The TRUTH About Emotional Eating and Food Noise: Is Your Diet to Blame? With Health Coach, Erin Treloar

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: Introduction What Triggers Chronic Emotional Eating? Exploring the Root Causes and Risk Factors Erin’s ED Journey Recovery & Change: Shifting Your Relationship with Food Identifying the Root Cause Behind Bingeing and Feeling Out of Control with Food Ozempic, Food Noise, and Emotional Eating: Navigating Weight Loss Drugs and Eating Disorder Risk Practical Strategies for Overcoming Emotional Eating in a Compassionate Way Reframing Emotional Eating as a Form of Self-Care, Not a Moral Failing References: Emotional Eating in Adults: The Role of Sociodemographics, Lifestyle Behaviors, and Self-Regulation—Findings from a U. S. National Study Relationship between emotional eating and nutritional intake in adult women with overweight and obesity: a cross-sectional study A scoping review of emotion regulation and inhibition in emotional eating and binge-eating disorder: what about a continuum? Check in with today’s amazing guest: Erin Treloar Website: rawbeauty.co Podcast: The Raw Beauty Talks Podcast Instagram: @rawbeautytalks Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase: Amazon Barnes & Noble Amazon Kindle Apple Books Google Play Kobo Apple Books (Audiobook) Audible abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters: Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books: Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book Protein 101 E-Book 👋 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchen TikTok: @abbeyskitchen YouTube: @AbbeysKitchen Blog: abbeyskitchen.com Book: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Your body is speaking to you. Your body is giving you signals. And emotional eating is a symptom that is asking you to tend to it.

• 0:50Abbey Sharp?

  Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantle dichotomy rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good.

• 1:03Abbey Sharp?

  Today, we're going to be talking about an experience that affects one in five adults and three out of five women in larger bodies. Yep, we are diving deep into emotional eating. Emotional eating is often described as eating not out of physical hunger, but in response to how we feel, whether we're sad, bored, lonely, stressed, or even overjoyed. But the root causes of emotional eating and the solutions to prevent them are a lot more complex than an occasional craving for a bag of chips after a stressful day. Joining me today is health coach and host of Raw Beauty Talks, Erin Treloar. After suffering from an eating disorder in her teens,

• 1:48Abbey Sharp?

  Erin channeled her experience into helping other women pump the brakes on their disordered eating and emotional eating patterns. Today, Erin and I are going to talk about the most common triggers and risk factors for emotional eating, including the role of restriction and dieting. We're also going to discuss the intersection between emotional eating and food noise. And the role of GLP-1s like Ozempic. We'll, of course, discuss actionable strategies for overcoming emotional eating. And I will discuss how reframing emotional eating in a positive light may help you stop it in its tracks. A quick reminder that this episode is not a replacement for one-on-one counseling or healthcare advice.

• 2:30Abbey Sharp?

  And also, we will be discussing disordered eating in detail, so please feel free to skip this if it's not supportive to your journey. Also, if you are loving the podcast, I would really love if you would send me a little love note on this episode and follow me wherever you get your podcasts because it really does help me get the word out. All right, let's get into it.

• 2:56Abbey Sharp?

  Erin, thank you so much for joining me.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Abby. I'm a huge fan of all of your work and I'm so excited to be here on Bite Back.

• 3:05Abbey Sharp?

  Thank you. We are so excited to have you. So I just kind of want to start out by saying that, you know, it is obviously, it is normal to occasionally eat for reasons beyond just, you know, physical hunger. Because if we're just to think about food biologically, like it's designed to be pleasurable so that we don't just like let ourselves starve and die. So it makes sense that a lot of us will look to food at times when life is, is hard and shitty. But obviously, this can become more problematic when food becomes the only tool in our emotional regulation toolbox. So I'm curious, from your perspective, as someone who works with a lot of folks who

• 3:45Abbey Sharp?

  struggle with emotional eating, what are the major kind of triggers or risk factors for this kind of more destructive, chronic emotional eating patterns?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I have to say, when I started doing this work, I was so surprised because I think the number one risk factor has got to be deprivation. It's, it's either like emotional or physical deprivation in some way, shape or form. And why this is so shocking to me is because- Because the majority of messages that we receive as teens, young women, women in various stages of our lives is that we need to deprive food, that we should be cutting things out, we should be counting calories or macros.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And yet, this deprivation often sends us on a cycle of then, quote unquote, overeating, or binge eating, or having a lot of food thoughts. And so, we really, from a young age, are set up to fall into this cycle or system. So, when I say deprivation can be either emotional or physical, we can be deprived physically from food, undernourished, or we can, you know, have a certain food group or category that we've removed, or deemed as wrong or bad. And that deprivation, as you said so beautifully, our body is designed to want and desire food, to need food, to function.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  That deprivation can have us thinking about food more often. We can also have emotional deprivation. So if our needs aren't being met, if we are out of touch with our emotions and we're shoving them down constantly. Maybe we grew up in a family where it wasn't safe to share what you were feeling, or to express anger, or to express sadness, or even your desires. And so, if we are constantly shoving those emotions down, and we're not in touch with them, we're deprived of them, that can also have us reaching for food more often than one would like, from an emotional standpoint.

• 6:02Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, absolutely. You're right. And like you mentioned, especially from, you know, early exposure, early childhood experiences, like, there's a lot of conditioning and learned behaviors that happen in childhood. You know, parents using food as punishment or rewards. Parents saying, oh, you need to eat X, Y, and Z before you're allowed to have the dessert. So putting food on a pedestal, seeing it as something to be fearful of, or feel guilty about, or feel ashamed about. It's not just a matter of willpower or weakness, like diet culture tends to make it out to be.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  100%. I think another really common

• 6:39Speaker 01

  The thing that can put at us risk of emotional eating is a dysregulated nervous system, which I think so many of us walk around with these days because life is stressful. We're constantly under this barrage of media and images from social media and our phones beeping at us and we're exposed to so much, right? Like if we look back in into centuries before, if something terrible was happening in the town next to us, we didn't know about it. You know, maybe two years later, word would spread and we would find out about it. And now we literally know what is happening in every corner of the world, which is a

• 7:18Speaker 01

  blessing in some ways, but also I, I personally question whether our nervous systems can handle it, right? And so when we're in this space of dysregulation, the tendency is to want to self soothe. Yeah. And one of the most simple, easy, accessible ways to self soothe is to eat something that tastes good and feels good. Yep. What a normal response. Like, of course, we do that. How human. Yeah. And so if we haven't learned other tools to help us regulate, then we are going to be more likely to emotionally eat. And then I would say the third thing that can put us at risk of emotional eating is if we've experienced some sort of trauma in

• 8:03Speaker 01

  our life that is unresolved, unhealed, unmet. And so that could be a small trauma, a little t-trauma, or a bigger trauma. But either way, if that's something that you've gone through, exploring that with a therapist or somebody who you feel safe with can also help to reduce our emotional eating symptoms. What I find is that so many women who are in this cycle of emotionally eating, they're blaming themselves. Like, why don't I have more discipline? Yeah. Why can't I just get this under control? Why can that girl on social media manage her macros or calories or eat so well and do this clean eating? And I'm, I like, I'm

• 8:44Speaker 01

  just, I'm not good enough. I'm the problem. And yet I really want everyone who's listening right now to hear that it's not a problem. Your body is speaking to you. Your body is giving you signals and the emotional eating is a symptom that is asking you to tend to it. Yeah. It's almost like when we have a stomach ache, right? You have a stomach ache and your stomach is giving you all these signals that it's painful and uncomfortable. And of course, we don't like feeling that way. But generally, if we've had a stomach ache a couple of times, we'll start to look for the root cause of that stomach ache. Like, oh, am I allergic to onions that I keep eating? Or has life been really stressful?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Is there an ulcer under there? What's causing that ulcer? Yep, we are less likely to blame ourselves for the stomach ache. We're not like, I'm a bad person because I keep getting this stomach ache, like we do with emotional eating. The stomach ache is the body speaking to you, letting you know, there's something going on here. Can you pay attention to this? And then we dive deeper. Emotional eating is the same thing. It is a symptom. It is your body saying, hey, there's something unresolved here. There's something I need you to look at. There's some patterning, whether it's emotional or physical, that we might need to shift or change. And so rather than just trying to solve the emotional eating by removing food,

• 10:13Speaker 01

  you know, we've probably all been there where you take everything out of your kitchen and you're like, I never eat at Chips again. And you remove it and throw it all in the garbage. And then one week later, you're back into the same pattern. But instead of just trying to remove food or stop the emotional eating, we have to go deeper and we have to look at what's going on underneath the surface that is causing this emotional eating. Am I dysregulated? Is there trauma there? Are there emotions that I don't feel safe or prepared to handle? Maybe I don't even have the tools or the awareness yet. And as soon as we start doing that deeper work, the emotional eating will start to subside. That symptom, like the stomach ache, will just start to dissipate.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Right. You don't have to work so hard. It's really incredible. Once you see and experience, as you know, women noticing this.

• 11:06Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, that was so powerful what you said. And I kind of want to go back to what you, you know, the first point you made, which was that oftentimes emotional eating is it's like it's a response to just our base needs not being met. Right. Whether that's not sleeping, not nourishing our body with enough fuel and food, not having that that time to unwind and let ourselves unpack what is happening in our lives. And so of course, that is going to over time lead to a breakdown of our interceptive skills, which, like you said, can result in this kind of binge eating type of cycle. And this is why, you know, things like binge eating disorder is considered the pathological extreme of emotional eating and that, you know, they tend to share deficits in emotional regulation and impulse control.

• 11:49Abbey Sharp?

  And and you've been very open about your history with an eating disorder, as have I. I'm wondering, how did emotional eating kind of show up in in your journey?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Like so many women who've struggled with an eating disorder. My journey started in my teens and I was this perfectionist, high achieving, quote unquote, good girl who was doing dance, playing soccer, getting straight A's. And I started to eat healthy. I started to eat clean so that I would be better at the activities that I was doing. And I was a growing girl going through puberty still. My body lost weight that I I didn't have to lose very quickly. And so my eating disorder snuck up on us as a family, because I really believe eating disorders impact the entire family.

• 12:43Abbey Sharp?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Very quickly. Within a few months, found myself obsessively counting and tracking calories, becoming very obsessive about what my younger sister was eating.

• 12:54Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Poor her. I'm still, I still feel guilty about that today. But I was consumed by food thoughts, food noise. And within probably six to eight months, was getting questioned by dance teachers, school teachers, had to drop out of dance to try and figure out recovery. Had to drop out of a number of classes. I was eventually hospitalized for three months in between grade 11 and 12 and put into an inpatient care unit at B C Women and Children's Hospital. And within that one week period of

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Being re-fed and having control taken away from me and placed into the hand of these nurses and doctors, the food noise and that ED voice, which had become so grippy and loud, had completely subsided.

• 13:45Abbey Sharp?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And I remember saying, I know I can't leave yet. I know, I, I, it was, the whole process was so hard to go through and I was dealing with the bloating and the extreme discomfort. Of course, I won't say my weight on this show, it'd be so triggering, but I was in a very, very bad place from a health perspective. And so ED recovery is by no means comfortable, but the pain of that gripping, non-stop voice and narrative in my head was worse. And so the fact that that had gotten a lot quieter and we turned the volume down on that, I was willing to stay.

• 14:22Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  I had now this new normal of what I should be eating, but I didn't have the tools to regulate my very anxious system. We hadn't gotten into the perfectionism. We hadn't gotten into the codependency that was happening in my family. And I never had a big trauma, Abby, but there was dysfunction in the family unit where I was, my parents ran a business together and I would hear conversations about how it was doing and the financials and in moments, like a normal couple running a business together, they would argue and I was carrying so much of the weight of that. And, and nobody knew and I didn't have the tools to regulate, to express, to set boundaries. None of that was part of the languaging.

• 15:17Abbey Sharp?

  No.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  So I went back into the same environment without enough tools and I found myself in almost a decade-long cycle of binge eating. What's interesting about binge eating is that sometimes, and in my case for sure, people can't see on the outside what you're struggling with.

• 15:36Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  It's more invisible because you're restricting during the day and then I would completely lose control around food, especially in the evening. And I would be eating bowls of cereal, digging through the back of the freezer, like getting toast with butter and eating like half the or full package, eating the toppings off all the pizzas. Like I had so many weird food habits, eating things and then spitting it out into bags, like just bizarre habits. But then the next day I'd feel so guilty, so I would cut back and restrict again and try and find some sense of control. And then we would do the whole pattern over and over and over and over again.

• 16:16Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  And so emotional eating, I mean, it was the story of the first half of my life.

• 16:23Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  It was a treadmill that I was living in and it stole so much joy, so much time and energy and mental capacity. And, and really I was desperate to have the tools and the knowledge and the understanding. It wasn't until I started working with a health coach myself, and she was a health coach and a life coach, and we really started to dive into the stuff underneath the surface that I was talking about before, the somatic healing, learning how to set boundaries, understanding my desires, tapping into my creativity. That's when like an entire new level of healing began for me.

• 17:07Abbey Sharp?

  Wow. And I've been nodding this whole time because my story is virtually identical to your story, their perfectionism, you know, the kind of cutting out bad foods first and then it kind of spiraling into, you know, a cocktail of different eating disorder patterns. You know, because food for me and sounds like for you became such a scarcity, like obviously I put it on such a high pedestal. So every interaction with it was so emotionally charged. And we talk about emotional eating, like it's not just like the high from it. It's also the lows. It's also the guilt that you get from that, that, that food after you eat it.

• 17:48Abbey Sharp?

  That keeps you stuck in that cycle, a binge, restrict, repent, repeat, binge, restrict, repent, repeat. And so it, like you said, it's very hard to break out of that, even after you've done the kind of more physical recovery of the weight restoration and you know, you've, you've gotten your body back up and the refeeding. Like you still have to break free of those patterns and it really comes down to doing that emotional work.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, we don't live in a silo. When you are healing your relationship with food and working on your relationship with food and your body, you're also going to meet yourself along the way. You are going to change your relationships in general. You are going to have a more abundant mindset. I mean, you're literally going to change every single aspect of your life.

• 18:33Abbey Sharp?

  Right. And I want to talk about the interplay of emotional eating and, and something we're hearing a lot more about, which is food noise. Which is kind of often defined as these like persistent intrusive thoughts about food. And these are distinct, but often overlapping, kind of reinforcing concepts where folks with persistent food noise may often eat emotionally, trying to kind of escape the food noise. Where emotional eating can create this cycle of guilt and shame and future restriction that heightens food noise. You know, just basically as the brain is like scrambling to, to regain control. When someone is coming in with, you know, frequent binging or overeating episodes and they're generally feeling kind of out of control with food.

• 19:17Abbey Sharp?

  How do you help patients like differentiate the root driver? Or do you like, do you just kind of approach them the same? What do we tackle first? What's the approach?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Well, for me, I think coming back to what we initially talked about is recognizing some level, there's some deprivation happening. When I think about emotional eating, that, that's a behavior. It's an action that we're taking. Food noise is that ongoing running narrative in the mind. Should I eat this? Shouldn't I eat this? Why did I eat that? How many macros does that have in it? Should, is this clean enough? Is it safe? Like it's incessant and it goes, it's just always running in the background and really. Stealing our peace, robbing our presence. So we have to look at both things together. At the end of the day, they are both symptoms.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  And so one of the very first things that I work on with clients is ensuring that we are getting enough nourishment throughout the day from a physical standpoint. So before we even do the emotional work, I'm always checking in to just make sure that from a physical standpoint, we are getting enough nourishment. I use something called the golden guidelines, which was initially taught to me by a dietitian, a registered dietitian, Ali Everhart, who works in B C with a lot of eating disorder clinics. She had a wonderful podcast called Let Us Eat Cake. And so the golden guidelines are to have something to eat within an hour of waking

• 20:56Speaker 01

  up, to aim to eat every two to three hours, to have two or more food groups with our snacks, three or more food groups with our meals. And then the last one is to give yourself permission to eat. So for those of you listening right now, if you jot those down, some feelings might come up.

• 21:21Abbey Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  And it might feel very different than the way that you eat right now. And often people will be like, well, I intermittent fast. I can't have something to eat when I wake up because I feel nauseous or I'm not hungry yet. But if you're somebody who's been emotionally eating or in patterns of restriction, overeating, binging for a long time, we can't yet trust our hunger and fullness signals. Our intuition is very quiet. It, I mean, we've been following other people's rules for years. We've been looking to this personal trainer over here or this dietitian here. Like we have lost touch with our body's voice communication and signals.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And so at the start, I can't tell you, just listen to your hunger and fullness signals. You know, eat when you're at a four out of 10 and stop when you're at a seven or 10. Have no idea when you're hungry and full. And as somebody from me, I'm not diagnosed as ADHD. But I for sure have that type of brain where I can get working and kind of forget about food during the day. So we just, we can't always trust our body's hunger and fullness cues to guide us as to when to eat. So you may find out five years down the road after we start working together that intermittent fasting or just waiting later in the day to eat actually does work for your body.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Great. Not yet. We're all starting from the same page and making sure the body feels like it can trust that you are going to feed it again. That it can trust that you are going to give it a variety of foods that you are not going to withhold or restrict. We get so frustrated at our body for not doing what we want it to do. And yet, can our body trust us? Can your body trust you to give it what it needs emotionally, physically, spiritually? My general hypothesis is that if you're struggling with these things, it, it probably feels deprived in some way, shape or form. So we start with those golden guidelines and what's fascinating is that usually within even two to three weeks,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  people will start to say, I woke up and I felt hungry for the first time in years. I noticed that I was hungry for that snack in the middle of the afternoon, which normally I would have had another coffee or just kept working and then found myself binge eating at night. So the hunger cues tend to come back quite quickly. The fullness, we generally have to work on a little bit more. It's a little bit more subtle and so we'll, we'll work on that. Then once we have really felt, we feel more comfortable with these golden guidelines, then we can start doing more of the emotional work and, and tapping into those deeper layers. It also takes a second for an individual to get comfortable.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Talking about their life and like going into depth about various things that they may be experiencing. So I find that that's the best approach generally. As you start following the golden guidelines and you're nourishing your body, the food noise becomes much quieter. And as the food noise becomes quieter, we can hear our hunger and fullness levels, we can hear our intuition. We start to notice, oh, am I craving something crunchy or cold or warm or sweet? Or, you know, you can start to use the body as a guide more.

• 24:47Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, I, I think that is a really, really important reminder because a lot of folks who have struggled with disordered eating, we will, they'll hop on this quote, quote intuitive eating bandwagon and then convince themselves, well, I'm eating intuitively. I'm not hungry. I'm, I'm not hungry until 5:00 PM.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:05Abbey Sharp?

  But of course you're not hungry if you've trained your body to ignore hunger and fullness cues for so long that it's just wiped them out.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 25:14Abbey Sharp?

  And so, yeah, you're absolutely right. You've got to basically refeed the body to a point where you can actually trust it again.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Abbey Sharp?

  And so, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about the role of things like Ozempic and GLP-1s and quieting food noise. Of course, because they act on reward pathways of the brain. What are your thoughts on these kind of GLP-1 agonists for folks who are, you know, chronically struggling with the food noise and emotional eating piece, but may also be at risk of eating disorder? Because I would think, you know, especially folks who have been struggling with their weight their entire lives, on and off diets, these are people who are generally at risk. So what are your thoughts there?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Well, I want to start off with a disclaimer that I'm not a doctor. And this is the whole conversation around Ozempic. I honestly didn't even talk about it for the first two or three years of hearing about it because I just wanted to sit back and listen to the experts and also listen to clients who were dabbling in it, or friends and family members as well. So it was a long process of listening. I still don't think I have the right answers, but what I have noticed, I can share. So I initially had my guard up hard when it came to Ozempic. I was like, this is going to be a disaster. Also, little Erin would have killed for something like this and it would have just fueled the eating disorder.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  And so how is this going to impact so many different people? I for sure think that there are people with eating disorders, disordered eating, who will struggle more because of Ozempic. However, I also think there is a place for Ozempic that can really serve certain individuals. And I am not about to tell you whether or not it can serve you or not. That's a conversation to have with a doctor or a professional. I recently interviewed Dr. Sue Stock on my podcast, Raw Beauty Talks, and it was a fascinating conversation, very rooted in research and what she's seen as an endocrinologist and as somebody who's

• 27:22Speaker 01

  helping people with weight management and hormones for her career of over 25 years. She's very excited about the things that Ozempic can help with. So I think that there's a space for it and a place for it where it can be very beneficial. And if you're somebody who's struggled with a lot of food noise, what I've heard from clients and family members is the relief that you experience when you start taking Ozempic is profound. And I relate to that because I felt it when I was in the hospital myself. So who are we to judge individuals for taking it or not taking it? What I will say, though, is that it feels like it is still important to me that you

• 28:06Speaker 01

  do the work around your belief systems, around retraining your habits with food, ensuring that you're eating enough, ensuring that there's room for self-care, ensuring that you are regulating your nervous system and that you have those tools to support you. It's still important to do the work as well. Otherwise, when you stop taking Ozempic eventually, or even while you're taking it,

• 28:35Speaker 01

  You're not necessarily setting yourself up for long-term success. So I think this is a conversation where Ozempic can be used as a tool in the toolbox. Same as the SSRI that I take for anxiety. It's a tool in the toolbox, but I also use a number of other tools to really support me in being my most vital and vibrant self. I have someone in my life who took Ozempic and felt like it gave her the ability and the confidence to start showing up at the gym again.

• 29:09Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  To be able to move her body without so much pain and discomfort. So it's really giving her a leg up. And I love that example of how Ozempic can be a tool in the toolbox.

• 29:18Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  But I would caution people about just using that and not doing the other work as well.

• 29:26Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, I 100% agree. I think there are a lot of folks, especially those who, you know, are experiencing food noise for biological reasons, for genetic reasons. We do know that there are specific genes that may predispose some folks to food noise, even when they are not restricting, like what we've been talking about. Obviously, food noise from restriction, very prevalent, but there's still a lot of folks who experience this food noise even when they are not restricting. But you're right, GLP-1s may suppress, you know, these symptoms of, you know, binge urges or food noise, but they don't necessarily address the emotional or cognitive or behavioral roots of the disordered eating patterns or the belief systems behind it.

• 30:08Abbey Sharp?

  So I think fantastic tool for folks who are, you know, it opens up their ability to kind of free their mind, their brain of some of the mental space, the mental load of thinking about food all day, so that they can focus on other acts of self-care. But we don't want the drug to be used to kind of, as a way to avoid deeper therapeutic help. Obviously, then it can delay healing, even entrench folks in kind of dissociation from body cues. So very important that we're working with, you know, an ED-informed team, especially for folks who are at risk of disordered eating.

• 31:00Abbey Sharp?

  But this is fantastic. We've got the golden guidelines under our belt for folks who are struggling with emotional eating, any other kind of actionable tips or strategies that we can take away.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I think once you're feeling confident that you are nourishing yourself consistently and that you are feeding and fueling your body enough, that we can start to get curious about the emotional side of things. And so one question that I love my clients to ask themselves is, when you go to eat, can you pause for a moment and just ask yourself, first of all, like, am I actually hungry right now? Am I noticing any hunger or fullness cues? Now, if you are somebody who's just getting started on the journey, you may ask yourself, like, did I eat within the last couple of hours? Was it a small snack? In

• 31:56Speaker 01

  which case, it would probably make sense that I'm hungry. Or did I just have a meal and now I'm like back in the kitchen pecking again? So you're gonna have to look at this from a number of different angles. But am I actually hungry right now? And if the answer is no, you can ask yourself the question, what am I hungry for that can't be solved in the kitchen? What am I hungry for that cannot be solved in this box of crackers? What am I hungry for that isn't food? And so what I'm talking about here are emotional cravings. Am I craving to be heard in my family? Like, I have feelings or thoughts and I'm shoving them down. Am I stressed right now and I'm needing to be regulated?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Am I bored and I'm hungry for stimulation? Am I...

• 32:49Speaker 01

  In a job that I hate and I'm, you know, not feeling connected to myself or I'm craving more creativity. I was shocked when I started doing this work with my life coach that we did an exercise called the Wheel of Life and it has this wheel and you break the wheel into different segments that all holistically combined to create greater wellbeing and satisfaction in life. You have things like your financial health, your creativity, spirituality, relationships, time and nature, all of these various different pieces, connection to purpose. And one of the sections of my wheel that was feeling very undernourished was creativity. Now, who would

• 33:31Speaker 01

  think that creativity would be or have any connection to emotional eating, to years of eating disorders, to binge eating? But for whatever reason, you know, I noticed there are a number of areas in my wheel that felt undernourished. That area felt safe to start dabbling in to look at, okay, well, how could I feel more nourished in regards to my creativity? And so we started doing some various exercises, which ultimately led to me creating Raw Beauty Talks, to me booking this first photo shoot with a woman, no makeup, no photo editing, no filters, having a conversation with her, which has led to a decade-long, 15-year

• 34:14Speaker 01

  career in this industry and in this space. And so you just never know what area of your life that is undernourished that can be at the root of so much of your struggles. So ask yourself this question, just to get started. What am I hungry for that can't be solved in the kitchen? And maybe you realize I'm bored right now. Okay, what else can we do other than using food to temper that boredom? What will make your life feel more exciting in that given moment and maybe bigger picture as well? If you are overstimulated, which is probably the thing I feel most as a mom, my kids are both home for summer right now. I kind of always have this

• 35:00Speaker 01

  rolling checklist in the back of my mind of the things I should be doing for work and the stuff that needs to get done around the house. And then people are asking me for 700 million snacks. And you know, there's, I often find myself overstimulated right now. And for me, that can cause me to under eat or overeat either way. And I don't judge myself for that. We just have awareness of it. But I now have a toolbox of tools, whether it's a bit of breath work in the moment. I don't even have to remove myself from the situation. Maybe it's asking for 15 minutes. Mom's going to go into her room. Everyone's going to have a bit of quiet time and I get that to myself. Maybe going for a walk after dinner and just taking a moment for myself.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Meditation, you know, I have so many tools that I can use at this point. And when we can feed that emotional craving that we have with something other than food, now ultimately we're getting to the root rather than just putting a Band-Aid on the symptom that we're experiencing.

• 36:04Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, that is so, so helpful. Because of course, it's not only going to help you in that moment with that particular overeating episode, but it's going to help you long-term, not just with the food, but with every other aspect of your life. So I think that is such a great question to be asking, you know, in that moment. It's so powerful. Thank you so much, Erin. I'm sure this is going to be incredibly helpful for so many listeners. And I'm going to be leaving links to your courses and your website if you're looking for coaching. And of course, your amazing podcasts, which I am also making an appearance on, Raw Beauty Talk. So thank you so much, Erin.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Abby. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 36:49Abbey Sharp?

  This was such a great conversation and something I'm sure so many can relate to considering how prevalent emotional eating is and how many challenges we're up against just trying to learn how to eat intuitively. Between diet culture, life stressors, and persuasive food cues everywhere we look, it is completely understandable that we turn to food to fill the void. But in addition to giving yourself some grace in your emotional eating episodes, I think it's also very helpful to try to reframe emotional eating from a sign of moral weakness, a lack of willpower, or something to be fixed, to a source of self-care.

• 37:31Abbey Sharp?

  Because as Erin mentioned earlier, at its core, emotional eating isn't a moral failure. It's a signal from our body, a beautiful human response to pain, stress, or even joy, that deserves to be acknowledged empathetically. You know, I really do believe that shame can often serve as the gasoline that fuels the emotional eating fire. It can really keep us stuck in a cycle of secrecy, self-loathing, and self-blame that just intensifies the urge to soothe with food. But when we shift our mindset from, "Oh, my God, I'm such a failure, I screwed up again," to, "I wonder what I was feeling or needing in that moment,"

• 38:14Abbey Sharp?

  we start to build awareness without judgment. And that is the birthplace of change. Not through tightening the reins to restrict even harder to prevent another binge, but through gentle observation, curiosity, and compassion. The more we can practice neutrality, maybe even gratitude for how food has supported us in tough times, the more the emotional charge around food will dissolve. It becomes less reactive. We stop swinging between all-or-nothing patterns, and that food noise we talked about quiets down as well. Emotional eating isn't the enemy. It's often the body's way of asking for care. And when we stop moralizing it,

• 38:57Abbey Sharp?

  we can start to truly listen to what we need, whether that's a snack, a nap, a boundary, or a good cry. And that's where healing our relationship with food can begin.

• 39:09Abbey Sharp?

  And that brings me to the end of my TED Talk. No, but really, truly, a big thank you for tuning in today. And also a big thank you to Erin for helping me bite back against diet culture. A reminder that if you are enjoying the podcast, I would really love if you would leave me a review and a little comment and hit that follow button because it really does help me get the word out to those in need. Signing off with Science and SaaS, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.