Today, I’m talking about a relationship you probably don’t think about much. It’s not with your partner. Or your kids. Or even your dog.

It’s your relationship with your kitchen. 

Maybe you’re home most of the day, working, retired, raising kids, or you walk in the door after work and immediately hear it whisper…

“Hey girl… come on in. I got exactly what you need.”

You’re not crazy. My kitchen used to talk to me, too. 

And that bitch was loud.

Some days, I swore if I could just rip it out of my house, I’d stop overeating. But your kitchen isn’t the problem. It’s just where you end up after something inside you gets triggered.

If you’re not hungry but still find yourself drawn to the kitchen like a moth to a flame, you’re probably bored, looking for a break, or trying to take the edge off some feeling you haven't even named yet.

So, no, the kitchen isn't your enemy. But it is time to wake yourself up from that automatic eating fog. 

And you don’t need to overhaul your life to do it.

Inside this podcast, I’ll show you how to stop finding yourself in the kitchen eating your face off. 

I'm giving you simple things you can do today, including a few strange ideas I bet you’ve never heard before.

You don't need to put up crime scene tape to stay out of the kitchen. You just need to understand the real reason it keeps calling and how to change what happens next.

Listen to When the Kitchen is Calling Your Name now.

Let's talk about, for those of you who are at home all day and you feel like the kitchen is calling your name, you could be retired, you could be taking care of small kids, you could be a work from home person. Or even for those of you who work a job through the week, sometimes you feel like the kitchen calls your name at night or it calls your name on the weekends. And so these things are going to help you no matter what. So sometimes it does really feel like the kitchen is just whispering or even yelling for you to come on in there. We think that the kitchen being close by is somehow a problem, but I want to tell you what's really happening and what's really happening is the kitchen is where you end up after you've been cued by an emotion. So the kitchen is not kick starting anything.  

Some things are already happening and the kitchen ends up being the tail end of where you end up to eat. Okay? So I think that's really important to understand. It's not the kitchen's fault. The kitchen is where you end up because there's something else. Kickstarting, all of this. So most of us who are grazing around in the kitchen and finding ourselves there and stuff, we're usually not hungry because I'm going to tell you right now, there's no problem with you ending up in the kitchen. If you're hungry, that is exactly where you should go. You should go immediately to the kitchen. You should immediately nourish your body and then you should immediately move on with your life. But for those of us who aren't hungry, we're usually bored, restless, or we're just trying to break up our day, and those are feelings that we've adopted the habit of eating around to settle our feelings instead of adopting some type of new thinking or new body technique that will help us settle those nerves.  

And sometimes you're going to need both. You're going to need a little bit of new thinking and you're going to need a new thing to do in response to whatever is sending you to the kitchen. So this is why for so many of you just trying to avoid the kitchen really doesn't work and it doesn't work because blaming the kitchen, what it does is it takes the focus off of why you are eating to begin with. If the kitchen is truly the problem, you would never be able to enter your kitchen without eating. So until you articulate the problem accurately, you'll find yourself stuck either feeling helpless because you can't just reno your house and say, I don't need a kitchen anymore. Or you get stuck throwing solutions at the wrong damn. It's like if you're bleeding from a gunshot wound and you sit there and you just mad insist that No, it's a minor cut.  

It's a paper cut. I just need a bandaid. Just need a bandaid. And then you sit there and you wonder why your bandaid isn't solving your big ass wound. So this is what I want you to try. Notice when you walk into the kitchen to eat and you know aren't hungry. So we're going to start with you thinking about all the times that you go to the kitchen and you're 90% sure this is not a hunger situation. These are the times, these are the foods I grab. Look for your patterns. We want to first identify all of that so that the alarm goes off in your head. Warning, warning, this is something to pay attention to. Instead of you just walking in there and eating and going like, Ugh, it's so hard to be at home with my kitchen. My kitchen just calls my name.  

If I didn't have a kitchen, I'd have no problems. If I just didn't work from home, I'd have no problems. That's not helpful. The kitchen is here to stay and your ass is here to stay. So they got to learn to work together. Blaming the kitchen is no longer good enough. All right, so we're going to notice as many things as we can about our behavior around. I want to wake up from my automatic fog. When I walk into the kitchen, I no longer want to do this as a routine or habit. What I want to do is be like, oh my gosh, here I am again, and we're not going to beat ourselves up. We are not going to beat ourselves up. This is really important. You have to be willing to start turning on your brain so that your brain can say like, Hey girl, you about to eat.  

Oh my gosh, the only time you grab them Oreos at three o'clock is when you stressed, Hey girl, I see you grabbing them chips. This is one of those times. This ain't the kitchen's fault. This ain't the chip's fault. We have to know that and we have to be awake when it's happening if we're ever going to be able to take back control. Now, the next step after you notice, so I want you to simply say something really simple to yourself. I'm not eating because I have a kitchen. Repeat after me. I'm not eating because I have a kitchen. So then we're going to ask ourselves, Hey girl, I wonder what's going on Again, I'm not eating because I have a kitchen, but I wonder what's going on. This is where we're going to start trying to identify why are we here? What's driving us here?  

There's always a reason, and the only way we're going to find the reasons is we have to wake to them. Now, this doesn't mean you might be able to stop the eating today, but if you ever want to stop the eating, you got to know when you're doing it. You got to be able to wake up from the fog and you got to understand why those things have to happen or we can't ever get to the part where we don't do it anymore. Saying lots of bullshit tactics like closing your kitchen or whatever will never work if you're not able to wake yourself up in the fog and understand your patterns and know why you're doing it. All right, so then here's after we say I'm not eating because I have a kitchen, I wonder what's going on, then we're going to do this. If you can identify the feeling, then I just want you to say, I'm feeling bored, I'm feeling stressed, or I'm feeling whatever it is I'm feeling.  

Just insert your feeling here. And then you simply ask yourself, is there anything else I can do other than eat? This is such a powerful question. So many of our little overeats, we actually can do something else and we will be fine. We're just not used to not asking ourselves can we do something else? Now, sometimes just saying what you're feeling is going to be more than enough to stop the eating. A lot of people just feel better knowing why they want to eat, and then they say like, well, okay, I'm just bored. I'm okay with being bored. I probably could sit here and tolerate it without the acknowledgement of it. Your body just is acting like a dunk butt on the inside and it just wants to get relief. But when you really address it, then your body gets the relief. It was seeking acknowledgement.  

It gets to know that you are listening and then sometimes you can do something else. And I'm going to tell you a few things you can do in just a moment. Now, for some of you, you won't know the feeling. You have been so shut down on your feelings for so long that right now it's really hard to identify them, and that's very normal. I don't want you beating yourself up for that. What we want to do in these cases is, and this is one of the alternate things that you can do, but if you don't know the feeling, you can try one of these things on rotation until you find something that allows you to smooth out whatever's happening for you internally, just like food is doing for you now. So for some people, you might want to, I don't know the feeling, but I'm going to sit in a room that's not where I work and that's not in the kitchen, and try putting a cool ice pack on your neck for a couple of minutes.  

There are lots of studies that show that for people who are having food urges, that the coolness on the back of the neck actually can turn urges down significantly. So sometimes that will be enough to kind of calm your nervous system so that you can let the urge pass by. For some people, you might want to lay on the floor for a couple of minutes flat on the floor, and if you can't lay down on the floor, maybe you're not physically able to get down on the floor, try laying down on a bed or on a couch just for a couple of minutes because that can ground your body. And I would lay there and just try to feel supported. This is particularly good if you are identifying as I'm stressed, I'm anxious. If there's something, that's what we call a higher vibe. Going through your body, laying down and focusing on feeling supported allows your body to get a signal that things are like, you might be worried about something but you are still safe.  

You could try scrolling something you enjoy. I take little breaks every day. I set a little timer for five minutes and I just scroll. Instagram reels full of reels of just funny cat videos, sexy men dancing, updates on the sports that I love, that kind of stuff. So you could just scroll something you enjoy. That's particularly good for people who get bored, easy at work, and they just need a little mental distraction sometimes. This is what works for my husband because he doesn't like, he hates social media. He's not on social media at all, but he takes two to 10 minute little breaks. Every hour his alarm goes off and he does what he calls a two to 10 minute task. Sometimes he just walks laps in our basement. He likes to get his steps in, and while he is walking laps, he's thinking mentally about what he might like to do next, but he likes to break the time up.  

Sometimes he has a little running list of all these little things he's been meaning to do, like text someone, check the mail, go through magazines that he needs to throw out. He just has a lot of those little just nagging tasks that you don't feel like doing. But in this case, you are more motivated to do them because you're taking a structured two to 10 minute task break. So that's a thing you can try. And then for some of you just turning on some fun music and moving around while it's playing or possibly stepping outside really helps. If you know that you keep going to the kitchen because you have bouts of where you're tired or you need a pick me up, you've got to keep working. So you go to the kitchen to get food, to get that little rebound effect. Turning on some fun music and moving around for a few minutes or stepping outside is the same.  

Don't lie to yourself that you don't have time for that because if your ass has time to go get some food and to grab a few cookies to eat at your desk while you power through, you have the time. There is no task that is going to be derailed with you taking a two minute break that is the equivalent to you going and getting some cookies. So what I want you to take away from this, if you don't learn anything else, is the pull to the kitchen is not the kitchen's fault. The pool to the kitchen is a signal that there may be something that you need to take care of in a new way.