Why Can't I Stop OVEREATING IN THE EVENING?

SPEAKER_00: Hey, welcome to Overeating Recovery. Do you feel compelled to overeat but wish that you could stop? Or perhaps you know that your emotions drive your eating, but you don't know what to do about it. In these podcasts, I talk about the side of overeating that nobody really talks about. The emotional and psychological side. There are reasons why you can't stop eating, and that's what we explore here. Here, I'll support you on your journey to stopping binge eating altogether. This podcast is produced fortnightly, and I am your host, Shelley Treacher. Welcome. One of the most common things that I see are people who overeat at a certain time of day. Commonly in the evening, but it could be at any time of day. So this is what I want to talk about today. But first let's talk about what it is that defines the different periods. A while ago I produced a series of quick video tips about understanding comfort eating. One of the comments I received was about how to reduce eating badly after work. The person who left the comments spoke of feeling fine all day, but then as soon as she finishes work, she just can't stop eating. And I hear that a lot. So so many people have this experience of not thinking about food all day, but then as soon as they finish work, or stop whatever it is that they were absorbed in doing during the day, they just can't stop eating. This isn't exclusively reserved for the people who are working all day. You might be a stay-at-home mum or a self-employed artist who has had so much to do in the day and you got absorbed in that that you didn't think so much about food. But then when you stopped, you'd have the same experience as people who have been working all day and hit the food. Or you might be on a different schedule to this, but you still find that it's when you stop that you overeat. Of course, with COVID-19, everything may be so much more extreme because we're now having to be very self-guided about when we finish our work, as there's very loose boundaries between work and home at the moment for most of us. So your eating habits might have changed along with this. But is there still a time of day or a time of the week when you stop doing something and start eating? The first thing to notice here is that you transition from one state to another. So it's important to understand both states and how you transition. So today I'm going to lead you through a five-step process to help you understand what's going on so that you can slow down, rebalance, challenge your habits around food and overeating at a certain time, and address what it is that you might really need. So the first one is understanding your evening eating habits or whenever it is. Evening overeating, or whenever it is, is a habit in itself. It may also be surrounded by other little habits or patterns of thought, so get to know what habits you have around it. What reasons do you tell yourself for binge eating after work? Are you telling yourself it's a reward after a hard day's work? Or you might be telling yourself that there's nothing else that you could do. Or that you need to relax, so your food is the way to do that. And just observe the logistics of how you make sure that this is what you'll do every day or at the habitual time when you do this. When do you buy the food? Do you put your PJs on when you get home? Do you tidy up first? Do you turn your phone off? Is it after dinner that you binge? Or is it when you sit in front of the TV? Just get to know your own habits and your own ways of thinking. And then the second stage is what state are you in? And this is what you need to ask yourself: what state are you in during the time when you're not overeating? So in the period when you're busy or in the period when you're not busy? It could be could work both ways for different people. Different people are different. But in general, here I think I'm talking about people who are really busy and then they start overeating. During a working day or in the time before you binge eat, during the time when you're not binge eating, what state are you actually in? Is it that you're content at work and then unhappy in the evening, or uncomfortable in the day and then need to relax at night? Or your version of this? Often people who overeat in the evening eat very little during the day, in my experience. I could be not talking about everyone here, but a lot of people do follow this pattern and just see if you do. And because they're not eating much, they're thinking, Great, I've done really well today, and I probably won't put on weight, and I know I'm going to eat in the evening or at the weekend, so I'm fasting now to balance it out. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. And as we saw in the last podcast, if you heard that, if there are periods of fasting, the opposite is actually true. The body thinks it's starving, so it's desperate for fuel and is more likely to store weight and make you eat more. It's possible that in the time of an absence of food, you're also not actually getting the nutrition that you need and that your body needs. So you might be setting yourself up for a binge in more ways than one. Challenging your habits and rebalancing your metabolism are two important keys to tackling binge eating in the evening. So ask yourself in the daytime or in the working week, what emotional state are you in? What physical state are you in, and what energetic state are you in? This is going to take some thought and some practice at observing yourself in the week, or you might actually know the answer straight away. One of the states you might be in is a stress state. Especially now, when we have so little normal social contact or community to help us co-regulate. And we need that. It's possible that fasting in the day and binge eating at whatever time of day happen in the same way, with very little regard for your needs, very little pleasure, and in a frantic rush. So now I'm going to take you through some signs to know how to recognise that you might be in a stress state. You might actually be in a minor or major state of fight or flight or freeze as you're going about your daily business. So here's some things to look out for to say that you might be in a little bit of a stress state. A. Is your breathing shallow? B check your temperature. Are you having hot or cold sweats? Are your feet cold or your hands cold? C, do you have any tension in your body? And of course the answer is yes. We all have tension at some in somewhere in our bodies, but check the tension in your body. You might want to check your jaw. Often we're running around our work days with a jaw clamped shut and with gritted teeth. Is that you? Check your shoulders. Are they up by your ears? Are your legs tense? Or are your arms tense? And what about your belly? Are you holding your belly in all day long? D, check your heart and your breathing rate. Is your heart beating really fast? Are you rushing? And do you get out of breath or breathe really shallowly? E, are you starting to get irritable? And I've gotta say, I found that a lot of people are getting irritable in the third week of number two lockdown. And with the situation as it is, a lot of people are finding it hard not to get irritable. So you know, count yourself as a normal person if you are getting irritable at the moment. And it just might be a sign of stress. So just check. If somebody says to you, could you just do this one more thing for me? Do you want to bite the head off? Because you've done a million things already and you've got a ton of other things to do. All of these are really normal responses. Most of us are going through our working life with these symptoms all day long, but they are signs that our bodies are in distress. You've heard these phrases before, fight, flight, freeze. But what do they actually mean? Fight is characterized by the irritation, tension, heat in the body. Freeze, you might feel numb, cold, or have cold sweat. You might be very still and not want to move much. Or with flight, you might have a cold sweat and rushing with your heart beating fast and your breathing being shallow. So you hear these phrases all the time. They kind of pop psychology now, right? But so what they actually mean though, and this is quite a revelation in a way, they mean that your system detects a threat. It detects that something is threatening and it's responding to that as if it were a threat to your life. So your system starts to shut down in all other areas. Your digestive system starts to slow down, your breathing starts to change and get more shallow, your heart rate starts to speed up, as you get an adrenaline rush, and you actually get more sensitive around your eyes and your sight and your hearing. This ought to make you more sensitive to what you need to respond to the threat with. And all these systems start to change automatically. There's nothing you can do about it. It's a physiological response to threat. And that's pretty dramatic, don't you think, for just another day at work? You go into a fight-flight-freeze threat cycle where you perceive that something is not safe, so your system tries to do something to make you feel safer, or to respond to the threat. That's not really quite right, is it, just to spend every working day like that? You've got to start to wonder what the cost of that is even without the binge eating. How can that be good for you? So going through this every single day, no wonder you might be tired and look forward to a break at the end of the day or at the weekend. And as I said, that comes with its own difficulties at the moment. So that's step two. Work out what state you're actually in at work, or when you're looking after the kids, or during the week, or at the weekend, whenever it is that you're not or not feeling that you need to eat. The thing you do before you eat. And by the way, the situation can also be reversed. If you're someone who eats more all day long but doesn't eat at the weekend, chances are it's because your states have shifted just in the opposite way. It's still a good idea to work out what state you shifted from to and why. How were you at work and how are you at the weekend? So let's move on to number three. What's the purpose of that state? You kind of need to understand what you're in that state for and where it came from. When you're in the state you're in before you stop working or doing, what's the reason for that state? Why are you actually in that state? If you're in a stress state at work, what's causing you to rush? Or to make you do all the to-do things in the day, in the way that you do them, in the state that you do them in? What is that state doing for you? What would you be left with if you didn't do that? How is it trying to help you or protect you? If you ask compassionately, you're going to get answers more than if you ask in a demanding way. So ask compassionately. What is it trying to do? One of the reasons you might be doing this is that you might be addicted to productivity. This is a massive thing in our culture. There's actually a chemical released in our brain that when you do something productive makes you feel good. So you might be addicted to productivity. This is your physiological system again, and the chemical saying I need more of this productivity to feel good. Does that sound familiar? That's a lot like sugar or junk food, or any other drug for that matter. You can see this is another pattern of thinking or a habit. You're brainwashing yourself into thinking productivity is amazing. The best thing that you can do to make yourself happy, maybe even the only thing you can do. But it's exhausting, isn't it? Another reason for being busy is being afraid to stop, which in itself deserves compassionate understanding. I imagine this is quite a common one at the moment. Stopping and bearing discomfort is hard, and we choose not to do it. I had a client last week actually told me that there was an experiment done where people could either choose to stop and feel, or they could have an electric shock. Every single one of them chose the electric shock, so that really tells us something about humanity. But unfortunately, for you, sooner or later, to overcome overeating, you're gonna have to stop. I'll be talking about this more in the coming weeks. Another reason is to try to please people. This is a really common one for people who overeat, at least I see this every day anyway. People worry what others think of them. Maybe you're comparing yourself to everybody else and thinking that you have to work really hard, otherwise everybody else is going to think really badly of you, because everybody else is doing much, much more than you. That's probably not even the case. But this is a really hard one. I had a client recently who realized that her true story was she suddenly said, So basically, I'm just afraid of getting told off. Can you relate to that? Not many of us handle getting told off very well. We don't like any kind of criticism or to feel like we're in people's bad books. As a nation in the UK, we are notoriously avoidant of any kind of confrontation. But most of the time we are imagining that we will be told off. So it's a good thing to identify as a trigger for you. You may want to watch out for your self-critic. Somewhere behind most stressed out people is the self-critic. So identify what the critic is saying about how you should run your day. That's gonna help you say, actually, I think I'm gonna slow down for a bit, because that's gonna be better for me. So let's move on to number four. Once you've worked out what state you're in and you've worked out why, you need to work out the purpose of the binge. So start asking, alright, so I was uncomfortable in the day or I was stressed out in the day or I felt criticized in the day and I felt really horrible towards myself. So what am I doing in this binge? It's actually quite obvious really, isn't it, if you think about it? If you're feeling awful about yourself and you've been running all day long, you're gonna need to let go at the end of the day. Maybe you feel you had too much responsibility in the day, and now you need to let it go. Binge eating, comfort eating, or indeed any other kind of addiction like alcohol, watching television, or surfing the net, your purpose is to let go and to feel better. Some light relief, especially right now. And it does work, it kinda works, it does give you a bit of a hit for a short period of time. So this is the next thing to understand. You're trying to achieve a certain physical state or a certain emotional well-being. Unfortunately though, the substance doesn't really work for long. Of course it also makes you feel worse by the end of the day or by tomorrow, or actually even sometimes instantly. So you need something else. So that's where number five comes in, and this is really where the healing is at. Number five, in order to really recover from binge eating or any habitually addictive behaviour that's helping you to manage how you feel, sooner or later you're gonna have to start asking yourself about your real needs, and to work out how to prioritize yourself. What is it that you really need? This can range from physical to emotional to energetic to life goals. So let's start with the physical. Are you actually ignoring your physical needs? Often I found that people who binge eat are people who put others' needs ahead of their own, so they don't even meet their own physical needs in the day. So it's a really good one to check out for yourself. Are you going to the toilet at the right time or do you put it off? Are you giving yourself a drink of water when you're thirsty? Are you putting a jumper on if you're cold? Do you take your jumper off if you're too hot or do you just keep going? So just notice, are you meeting your own physical needs? The recovery from binge eating is a gradual process of understanding what you feel and responding with less harmful strategies. So emotionally, how are you meeting your needs? This is always a good question to ask, even if you don't binge eat. Does what you're doing serve the purpose you really need it to serve? Does it serve you or does it harm you? When you eat on autopilot because you're tired, what would really help you to rest? When you eat to let go and relax, what would really help you to relax? Does the food even do that? What really brings light relief to you? Is it conversation? A cuddle with a teddy bear or your dog? Or is it just something funny? We're not really getting much of a laugh these days, are we apart from being plugged into the television? How could you have more pleasure in your life? So all of this stuff I'm telling you is not a quick fix. This is something that if you address will help you to make powerful changes little by little over time. It's actually really a way of life. Often people who overeat have not been taught how to or even if it's okay to enjoy life. I know this is really hard right now because it's limited how we can enjoy our lives, but the first thing to notice is that you might not even feel it's okay to prioritize that. A lot of people who come to me think it's selfish to focus on their own enjoyment. Is this you? Do you feel that doing something just for the sake of doing it would be overindulgent or too frivolous? That's just pleasure in life. You're not just allowed to have that, it's actually where most meaning in life develops. Otherwise, what's the point in this life? Is it to work frantically and then to zone out for the rest of the day, or vice versa? Life is about pleasure. We're pleasure-seeking creatures. That might even be why you chose food in the first place, although it quickly becomes something not enjoyed. The thing that's going to have to be addressed sooner or later for lasting change is slowing down, as I said. Binge eating happens really fast. Food isn't tasted and it's often an autopilot experience. Can you identify with that? Mindful eating is about slowing down when you eat. Enjoying the food instead of wolfing it down without even noticing it. Just like living more mindfully. Living more mindfully is about enjoying your day, enjoying what you do at work or what you do all day, or even just taking out the dustbin, enjoying the moment somehow rather than resenting it and rushing it. Because you have the time to, rather than because you're trying to get it over with. So that's number five, to start reflecting on what you actually need and to start meeting your own needs. Because let me tell you, what I've found is that if you don't meet your needs, you're not going to give up the food. Or to put it in the opposite way, if you start meeting your needs, you're going to start treating yourself better, so you won't need the food so much. You won't need junk food. You won't need to squash how you feel because you won't feel that bad. You'll feel good about yourself because you'll be treating yourself like someone you actually love. So those are some of the things to explore if you find that the binge eating at a certain time of day cripples you a little bit. So here's to recap. Number one, understand your eating evening habits and what practical habits and habits of thought you have around food, or whatever time of day it is for you. Number two, ask yourself what state you're in all day that might be causing you to binge eat. It's important to understand what you were doing before the binge. And number three, what's the purpose of this state? What's the day state, or the weekend state, or the weekday state, or the night state? What's it doing for you? And number four, what is the purpose of your Binge. What is the binge doing for you? How well is it actually meeting what your needs are? And number five, what are your real needs? During the day, before you start to eat, and in the evening, what are your real needs? So that's it for today. I'll be back in two weeks, but thank you so much for listening. But if you're ready to go further now, please be in touch. My programme details are at bristolcounselling.co.uk, or you can get in touch with me, Shelley underscore treacher at hotmail.com, and you can also join my support group, Facebook Comfort Eating Recovery Support Group. Thank you so much. I hope to see you next time.