RYW 140: Are You Really an Emotional Eater or Is It Brain Biology?

I am Rachel if you haven't joined us before and I'm very excited to have you here because today we're going to talk about a topic which is called restriction rebound and And I want to help you understand, first of all, what it is, why it happens, why this gets mislabeled as emotional eating constantly and actually what's going on in your brain when it is something that's happening.

So I want to start by painting a picture.

And this is probably very, very familiar to you.

You have been very disciplined all week, like really, really disciplined.

You've done everything right.

You're very proud of yourself, but then something happens.

Maybe it's a mundane, normal, regular Thursday evening.

Maybe it's after a stressful meeting.

Maybe actually it's nothing at all, but you suddenly find yourself eating everything that you can possibly get your hands on.

Now you know it's not because you're sad, you're not really feeling stressed, it's not because you're turning to food to cope with some deep unresolved like trauma.

You're eating because your body's basically grabbed the wheel and you have absolutely no say in it whatsoever.

But then the story that you tell yourself is, oh my God, I'm an emotional eater.

I wonder what's going on.

Something must be wrong with me.

And maybe if you are already in this process of exploring these topics for yourself, you may have spent then quite a lot of time afterwards feeling actually a little bit baffled because there wasn't any specific emotion that you were aware of.

You weren't thinking anything in particular.

You weren't feeling particularly uncomfortable.

And that then even creates more of a spiral because then you really do think, well, there must be something wrong with me because I don't understand why I'm doing this.

So this is what I want to talk about.

So let's start with emotional eating.

Now, the emotional eating label is everywhere.

And look, emotional eating is very, very, very real.

Like people do use food to manage feelings and to change how they're feeling and that happens.

But I want to just push back a little bit on how quickly we can reach for that explanation because I do see it misapplied actually quite a lot.

And the reason that matters is because if you're treating, quote unquote, treating the wrong problem, you're never going to fix the actual one.