Emotional Eating: Food Isn’t the Problem - Your Brain Is.

We all need to learn to get back to that center position because that is ultimately where true healing is. Big picture, we all need to learn to have a balance of healthy self-regulation where we look to ourselves first and see what we can internally process and become accountable for before we talk about it with other people. If you pay attention to this part of the emotional healing architecture, many of your food behaviors will be self-resolving. The underlying emotional and behavioral roots of food have to be resolved for that behavior to no longer be something that your brain prioritizes because right now your brain has wired you to immediately link certain cause and effects with that behavior. You need to dismantle how your brain is perceiving reality and emoting so that that desire to go reach for the pine of ice cream is no longer something that your brain is aware of. We brought it into a new state of awareness where it has new choices and decisions. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Let's get into this episode on emotional eating. This is a topic that I bring up toward the end of Break Method in Module 3. And one of the typical pieces of feedback that I get from the lecture that I do there is that many people never really stop to examine their food behaviors, their relationship to food, and how food fits into their behavior cycle as a whole. And it's typically an aha moment. Personally, I never thought that I had an emotional relationship with food. Especially until the last few years and then really the last few years. I started to notice sneakier patterns regarding justifying certain food choices because I already felt like crap. For any of you that are out there listening to this or watching this that are moms or even new moms, sometimes you go through this period where, at least for me, my body didn't look and feel the way that it once did. And instead of that being a motivator, it actually became the reason that I started to justify eating some gluten-free mac and cheese, sampling my kid's toast. And little by little, I gained about 25 pounds and it snuck up on me because I have positive self-deception and I actually thought that I looked better than I did. And then I started to watch videos and see photos and I realized, dang, I really let myself go. It was a moment of realization for me that sometimes if our food behaviors don't necessarily come with a physical manifestation like weight gain or physical symptoms like migraines, sometimes we can just sweep them under the rug and excuse them or justify them or pretend that they're not operating. My hope is that in today's episode, you'll start to understand the way that food may play a sneakier role in some of your emotional ups and downs that you might have otherwise not noticed. One of the things that I really like to look at is that when we're thinking about role of food in our overall behavior, sometimes people think about food literally just by like the ingredient or what's on their plate and they're not really thinking about how they relate to the idea of food. Much more broadly, people are impacted by the idea and relationship to the concept of food rather than the actual macronutrients on your plate. Today is all about exploring past programming from childhood and beyond that influences the way we think about food, plan for food, the state of mind that we're in when we're eating food. It doesn't take long for people, I'm sure, to start thinking about how they engage with it. And I know for some people can sometimes start mindlessly snacking, for example, if they're doing something where they're stressed out or they're doing busy work, that's really repetitive. Oftentimes there's this oral fixation where you just keep wanting to like I'll have another trip and another trip and all of a sudden you look and the entire can of Pringles is gone. How did that happen? Well, it's because I was tunnel vision focused in this other area and my brain was prompting me to just kind of keep this feedback loop going of reaching for something oral fixations that I could maintain my focus. If you think about how the education establishment has started to engage kids with ADHD, this is it's a cousin to a fidget spinner. If the kid can't focus, they give him something to fidget with so that hopefully they can focus while their body's doing something physical, sometimes snacking functions in this regard. It's much like a fidget spinner. When we're thinking about food in general, I think there's this idea that if you just have enough willpower or if you just have the right meal plan, somehow all of your behavior issues surrounding food are just going to magically disappear. But what actually ends up happening? Yo-yo dieting, doing really well for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden completely backsliding or you make one mistake and then because you made that one mistake you kind of say, well, I already made a mistake today. I might as well just go all over the top and just do it for the rest of the day. These are some of those sneakier things that can really just completely destroy our health, destroy us emotionally, be pathways to guilt or shame or anxiety. And I think when we're talking about this topic today, I want you to be aware that food itself can trigger something, but we also can be triggered and then then tie that trigger to food. When we're thinking about this, think about behaviors like chronic snacking, overly controlling your meals or your macros where you're just very very fixated on needing things to be measured a certain way. Constant planning and thinking about food. There are people that are always thinking about their next meal or they could be eating the current meal and they're already thinking about, I wonder what I'm going to do for lunch. A great example of this would be my husband and I feel bad because I bring up my husband a lot on the show, but he knows the way it roll. One of the things he's very aware of is that his brain always needs something in the future to think about, to get him to feel excited so he can keep going. So he'll look forward to going to the store at the end of the day or on the way to pick up the kids from school. Let's get an energy drink. So it's almost like he's able to let that energy drink be a dangling carrot that allows him to move through discomfort during the day because he knows he's going to get that reward on the other side. Some of you use it more as a reward structure. Some of you actually in line with that reward structure, you sabotage yourself with the reward. Here's the example. You've done really well all week. You've stuck to your meal plan and for what it's worth, this is why I hate the concept of a cheat day if you've ever done a diet. Because it builds in this behavior and normalizes it. You've done really well for a week. You're feeling super good. You're like, oh my god, my bloating's down. I'm really starting to look fit. I think I could have a pizza tonight. Sure. Yeah, let's let's have a pizza. And then you're rewarding yourself for a job well done during the week with pizza. But then if you're me the next day you wake up bloated and you're like, oh, what did I do that? And again, depending on what emotional state you're in, some people go right back to the beginning and get very fixed on being restrictive again. Other people will take the opposite position, which is I already kind of feel like crap. So why not pile on? And I noticed over the last few years that I certainly have that tendency that I was not aware of. One of the things that I do want to draw attention to, which will be something that we talk about in this episode and the next episode on peptides, is really about the role autoimmune disease has played in my life and my ability to become strict with my diet. I got diagnosed with lupus when I was 23. And the only way for me to stop the symptoms was to go on a very strict nutritional protocol. I was about 23 at the time and I had done the Western medical route where the doctor looked at main center and have to be on these following medications for the rest of your life. These are the following things that might happen to you. And thankfully, I'm me and I'm stubborn. And I was like, nope, I'm not signing up for that. And I went on a hunt to find some sort of alternative practitioner. At 23, I was living on the Big Island of Hawaii and it just so happens that I found an alternative doctor who was a Western MD, but really was likely a functional MD all the way back then. I'm 40 just to give it some chronology. His name was Dr. Thall. I go into his office. He's wearing grateful dead stuff. Everything's very grateful dead hippie cave. And everyone's like, trust me, this guy's a genius. He's just going to fix you right up. I get there, chopped him through my symptoms and he was like, here's what you got to do. And I realized that one of the things that had led up to me having this diagnosis and all these symptoms was that I had been living in Hawaii at that point for about a year and my diet had radically changed because I was living with a bunch of Japanese people. And if you've ever spent time around Japanese people, they eat a lot of rice. Virtually at every single meal, I was eating rice. So I was eating in some ways healthier than I ever had been, farm to table, everything organic from the farm. But the one thing that changed was that I was suddenly now eating rice with every single meal. And it turned out it really was the rice that pushed my body to its absolute limit. And then I was dealing with this whole host of symptoms. When I'm talking to Dr. Thall and he kind of lays out these are things you got to do. It was a phased approach. In the beginning phase, it was obviously very restrictive. I could only have greens basically. And I was allowed to have one coconut water a day for a little bit of sugar. But other than that, I was not able to have any fruit, no sugar, no grains, pretty much lived on avocado, greens, cucumber. I think sometimes I was allowed to have a little bit of a red pepper. But other than red pepper and an actual coconut water out of the coconut, I had no sugar to speak of. And that lasted for a few weeks. I immediately started to feel better. It was probably like a weekend. I felt drastically different. And when I went on to the maintenance phase, he told me you're never going to be able to eat dairy or grains likely ever again. And just for clarity's sake, I'm saying grains like G-R-A-I-N-S like grains. A lot of times people are like, you can't eat grains, but no grains. From that age, really up until I had my last two babies, I have four babies, I was strictly paleo. I was the one that would go out to a restaurant with all my friends. And if there really wasn't something I could eat, I would just not eat. I was that dedicated. I was that dedicated because by rewiring the way I was approaching food, and I had obviously been faced with all these very debilitating symptoms, I was able to make the connection where a piece of bread didn't look like delicious bread anymore. Bread started to look like a rash or a bowl of rice started to look like muscle spasms. Sometimes we get to this place where we have to get ourselves backed into a corner where things are so bad or so painful that we're able to rewire how we think about food. Now, for those of you that are relatively familiar with brain pattern types, mine is the abandon hold it all together type. Naturally, I don't want to be a burden. I'm good at being self-sufficient. I don't want to ruffle any feathers. Even though if I look back in all of those times where I was like, I probably don't need more rice right now. I was just eating what was there and was participating in the meals. But eventually, when I really started to look at what's happening emotionally under the hood, some of this hold it all together quality of not wanting to be a burden and not wanting to be annoying with how I need different food than somebody else really was part of what got me in this deep dark hole. As we're going through this, I want you to think about these opposite sides of the pendulum because I was probably overly relaxed and just not wanting to be a burden. That led me to a symptom pattern that was profound while others deal with more restrictive obsessive fixated disorders where they are not eating food or they become so afraid of food that eventually they become so restrictive that they lose so much weight that they start to have other physical problems. On either side, whether it's not caring at all and just not wanting to be a burden or being too restrictive and rigid, physical and emotional symptoms can be a result of this. Be aware that this can happen on both sides and, of course, everywhere in the middle. When we think about food behaviors, I also want to earmark here. Hiding food is another one that people sometimes overlook. Example would be, let's say you've asked your kids to eat a certain way, but you keep your little treats or snacks or marshmallows up on a really high shelf that nobody else knows about. That's a behavior that's worth examining. If you are quick to snap at people, if they want to share food with you, that is something to examine because that sort of reflexive scarcity of like, you can't have any of my food, this is my food, that comes from a deeper brain pattern. That is not a typically occurring behavior in one of the places that I see this. Again, I see this with my husband sometimes, but I see this with clients all the time. Is it even with a child who, in my mind, if your child is like, mommy, can I have some of that? To me, and of course, my brain pattern is on this far left side. Of course, I'm going to be like, sure, take all my food, even if I'm starving, please, you first. There's an imbalance to that too. With children in particular, you would think you would want to just be giving your child food to your children without any sort of hesitancy or without any sort of rigid response where you want to covet your food. But I do see this pop up with parents where parents are like, you have your own food. That's a behavior that I would also like to draw attention to today, because I do think that that is something worth working through. Why is it that even when it's a four-year-old asking for a bite of your food, is your instinct to kind of lift your shoulders and say, no, this is my plate, go get your own food? That's coming from a childhood wound, and it's worth us tracking the etiology of that. Much of what I want to focus on today is understanding how childhood inputs both taught us how to think about food and how we engage with food. One thing that might be worth mentioning is the distinction between self-regulation and co-regulation, because this is something that isn't necessarily taught, and many people don't have this vocabulary. So I'll pause here and make sure that we're all working with the same definitions. When you are faced with some sort of emotional hardship or things just get tough, there are certain brain pattern types that look to others to help them feel better. And other could be a person. Other in early stages could be a pacifier. It could be a stuffed animal or a blankie. But the instinct isn't, I'm going to work through this on my own, and I'm going to self-regulate and get through this. The two terms that are going to split here are co-regulation and self-regulation. Co-regulation is when you feel that discomfort or the pain, and you look outside of yourself to either be comforted, soothed, or assisted. For people that self-regulate, you don't have that instinct. You don't reach outside of yourself. You go within yourself to strategize how to solve a problem. Some people don't only strategize. Some people also dissociate, so that's something worth noting is that there are people that self-regulate that one of their mechanisms of getting through it is simply to dissociate. Their physical body is present in it, but they check out until essentially that stress or that nervous system response times out, and then they kind of come back. And in those cases, that type of person may struggle with having a great memory because effectively they're there, but they're not there when they dissociate. Those mechanisms of strategy and dissociation would be on the self-regulation side. In general, those who tend to self-regulate are less likely to have some of these sneaky under the radar food behaviors. What is more likely to occur for you is that when you get stressed out, you forget to eat. And I know that this is a huge one for me. When I'm stressed out, I have no hunger signals whatsoever. For those of you listening that have been through breakups, especially as women, I know we have a lot of men that watch the show too, women know that there are people that when they're stressed out and going through breakups, what happens? Some of us look the hottest we've ever looked and we get super skinny and ripped, and then other people hit the bed and Jerry's pints and we put on a lot of weight. But typically, we fall into one of those two categories and we don't usually switch. This ties right back into our conversation on self-regulation versus co-regulation. Can you think of which one would be which? Yeah, I think you got it. But Jerry's co-regulation, forgetting to eat and looking the hottest you've ever looked because you're in a terrible dumpster fire of a situation in your life, that's the self-regulation piece. One of the things that's important for us to recognize is that our food actually does very much matter to our mental state and our health, and our brain and body do read certain nutrient levels just like a fuel gauge in a car. Some of our behavior will become erratic or even dysregulated if we don't have the nutrients that we need to thrive. An example of the self-regulation type that may forget to eat, eventually you start to experience a cascade of emotional dysregulation and probably making some pretty poor self-sabotage decisions because your body doesn't have the nutrients that it needs and you are now not thinking rationally. Although you tend to be that self-regulated person, if you go for a long enough period not properly nourishing your body, that can actually be a pathway to very reckless self-sabotage behaviors. And if I'm describing you and you feel called out, good, same girl, same, I have been there myself. Eventually someone that loves you is like, can I be honest with you, you are too skinny, could you please eat something? And if you're like me and I'll admit it too, because again this sort of food oral fixation thing, whether you're on the self-regulation or co-regulation side, they can come in tandem. Often that same person may magically, having not smoked cigarettes for a long time, may also start kind of closet smoking cigarettes when they're in that phase during sort of a wild breakup or a low point in their life. They're not eating, but their mouth is still getting the cues that I want something, I want to be doing something with my hand to mouth, so what am I going to start doing when we start chain smoking cigarettes? Obviously this is also going to lead you down a potentially very dark path where you're going to have to pull yourself out of a hole that you've dug yourself. Let's dig into the co-regulation side of how this can work. For some people when they get sad or their heart is broken, they look to food as a way to soothe themselves and co-regulate, so you may start binge eating, you may think to yourself, it doesn't matter, I don't have anyone to look good for. All of the behaviors that kind of kept your body composition in check before really were rooted in some sort of external validation seeking. I can maintain these habits or these eating behaviors as long as somebody's giving me the feedback that I look good, but as soon as that feedback gets pulled away and you're all alone in your heartbreak, suddenly you may go off the rails with eating whatever you want or eating Ben and Jerry pints of ice cream into the evening. The right hand side is much more likely to lead you into shame because eventually you're going to continue to pack on the pounds or put yourself in a situation where now you really also don't physically feel well. That will be that pathway for you to experience your version of self-sabotage and eventually that pathway tends to lead toward guilt and shame. What have I done? I really let myself go and then your brain is looking for something to pull you out of it and typically in that case, the shame, that little kind of onset of shame is one of the ways that you may start to pull yourself out of it, but for select people that actually starts a cascade of an even more profound eating behavior. I'll take a moment to remind you if you haven't listened to the previous episodes in brain pattern mapping, we track nine distinct markers and four of those markers are behavior and they specifically look at how behavior unfolds in a four phase cycle chronologically. We're tracking early stage, transitional and late stage behavior. If we look at this left hand side that we're talking about with self-regulated behaviors, typically in those early stages, this is where again you go strategic or dissociating and you are not eating. You're just kind of powering through life and trying to avoid having to deal with the heartbreak or pain that you're in. Eventually, like we talked about, you could lead yourself down a dark path into some sort of chaos and it would be the chaos that you create that would eventually cause you to snap out of it and go back to your beginning of your cycle. Essentially, as you're moving through those four phases, what I would expect to see there is that maybe you start to hang out with friends that you know don't bring out the best in you and then maybe you start to default back to old, more reckless or wild behaviors. You have a bunch of fun, you blow off some steam and then you realize, yeah, I can't do this anymore. I'm too old for this or I can't live my life like this anymore. I thought I'd outgrown this and it's the awareness of living a life that you intentionally chose not to live that ends up pulling you back to the beginning where hopefully you get a fresh start. For those of you that are on the right side and you look toward co-regulation, it can be more challenging to reset because of how that shame experience at the end can start to trigger even more dysregulated food behaviors. When we're thinking about food behaviors like the snacking, hiding, overeating, mindlessly snacking, restricting, forgetting to eat, all of these things are ultimately rooted to not just our emotional addiction cycle but our perception of reality. You've heard me talk about in previous episodes something called the neurocognitive funnel and brain pattern mapping tracks these nine markers that make up the neurocognitive funnel. The very top two are going to tell us how you perceive reality at that very base level. In our world we're always looking at pixels and we're trying to organize these pixels into things that make sense. So we're creating these definitions and when we create these definitions our brain is then going to have an emotional response to how we've defined it. Even when we're looking at the split between those who are more self-regulated and those who co-regulate, the self-regulate people when they're experiencing that the pain or the heartbreak, their perception of that event is not necessarily that life is over and I'm never going to move on from this. There's a part of them that naturally realizes this sucks but this is temporary. Nothing feels futile. They're still acutely aware of a future where this situation has ended and although the pain is happening right now because they are that self-regulated type, they have built the skills and the understanding that they can get themselves out of anything as long as they stay committed and keep methodically working through it. Another way to describe this is that these people on the left tend to be relatively relentless. If a bunch of bad things happen to you people you're like, how are you still going? It's not really like my mom or my dad or my genetics, it's literally my brain pattern. My brain pattern forces me to keep going into, to some degree, keep looking on the bright side even if we know that that bright side is not right now. Then if we look at the co-regulating people on the right, what often ends up happening is their perception of reality in those very instant moments. The wound or the heartbreak feels so victimizing and such a personal rejection that you can quickly get to this experience of futility. No one's ever going to love me. This is always going to happen where you start to think in these very broad blanket statements and it's in these more negatively skewed broad blanket statements that we end up looking for that ice cream, that bag of chips, something to make us feel better because there's a part of us that's trying to seek pleasure. To be honest, the more I work with clients who are the self-regulate type, I think their entire construct of pleasure seeking is not really wired all the way and I'll back this up. I think sometimes people that are on this left-hand side that tend to be more the self-regulating types, they can maybe, in the past, they have maybe like some wild tendencies. Like I know for example, I was a raver for really, really long time. For many years, I went to a rave every Friday and Saturday of every weekend for my whole life in my teens. That to me was like the closest I got to pleasure, which for me was really just peace, not having any commitments, just getting to completely be myself and kind of blend into a big crowd. That's not really the type of pleasure that we're talking about here with the right-side people. So people on the left, typically their pleasure, which if you're listening to this on audio and putting it in air quotes, really has more to do with relaxation and peace and being free of the burden of commitments and having to be responsible. That obviously can get you into other bad patterns too. It never got me into drugs because I was just much too controlled of a person to ever dip into that. But I think people on the left have likely dabbled with hallucinogens and parting and things like that. That might be an example of where over time you eventually start to justify that until you're like, what am I doing? I don't do this anymore. I need to go back to being like a mom or business person. But on the right-hand side, this experience of pleasure is much more rooted in dopamine and wanting to chase after something and kind of get that immediate feedback and that immediate feeling of pleasure. This is actually very opposite. This is not peace. It's not relaxation. It's a very high arousal state. To contrast this, the left-side people are typically looking to kind of be in almost more of a moderately neutral state where they can just kind of let go. The people on the right are actually looking for this high arousal state dopamine hit where they're actually experiencing pleasure, whether that's through craving a piece of food, like craving pasta or in some cases, craving drugs. They want that pleasurable feeling, for example, with somebody who struggles with opiate use disorder of the feeling of taking opiates. It's not necessarily the piece or the letting go. It's the actual tangible feeling. Each side of this, and hopefully by now that you're listening, you've essentially figured out where you belong because it doesn't take much conversation on this for you to be like, oh yeah, I'm here. I'm there. So hopefully you place yourself by now. Some of the behaviors on the right side that are more rooted into co-regulation can be trickier to stop because there are likely other ways that you co-regulate as well that go far beyond food. For this reason, I want to emphasize to you that work like break method and even just the insights that you can gain from brain pattern mapping highlight ways where you need to learn how to build the ability to self-regulate because if you continue to reach to outside mechanisms, either to cope or soothe or reward, you're going to be forever dependent on something outside of yourself. You need to learn how to become truly independent and only then when you rewire some of those more internal emotional structures will you stop engaging with food in these disruptive ways. On the left hand side, interestingly, people here need to actually learn to be vulnerable and learn how to let some of their heartbreak or pain out into a space where they can have somebody at least process it with them because this is something that their brain won't naturally look to. Example, if I'm in pain, my instinct is I need to be alone and I'll be quiet. If I'm like really mad or something's really wrong, I go completely dead silent and all I want to do is be away from everybody. This episode is brought to you by Healing Sauna, the most advanced portable infrared sauna on the market and it's trusted by people like Dave Asprey and Peter Diamandis. I've been using this consistently at home and it is truly next level. I found them at Dave Asprey's biohacking conference. The girl ran me down and was like, hey, Bizzy, we love what you do. You have to try this. It's got 99% purity with every single one of its infrared ceramic chips, zero EMF. That's right. 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And I would appreciate it deeply if you would go check it out by far and away the best sauna I have ever owned. If you are serious about your health, recovery, and longevity, go head over to Healing Sauna's, use my code BGHeal for $100 off. Something that would help me actually pattern pose and ultimately rewire would be in those states to go to my husband and say something like, honey, I really don't want to talk right now, but I'm trying to do my pattern opposition work. I'm experiencing this and this and this. And I know my instinct is to just run away and deal with it alone, but I just wanted you to know that I'm hurting. And he's like, oh my God, honey, that's, wow, he was actually exposed yourself to me. It gives me a hug and I'm like, okay, cool. Okay, that's good. I'm good. I like put enough out there that now you at least know what's going on with me. That is a more healthy form of co-regulation where you're not compartmentalizing, you're not hiding, you're not just immediately processing alone in isolation, but you're actually letting people into what's going on. But you can see here, the distinction is I'm also not venting and dumping on this person and expecting them to solve my problems or engage with my problems in such a way that it starts to make my problems escalate rather than de-escalate. So there is this kind of happy medium that we all need to learn how to do, whether it's I tend to look to other people or other objects to help me co-regulate and solve my problem, I need to learn how to spend a little bit more time by myself to see if I can get myself to a healthier state before I go talk to somebody so that I'm not just dumping and venting on them and expecting them to somehow engage me emotionally so I can keep playing this out. We all need to learn to get back to that center position because that is ultimately where true healing is. So big picture, we all need to learn to have a balance of healthy self-regulation where we look to ourselves first and see what we can internally process and become accountable for and take responsibility for before we talk about it with other people. I truly believe that if you pay attention to this part of the emotional healing architecture, many of your food behaviors will be self-resolving. That might be hard for some of you to process if you've spent a lot of time working in therapy on, you know, addictive food behaviors and so on and so forth. The underlying emotional and behavioral roots of food, in my opinion, have to be resolved for that behavior to no longer be something that your brain prioritizes because right now, your brain has wired you to immediately link certain cause and effects with that behavior. We need to dismantle how your brain is perceiving reality and emoting so that that desire to go reach for the pine of ice cream is no longer something that your brain is aware of. We've brought it, we've brought it into a new state of awareness where it has new choices and decisions. I want to take a moment here and have everyone just, for one moment, just think about some of the food behaviors that you were exposed to in your early childhood. I'm going to go through and detail some of the things that I'm very acutely aware of because we do get influenced by what we see, what we experience, but also what is more covert and not explicitly said to us, but the gaps that we fill in in our childhood. The first thing that came to mind when I started thinking about this for myself was my dad. My dad was a fitness fanatic, still is by the way. My dad's turning 80 this year and whenever people see him, they're like, what? Your dad is not 80 and he's a real turning 80, born in 1945. My dad looks like he's maybe like late 50s, super fit, eats healthy, always has my whole life. Everything about his food was extremely restrictive. He always ate healthy. Everything about his early morning routine was very rigid and routine. Even from the early stage, I remember him always making protein shakes. My dad got me in the habit of drinking protein shakes when I was little, especially when my parents split up and I was living with my dad. Little funny side note, I was born in 1985 and the time frame that we're really looking at here is like early 90s and I don't know if anyone else had this experience, but my dad was really into these protein shakes. I think it was called Metrix. It was like M-E-T-R-X. Arguably that stands for some sort of like metabolism prescription, but honestly, these were for bodybuilders and I'm pretty sure every shake of like a thousand calories. So my dad not really thinking about it clearly was like, here, have these shakes. I was like really front loading a lot of calories that I probably didn't need at age like six, 70, but nonetheless, that's how I was raised with my dad. Also, in terms of exercise, which often food and exercise behaviors tend to come in tandem. My dad was very adamant about if we were going to be watching a movie, we had to be on a spin bike or a recombent bike. So if you went into my living room, and I know for some of you are listening to this and you're like busy, what? This is a true story. If you went into my living room, and by the way, this is after my parents got divorced. My dad didn't do this. My parents were married because I'm sure my mom would have had a total meltdown about exercise equipment being in her immaculate living room because she's an interior designer. Now my parents get divorced. My dad, we have this like obviously big grand living room, but right in front of the big screen TV are spin bikes and a recombent bicycle. You know, the one where you sit down. And that was the rule. If we wanted to watch a family movie, which we did most of the time, you had to be on an exercise bike. So there was this constant care for the human body that I both witnessed and heard my dad articulately over and over again. And I watched my dad every single night of my childhood that I can recall. My dad went on the stairmaster for 45 minutes every single night with depositions. So if he went down to the gym, and which is in our basement, my dad had the stair master and he literally would have like a stack this big of depositions. And he'd just sit there. He's a lawyer going through depositions while I was on the stair master. And that was his routine. That obviously left a mark on me because from a very early age, I also became very obsessed with fitness and food. Now my mom is a totally different story here. My mom actually was not fitness obsessed at all was always very, you know, looking back on it, I caught myself there. I think I always thought she was really naturally skinny. But looking back on it, she surely had and still has an eating disorder. But it just goes to show you in those younger years, especially when I was going through puberty, I remember looking at her body and being like, what's wrong with me? Like, why don't I look like my mom? My mom's super, super tiny. So this is another side note, just, you know, maybe TMI, but it's hilarious. And we might as well be wrong authentic on the show. My mom also for like, you know, 80s back then, she had huge fake boobs, except I didn't know she had fake boobs. So growing up going through puberty, I kept thinking in my head, like, one day my boobs are going to go one day. What happened? They didn't, because they weren't real. I didn't realize this until later on, you know, you're observing these things and your brain's kind of piecing together these little things. I'm like, Oh, I'm going to be skinny and have big boobs like my mom. And then I hit puberty and I'm like, Hey, wow, this is not going the way that I thought it was going to go. Additionally, if I look at some of the patterns and habits that I observed in my mom, she was constantly plating people's food and then not sitting down for dinner. So she would give herself nothing. She played everybody's food. And then if you asked her, like, Mom, why aren't you eating? She said, Oh, I just picked while I was cooking. That was always the answer. I just, I pick while I'm cooking. But also she had other very picky food behaviors that were much like what you would see in a toddler where she was very restricted with her food, but not in a health conscious sense. This was a little bit more in an OCD sense where foods couldn't be touching each other. Or if you were eating foods that she didn't like, she would feel compelled to tell you how disgusting they were. And I will say, I've caught this in myself a couple of times with my kids because of something I'm about to share with you right now. I am 40 years old and I have never in my entire life tried ketchup mustard or mayonnaise. They completely disgust me because I never had access to them. And my mom, over time, little by little, just she like programmed me to think that they were so disgusting that eventually I too felt like they were disgusting. And I do have a disgust response to condiments. And I've caught myself because my daughter Harley loves putting mustard on her sandwich. So I, in the very beginning when she first asked me, I was aware of the thought where I'm like, I thought like, ew, I didn't raise a child that eats mustard. And then I'm like, well, busy, you're way more emotionally mature than this. And I remember looking at the mustard that was in the fridge because my husband also loves it. And I talked myself there, I was like, we're not going to pass this on to your daughter if she loves mustard, bless it. You don't have to, but you do have to be emotionally mature enough to grab the damn mustard and put it on the girl's sandwich without making her feel ashamed. But I caught that reflex in myself because I almost did it myself. Put the mustard on her sandwich, pass it to her and my husband looks me like, wow, honey, I'm so proud of you touched a mustard. And I'm like, yep, we all can grow. Okay. But it just shows you how those little things will start to program you. And if I was not more self aware, I could have easily passed that same thing onto my daughter. Ew, you're going to eat mustard. That's so gross. I say this because some of these little things that happen in our early childhood, they do very much become part of the architecture with which we see the world. Example of that neurocognitive funnel, I hear mustard and my initial response is, ew, but that's not appropriate due to a four year old who just wants to come to mommy and wants a sandwich. So we have to be aware of some of those instinctive reflexes. Another thing that I very vividly recall in my childhood is that we also had my sister in the mix. My little sister definitely tended more toward OCDs sort of behaviors like my mom. And of course we've got my dad who's this fitness fanatic. So my dad's a fitness fanatic, always talk honestly if I'm really being totally honest. My dad definitely bashed overweight people quite a bit too, which as the kid, of course that programs you like, don't become the thing that your dad hates, don't become the thing that your dad hates. So that was also happening in the background. Then we've got my mom who's like super real thin, but my sister and I aren't really young enough to realize like, oh, she's probably got anorexia. And for what it's worth, my mom's I'm sure also naturally a very small person, but additionally, they were definitely eating disorder behaviors. So my sister then has to look at these two archetypes. My dad who's constantly bashing overweight people, that's a complete fitness fanatic and very rigid. And then my mom, who she never really sees eat at all. And then whenever she does describe food, everything's disgusting. And she's just super real thin. So my sister was kind of caught between a rock and hard place, because my sister is on the right side of the spectrum. She is very much the co-regulation type. She had a blankie forever. And she does look outside of herself naturally to soothe or to satiate herself so she feels like she can handle something. She started to closet this behavior of eating entire bags of chewy chips of white cookies. I don't know if you guys remember this from the 90s, but it was like the two row like big pack. She'd actually, if she got her hands on any, if there's any bag anywhere of chewy chips of white, she'd sneak off and eat the entire thing. I can't even think about how many calories that would be. This started this kind of sneaky fighting behavior where she didn't want to overtly do it because she didn't want to get shamed by my dad or have my mom be like, that's so disgusting. So my mom barely even eats, which, of course, if you're thinking like I am at this point, it's like, why are the adults buying these cookies? But again, we don't know why parents do what they do. Somehow it took them a while to figure out, I just shouldn't buy cookies. But that took unfortunately a very long time. So then I'm sure and obviously my sister can weigh in on this. I think over time, if you're on that right hand side and you've kind of built this closeted behavior, then anytime your dad like kind of fat shames people, all of a sudden you start to take that personally if you kind of feel like, oh no, I am that person, it can actually perpetuate the behavior. Remember when we talked about how when you do it, then you go into the shame and futility where it's like, oh my god, I can't stop. And then when you realize you can't stop, you kind of go into this apathy state and then you just continue to do it even more. I think in this case, I naturally came out more like, actually probably 50 50 split, I was much more potentially rigid in some ways where I did obviously want to look a certain way. And I do remember very vividly in high school, I did become very obsessed with going to the gym as soon as my dad got me a gym membership, I'm pretty sure I was 16. And obviously I'd grown up working out in my home gym. But once I was able to go to the gym and let that be something that I could do to get out of the house, especially during the summer, I became absolutely exercise-blemic. I would be on the treadmill forever. I was so obsessed with calories. And obviously that's not good for your body, especially at that age when you're developing. And it did a lot of harm. And finally, one day, I had gotten so skinny. And my mom that like bless her, because I, you know, for my mom to say this, I knew it was pretty bad. I was self aware enough when my mom told me this, I was like, Oh, damn, my mom looks at me one day and she goes, I just want to say, you are way too skinny. I don't know what you think you're doing. But you need to eat some food. And in my mind, I'm like, damn, if my mom is telling me that I'm too skinny and eat some food, I must really problem. And I obviously woke up to this and realized I needed to completely change how I was approaching my relationship with food and exercise. Having shared these stories, I want you to think for a moment, how were you patterned as a child? What were the things that you were experiencing? How did mom show up with food behaviors or how she talked about her body image? How did dad talk about it? Grandparents, babysitters, siblings, because all of these things all serve as inputs that formulate our relationship to food and how we engage with food. I'm going to give you a moment to try to piece that together as you're listening, because I want to actually start to have you guys think, are you equating certain things in a formula? So example would be, in your mind, do you feel like food makes you fat? Did you get the message that you have to watch your figure? Do you eat for muscle? Do you eat when you're sad or mad or bored? Do or snacks used as a child to just shut you up and keep you placated because that's another thing entirely. We receive these over and covert messages about food our entire early childhood. And these do affect us deeply as adults. And if we don't systematically uncover each one and understand how it's in operation subconsciously, we run the risk of it actually doing severe damage, not just in our personal lives, but also with our body image and our health overall, because these dysregulated food behaviors in the long term can lead to chronic health conditions like diabetes, obesity, etc. Or if you're on the highly restrictive side or even the bulimic side, obviously this can lead to complete organ failure, esophageal cancer, so many other things. When you're thinking about food, this is what I want you to ask yourself. How would your life change if you stopped having an emotional attachment to food and started to see it purely as a food source? Just resonate with that for a second. How would my life change? I know I've finally gotten there and I have had glimmers of that in my life and certainly getting that lupus diagnosis that we talked about helped me really look at food as a fuel source. But again, once I had these last two babies, I kind of defaulted back to my old patterns where food became a control mechanism to look a certain way rather than physically feel a certain way. When we're thinking about how we start to shift our understanding of food to being like a fuel source, it's really important that we start to remember that our body really does have this sort of fuel gauge component where we are actually trying to meet certain nutrient loads. One of the things that can happen here is that when our guts become dysregulated through a variety of mechanisms, so I'm sure many of you know what leaky gut is. Leaky gut is one way that this can happen. You can also have gut dysbiosis where there's an unhealthy imbalance of gut bacteria. You can start to have these problems where no matter what you eat, your body's nutrient gauges are not getting fulfilled and it's prompting you to just always feel hungry and continue to eat more and more and more. We do want to take into consideration the very physiological component of hunger because that is something that can get damaged by way of emotional eating and then can be the reason that emotional eating becomes perpetuated. For all people, and I know this is hard for some to wrap their heads around because many people that are in kind of the eating disorder space, it seems like the classic strategy is to just kind of stop restricting at all and you can't even talk about any sort of restriction or maybe we shouldn't eat this ingredient so we can eat these other things freely. People get very up in arms about any sort of tailored or restricted approach, but I will say there's so much evidence that supports when your gut is in dysbiosis, your emotional eating will likely become worse rather than better. We don't address this now kind of new root cause, whether this is a chicken or egg situation, did the emotional eating cause the gut dysbiosis or not, that's for another podcast episode entirely when we can go through the gut brain access. But here's what I will say, the gut is considered the second brain. When we think about the connection between the brain to the gut and the gut back to the brain, it's really important for us to remember that the signals going from the gut back to the brain are almost 80% stronger than those going from the brain down to the gut. So the more likely culprit is that all of our eating habits over the years, I don't know how old you are, but for ever many years you are old, eventually start to create some sort of gut dysbiosis. There's environmental factors, there's potential vaccine factors, there's all these other factors that can also start to damage your gut might for bio. We've got potentially these years of habits that haven't been checked that are tied to emotions and poor beliefs, but then we end up at 30, 40, 50, 60, however years old you are right now. And now your gut is in this dysregulated state. If we only address the emotional without actually helping your gut microbiome, the chances are these 80% stronger signals going from your dysregulated gut back up to your brain are going to override any behavior change that you try to adopt in your life. I think it's much better and a much more sustainable strategy to take a two-prong approach. We have to address the emotional, behavioral, and belief components, but we also have to address the gut dysbiosis itself. Leaky gut happens from a variety of factors, but one of the more common is gluten intolerance, or for many people literally just the inability to process grains. Grains have a coating that can actually start to clog your intestinal villi and you can no longer absorb nutrients. You're eating all this food, but none of the nutrients that you're trying to get out of the food are actually going where they need to go. So you just continue to feel hungrier and hungrier. Meanwhile, we start to create intestinal permeability where this kind of gluey sticky substance starts to push the cell walls apart. And now we have rogue particles going into your bloodstream that are unfortunately now able to dock in places and with receptors that they're not supposed to. I want to point out a couple areas where there are tons of clinical research and studies on this where this is absolutely a proven link. One of the most proven links is between IBS, okay, and mood-related disorders. These two tend to go hand in hand. I'm going to read from the screen so that I can tell you exactly what the statement is from this article and I'll also link all of this research in the show notes. Patients who suffer from IBS are far more likely to suffer from mood-related disorders like depression and anxiety. In this study, the rate of generalized anxiety disorder, which is described as chronic worrying, restlessness, fatigue, irritability, and sleep disturbances, among IBS patients was five times higher than the rate of the general population. And IBS is almost five times more common in anxiety patients than mentally healthy people. It also works the other way. Anxiety and stress can trigger IBS symptoms, which in turn tends to create more stress. So this shows you how this feedback loop can go, which came first, the chicken or the egg, well, can go both ways. Once you're in this cycle, it does become self-perpetuating, but whichever problem ultimately comes first, the upshot is clear. Anxiety and gut health go hand in hand. To figure out how diet can affect anxiety, our prime suspect should be how our diet affects our gut. We cannot discount how our gut and our emotions link in with each other. They are very much connected. And unfortunately, as I've mentioned, the gut signals going up to the brain are far stronger. Another case I want to look at is the link between schizophrenia and milk protein sensitivity. This one is amazing. There's so much research here. I'm going to read you some of what I found, but I encourage you go do some of this research on your own. It's incredible. And the fact that we are now finally in 2025 at the higher levels of government, finally starting to ask and talk about some of these topics about what are the true nutritional inputs that are generating some of these chronic disease outputs. I cannot believe it took us this long to get here. It's been painfully obvious and why nutrition discussions are not a broader aspect of Western medicine in general as beyond me. If you look at any sort of traditional medicine like TCM, IRB, or beta, nutrition and food are always one of the primary sources of how you solve problems. One of the first places that you look. And yet in Western medicine, we've just completely ignored this and not made it part of, or I should say a significant enough part of Western medical training. And I really do think we are seeing the tides turn right now, which is amazing. Let's take a look at the comorbidity between casein intolerance and schizophrenia. Elevated immune responses to milk proteins, particularly bovine casein, have been consistently observed in individuals with schizophrenia, suggesting that casein sensitivity plays a role in the pathophysiology of the disorder. This might sound surprising at first, but for over a decade, research has consistently shown elevated immune response to casein, the primary protein in milk. Got milk? Do you guys think about how many campaigns there have been to make sure that we all drink as much milk as possible? Interesting. These aren't food preferences. These are measurable biological responses, specifically high levels of IgG antibodies that indicate immune activation to milk proteins. What's more, these levels are elevated not just in long-term schizophrenia cases, but also in individuals with newly diagnosed or even pre-diagnosis symptoms. Why does this matter? Because when the immune system is chronically activated, especially by food antigens, it can contribute to inflammation in the brain, disrupting neurotransmission and reinforcing the exact cognitive and emotional patterns that we're trying to solve. So in cases like this, casein isn't just a dietary restriction that people should just prefer not to drink. It literally is the missing link in the gut brain immune triad that is shaping full-blown psychotic episodes. When it comes to schizophrenia, if you know somebody who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, or you have a family member, or maybe it's even you personally, one of the things I would highly suggest looking at is their diet. Because in many cases, completely removing casein, in particular, all milk proteins has been linked to decrease in symptoms. Another thing that I want to look at here is the link between gluten intolerance and anxiety and panic disorders. And this was something that I think profoundly impacted me personally. Many of you know that I started having panic attacks when I was nine. They didn't stop until I was 19. I think there are a variety of things that I did at 19 that probably supported it. I think some of you, if you listen to my other podcast, you probably listened to the episode I did, the scariest episode I've ever done, where I do talk about a personal radical encounter that I had with Jesus as a Jew from New York, completely unexpected. And in a moment of transactional prayer, I never had a panic attack over again. But additionally, around that same time, I had completely cut out gluten from my diet, completely. So I'm sure one piggybacked the other. I find this really interesting because this is definitely something that would have profoundly impacted me. Various types of anxiety are associated with gluten intolerance. One study found that Celiac patients are significantly more likely to experience state anxiety compared to controls and are reported higher lifetime prevalence of panic disorder. What we're seeing here is a clear link between gluten intolerance and emotional dysregulation, particularly in the form of anxiety and panic disorder. The gut and brain are in constant communication. And when the intestinal barrier is compromised, it often is in Celiac and non Celiac gluten sensitivity. The resulting inflammation and immune response can cross the blood brain barrier and disrupt emotional regulation. For many of these patients, anxiety isn't just situational or trauma based. It's actually biochemical in the form of inflammation, malabsorption and immune reactivity. This is all disrupting neurotransmitter balance. Here's the key. For some people, removing gluten actually can completely stop symptoms of anxiety within weeks, two months. So again, when we're talking about the emotional prevalence of panic attacks, we also have to be willing to zoom out and look at what literally is on your plate because, think about it this way, some of you have had these situations where you get really stressed out and maybe you start to make poor food choices and maybe you start binging on junk food. What might end up happening if you already have this underlying sensitivity. Now suddenly you're becoming even more emotionally dysregulated in part because of what you're eating. We have to remember that these things are all interconnected and big picture, this is not simply a willpower issue. I hope that I've really gotten that through to you that we have to understand this deeper work of how we relate to food and we use food both as a way to become triggered or to trigger the next state that we're ultimately trying to get to whether our brain is addicted to shame and we're trying to get ourselves to a shame state. We have to be able to also understand how these emotional components, when repeated over time, they actually start to destroy and imbalance our physiology. To take purely a one-ponged approach would never actually solve the problem. We have to solve the problem in a multi-dimensional way. We have to address the underlying poor beliefs and the relationships that we've built up around food and even the subconscious messages that we have around food that may be consciously we don't actually agree with, but there's a part of us that's still at that subconscious level does and that still drives behavior because some of you know better. Why don't you do better? Because the part of you that consciously knows is not unfortunately the one that's typically acting out behavior. You're only becoming conscious once you've gotten yourself into a situation where you're into pain. So we have to understand that emotionally, but we also have to understand how that repetitive behavior has possibly led to autoimmune or chronic disease conditions or gut dysbiosis. So we have to work on healing both simultaneously. This is something that we work on in Break Method and I want to close out today's episode talking about something that has absolutely worked for me and it's been such a profound shift and I'm going to go into it a lot more on the next episode on peptides. If you're looking at me and you're like, wow, busy, like your face looks a little different. You look a little leaner. Yeah, I am leaner. I've lost 15 pounds actually in the last three weeks. I feel amazing better than I have probably since I was like 25 to 27 years old. And it's because of taking this multi-prong approach where I'm very intentionally at the root level stopping inflammation, healing my gut and addressing some of these more emotional components. I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did and how I did it so that it's something that you have the ability to access as well. But I will say since I've been doing this protocol, I've become acutely aware of small ways that I actually did have cravings that I was just overlooking because remember I'm that left-hand side person where I just kind of power through and strategize and maybe at times even dissociate. So I don't think I was aware of how many times like if my kids were eating chocolate, I'd just kind of mindlessly eat some chocolate or if they were eating some popcorn, I'd just mindlessly eat some popcorn because I wasn't really methodically thinking my way through it. Now that I'm doing this protocol, literally all of my cravings are gone and I have not eaten chocolate or really anything crappy in weeks, not because I'm restricting myself, but it literally does not look appealing anymore. I have completely altered the way I am relating to food and cravings. Food is, I can tell you for maybe the first time in my life, food is 100% a fuel source only right now and it feels so free even for somebody where I would never have described myself as an emotional eater or somebody who really had unhealthy food behaviors other than obviously when I'm stressed out I am the type that does forget to eat or just doesn't feel hungry, I'd have to kind of force myself. This is the first time in my adult life where food is 100% a fuel source, I have no cravings and I just feel so free. Eating is such a part of our culture and our society and our day-to-day lives that we sometimes don't realize how far gone we are until some of these deeper habits and cravings have been addressed and I didn't realize how many times I might have subconsciously been thinking in the middle of an appointment, what am I going to get for lunch? It robs you of being present when you're constantly thinking about food or even just feeling that ravenous hunger for no reason. I definitely was a hangry person, I don't know if anyone else listening is a hangry person, but my husband historically he'll look at me and be like honey you need to eat, you're hangry and I'm like am I, okay yeah maybe I do need to eat. I will divulge exactly what I'm doing and break it all down for you so that everybody has access to it, but I will just say part of what sparked this emotional eating conversation for me was I had my own realization over the last few weeks and months about my own kind of core wounding around beauty and validation seeking and how that ties into food and now being a few weeks on the other side of it and really finally feeling like myself again, obviously I want to shout out from the rooftops and tell everybody how they can have access to it too. I hope today's episode gave you some food for thought and helped you realize that it's often these subtle under-the-radar input messages that are far more responsible for our dysregulated behaviors with food than the really big obvious ones. I hope you go digging around a little bit, I hope that separating out the two types of the self-regulated and co-regulated helps you understand perhaps where you fall in that spectrum with your food behaviors and as always I highly encourage you go check out brain pattern mapping when you get those night markers it tells you a whole lot about why you do what you do so that you can actually learn to stop it. Simply being aware of a behavior that you want to stop is not even close to enough to get it to stop in a sustainable Thank you for spending this time with me, I hope that you will join me for the peptide episode. I'm so excited to go into the nerdy science on peptides for that episode, I will be wearing my glasses the whole time because we are going deep into data research. I really hope that you'll join me for that episode and please if you feel called to share this episode with somebody that has struggled with this or you just really think that they need a little bit of decoder in their lives please share the episode. If you could go leave us a rating and a review it would mean so much to us because we are a new show. I hope that you've been enjoying tuning in weekly and I will see you for our next episode on peptides. Bye y'all. Your brain isn't broken, it's running an old code. Break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic-based rewiring in 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to.