fucking missing in life. It makes me miserable to eat less and moving my body was not a pleasant experience and I was already having a hard time every single day. The last thing I wanted to do was move my body so that I could what experience? Being out of breath, it being hard, it hurting, and being ashamed of how I looked. So when I was going to lose weight, one of the things that I realized is I don't think anybody has ever taught me why I'm overeating in the first place. It was like when I decided to lose weight and figure it out, one of the first things I thought was I got to figure out why is this all actually harder for me?
What is really going on here? So this is what I want you to know. Overeating is not about being lazy or undisciplined. Overeating is about patterns that we develop, coping mechanisms that we develop, habits around food that we develop and the inability to deal with some of life's tough emotions. Overeating is about what's happening in your life that's driving you to eat and how food has become that quick fix that you need so that you don't only don't have to feel certain things, but if you're like me, it's so that you could feel just a little bit better. Because on the whole, your day is stressed, anxiety driven, hard, tough, not fun. You're just getting through another day. Dreading. That was what my day was like. It was like groundhog day on repeat. So for me, ice cream at night was the only time I didn't feel quite so miserable for somebody else.
You might be eating like chips when you're stressed. You might have wine when you're lonely or maybe cookies are what you do because you just need a break. I just want you to know the cookies, the ice cream, the wine, all those things that we keep trying to take out of the house or ban from our life, they're not the problem. Eating them and wanting them and having them is the symptom of the deeper issue. It's the what's going on underneath that food. We got to figure out what does that eating of those foods, the overeating of it, what is it representing, what's going on underneath that makes us want those things? And I will tell you it's not because they're sugary. I tell my clients all the time, don't buy into this idea that you're somehow addicted and stuff. I'm not saying that there's not research on that.
We could prove anything, but I've yet to meet a woman who has an overeating problem that when we call it addiction, that it helps them. Most of the time they feel broken, even more broken and more like a failure. Usually when I say I think what we've got here is a deeper emotional issue. And if we can fill the holes of your emotional life, you won't want to eat these foods when you're feeling bad. Now you'll want to eat these foods because it truly is a special occasion because you truly do want it and there's not going to be any type of guilt or overeating because you're just enjoying it. So one of the things that you need to understand is that before we can address overeating and stuff, you can't fix something that you don't understand yet. So for me, I had to start paying attention.
I had to start asking myself, am I actually hungry right now or do I just want to feel better? And let me tell you, most of the time when I was over eating back in the day, I was surprised at how often all I really wanted to do was feel better. So I ate a little extra. I cleaned my plate, I grabbed a handful of goldfish. I ended my night with ice cream. There were so many ways. I always say this to my clients, I was dying by a thousand little cuts all the time. So we got to pay attention because if you're not paying attention to what's going on, you won't know what to solve. And I also teach y'all throughout this podcast how to lose weight is really simple. We got to ask, am I hungry and have I had enough? That is the two main components.
And the reason why we ask those questions is so that when you're not hungry and you want to eat and when you want to keep eating, when you know your body's had enough, anything outside of that is either emotional, mindless or habitual eating. And those three types of eating have to be turned down if you ever want to truly lose weight and be able to keep it off. So here's one of the things I want you to try. The next time you find yourself reaching for food, I want you to just pause for a second and I want you to ask, am I hungry or do I just want to feel something? Is there something else going on here? Because if I'm not actually hungry, I just want to know what that is. Whether or not you decide to eat or not, I will tell you.
Knowing why you're wanting to eat in every moment is the absolute step one of weight loss. Because if you know why you want to eat when you're not hungry or why you want to overeat, when you know you've had enough, you now have clues into what step two, step three, step four, however many steps it's going to take you to lose weight. So the next time you find yourself reaching for food, pause for a second and ask, what do I really need right now? If hunger's not it, and I'll be honest, you might not even have an answer yet, and that's okay. I just want you to get used to probing and asking the question. So if this feels hard, it's probably because no one's ever taught you to stop and be curious about why you're eating diets. Don't teach us that. And it's not your fault that you have not been able to lose weight before because if you haven't really understood why you're eating, how are you ever supposed to be able to get through a tough day with a calorie range?
I always use this example. It's like I don't care if somebody says you shouldn't eat bread or no carbs, or somebody says you should eat 1200 calories. Whatever the bullshit is, that will work, as long as you're having a good day, you will be motivated, you will feel good about it. It will make sense to you as long as you are having a good day, you can rationalize all that. The second though, you have a shitty day where your boss needs you to work over and you had promised your kids you were going to do something and now you're like, I'm riddled with the mom guilt because I told him I'd do this and I can't and I'm pissed at my boss and now I'm tired. In that moment, it does not matter what that diet says. If you're an emotional eater, you are going to throw it all out the window because now your emotions are in charge, not your rational brain.
And it's those things we need help with. We are only going to be able to follow a diet traditional diets if we are having good days. But if they're not teaching us what we need to solve, our basic emotional eating, we're screwed. So it is not your fault if you have been having a hard time losing weight. I promise you, you're not lazy and you're not weak, but you are figuring out something you were never given tools for. So I want you to really think about this. In order for you to lose weight, you have to get the missing pieces to the weight loss puzzle. And the other thing I want you to remember if you don't remember anything from this podcast, is that it is never too late. I have worked with women in their seventies who have lost 70 pounds. It doesn't matter how many times you've failed, it doesn't matter how old you are.
It doesn't matter how many times you've regained weight. I know you can do this and that's why I want to help you. So I want you to remember that you are not broken. There was nothing wrong with you that at the heart of all of our overeating is almost always one of three things. We are either mindlessly eating, which means we are just going through the day and we're just grabbing the goldfish. We're just passing the time. We don't even know the little cuts we're dying by or we're in a habit. I was in a big ass habit of if I gave myself ice cream at night, I ate the carton. I was in a big ass habit of if we went out to eat and I was overserved by the restaurant, I cleaned my plate no matter what. But the biggest problem I had was the emotional eating.
Whenever I tried to lose weight, they were taking away the one coping mechanism I had for when I felt worthless, when I felt hopeless, when I was anxious, when I got overwhelmed with my child, when I felt like I was purposeless in life, when I had a bad day, when I thought my husband might be upset with me, when I was upset with him, if I got angry, if I got sad, anything. Emotional food was the way I dealt with it. And diets took away my emotional coping mechanism. And when a diet's not teaching you how to cope so that you can have something to fill the void left, when you're going to eat less, the diet is to blame. It is not you. Alright, I hope you have an amazing week and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to no bs freecourse.com and sign up for my free weight loss training on what you need to know to start losing your weight right now. You'll also find lots of notes and resources from our past podcasts help you lose your weight without all the bullshit diet. I'll see you next week.