Hello, and welcome to the Chaos to Calm podcast episode number 71. I'm Sarah, The Perimenopause Naturopath, your guide through this magical journey that is perimenopause. If you're over 40 and feeling like your changing, hormones are hijacking your mood, energy, and weight and you want to change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you, my friend, because each episode I share with you my views on what is happening in your body, why you're feeling the way that you are and how you can manage it with actionable advice to help you move from chaos to calm and feel more comfortable in your body. Thank you so much for joining me.

Let's get into today's topic, which is all about emotional eating. Because I don't know about you, but each week at the moment is feeling a bit busier than the last one. And like I work for myself, don't really have an end of year function. My kids are homeschooled. We don't have a lot of those end of year activities, although the things that we do kind of finish up.

So sometimes there's celebrations, but there's not really additional celebration. So my life is pretty busy as a someone who commented this morning, who comes to take my kids out while I'm recording on Tuesdays said to me, you guys are very busy. You do a lot of activities. Yes, we, all the four, four of us in the family out of the six play sport and different, so there's some different sports and we have all our homeschool activities as well. So we're pretty busy. 

But I know that for lots of you, this end of year is getting super busy too. And at the moment I am getting prepped for a homeschool camp we're going to next week. I love that there's just me and the two younger kids going, everyone else staying home and working and doing the rest of their life.

I'm super excited because it feels kind of like a break before we slide into December. I know it's pretty busy getting ready for things. It's always the thing with holidays, isn't it? Super busy getting prepped and then you get to go away and enjoy it and then you come back and you have to catch up.

That's mum life, right? So yeah, end of year rush. I would say it's not even approaching, it's here and life really does feel like it's stepped it up a notch. There's you've got lots of to do, your list is very long. Mine is anyway. I'm sure yours is too. There's family obligations and other extra social gatherings as well as like maybe if your child's in year 12 or ending primary school, you've got graduations and things like that too.

So I always like to say that for lots of women. For most women I know this isn't just the season of giving, it's the season of getting more on your plate, more stress, more busyness, more being overscheduled. And with that, can come emotional eating, that buffering. So you might have found yourself halfway through a tub of ice cream after a long day, or maybe you're reaching for the wine as soon as you get home or after a terse conversation in the evening.

You might not even think about it as such, but you know, all of that is emotional eating and drinking. And it tends to happen more in the festive season and also I want you to know that your hormone changes in perimenopause and menopause can take it up a notch or make you more susceptible to it. So that's what we're going to talk about today I'm going to talk about what is emotional eating, why it's so common, particularly during those stress these stressful or busy times and how those hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause play a role and probably most importantly, I'm going to talk to you about the next step to take towards addressing it, not with restriction but with awareness and kindness and support because, yeah, that's what I'm about and, there's a reason that we're doing this.

I wonder if you've found yourself heading to the pantry or the fridge more at the moment maybe after a stressful or really busy day and maybe not even physically hungry. You're probably not physically hungry. So yeah, what were you feeling? How are you feeling? How are you feeling right now?

Great time to check in with yourself. So let's talk about what is emotional eating. It's emotional eating is when we use food or drink to cope with our emotions or to suppress our emotions to help us stop feeling them. So it's not about satisfying a physical hunger. It's not really about whatever you're consuming, the wine, the chocolate, the chips or anything like that themselves.

It's about how they temporarily mask the feelings of stress, sadness, frustration, boredom, all those negative emotions that we might feel, which I'm going to have a whole nother side quest conversation here, but I'm not going to today. We'll stay focused here, but you know, so at its core, emotional eating serves as self comfort.

It's that short term acute stress relief or sadness, relief, whatever emotion is behind that there for you, it gives us a momentary escape, some short term relief from those feelings and or the stress. So for lots of women, it is a pattern tied to stressful situations. And in the holidays, emotions can run high.

So, yeah, you're more likely to emotionally eat or want to buffer. Which is what we're doing with the food. We're buffering. We're avoiding the feelings. We're avoiding feeling negatively. We're trying to. I would argue that it doesn't necessarily always work because then there's a whole lot of shame and judgment on ourselves after the event.

And I'm always curious, like what's your go to comfort food or drink when you're feeling overwhelmed or stressed or when you just find yourself in the pantry in the evening. I'd love to know why you think you reach for that and feel free to leave me in the comments. Leave me a note in the comments, on this episode or DM me on Instagram.

I'm always really curious because it tells us a lot about your biochemistry and what's happening in your body there. So as I said holidays can really magnify your stress. Yeah, we kind of get that, but also heighten your emotions and make emotional eating more likely. And that's a few reasons why that happens.

So first of all, it's in our brain. Okay. Bye. When we're stressed or we're experiencing an unpleasant or negative emotion, one that we don't really want to feel, but I would say it's really important to feel, because if we don't feel the bad or the unpleasant, how do we appreciate the good anyway? When you're stressed or you're experiencing those emotions, your primal brain, I like to call it the monkey mind or your child brain.

This is more like your subconscious brain there. It's not the logical reasoning adult brain that our frontal lobe is. So it goes into overdrive trying to make it stop. And it's primary goal is to make you feel safe and happy as quickly as possible using the least amount of resources that it needs.

And food or drink is a really easy solution because it knows there's a whole bunch of foods and drinks that have, you've felt happy with before that have lit up the reward center in your brain. So those that are high in sugar or high carbohydrate and high fat tend to read like together the high sugar, high fat or high carb, high fat.

They really light up your brain's reward center with a hit of dopamine. Think about hot chips, like as if they don't make you feel good. So dopamine is our feel good, our short term happiness molecule, a neurotransmitter. So your brain is basically constantly seeking these dopamine hits. It's why we have so much trouble putting our phones down, hopping off social media.

If you're a gamer, like if you like playing those things, like, well, I can think of as Farmville, but I think it's like Stardew Valley and stuff like that. Now that people play Candy Crush, all of those things are designed to light up. Your reward center and your dopamine in your brain. And yeah, we do, we can do that with food as well.

It's like, why you think at the end of the day, I really need a wine. It's like your monkey mind. Your primal brain is that, Hey, you worked hard today. You really deserve this. Let's go chill out and get a dopamine hit cause it seems like you're a bit sad and that dopamine is lacking. Let's give you a hit and help you feel better.

And it's, addictive. Right? This is how addictions work as well. They light up that reward center and it's all about the dopamine. But what happens over time is that your brain's reward center adapts to the dopamine hit that these food or drinks give. Same with anything else that you're addicted to over time, it sort of gets numb or dull to that amount that maybe it's one glass of wine.

So then your brain adds more dopamine receptors in that reward center in your brain. And so you need more dopamine hits. It's to light up all the receptors in your reward center. So you need more of that comforting food or drink or activity to get the same feeling, to get the same dopamine hit.

And this is how emotional eating and cravings can escalate during prolonged periods of stress because you're feeling, down or low or there's cortisol pumping through you and less dopamine and less serotonin. Your brain just wants you to be happy. Because if you're not happy and you're not moving around and you're not going to get food our brains are still quite primal.

This part of our brain is very primal. It hasn't evolved and adapted to the modern busy 24 7 lifestyle that we have. And the other aspect of this, so our brain the way it's wired drives us to this emotional eating to try and make the bad feelings stop. Also the festive season amplifies triggers.

It's as simple as that we've got the end of year rush, late nights. Your routines all out of whack. So maybe you're not eating or moving your body or having your time out and relaxing like you normally would. There's lots of sugary treats and things around pretty much starts at Halloween, doesn't it?

With all the lollies and just flows on from then like mince pies are available. There's you know, all sorts of stuff and that impacts our hormones, not just our female hormones, but cortisol, insulin, leptin, ghrelin, those appetite hormones that I talked about in a recent episode. And it's not just that busyness and all those things that makes emotional eating more likely.

It's literally the people that you see and your interactions with them past and present. Because the truth is that family gatherings often reunite us with people who have unintentionally or intentionally hurt us in the past. And maybe it's a comment about your weight from years ago or what you were wearing, or you've had an argument and it hasn't been resolved, or there's maybe some other subtle dynamics or some passive aggressiveness that leaves you feeling judged or unseen or dismissed. 

So all of these types of things, these moments, they trigger that deep emotional response. And it's tied to what we've what our thoughts about those interactions, what we've made them mean, because our thoughts are not always based on fact. I'll be clear about that as well. Sometimes our brain extrapolates or makes a story out of what we've seen.

It interprets, it interprets all the data coming in and we will make it mean something just the way that it is. But if we haven't worked through or resolved how we feel or what about those interactions, the next time that you see them or any time that you have to see them at Christmas time, it's triggering.

And it can trigger these negative, or I don't know, I don't want to call them negative, but it triggers those emotions that people don't want to feel sadness, anger, frustration. Make you feel more stressed. So yeah, do you know, like, I'm sure that you probably have someone in your life that you think, Oh, I've got to see that person again, or, Oh, I hope they don't say anything or hope this doesn't happen.

So I reckon have a think about it now, flag those potential triggers and have a think about how you're going to handle it, what you're going to say, what you're going to do, because practice helps us navigate the situation. Practice when we're not in that fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode is really important.

So, yeah. So what does what differences perimenopause make? Because that's covered pretty much lots of us for most of our lives. But you know, I don't need to tell you that the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause don't just affect your body, you're probably really well aware that they also shape how you respond with, or how your mood is and how you respond to stressful situations and busyness.

And, interactions or emotionally charged interactions with people. And these mental or emotional symptoms are really often the first early signs of perimenopause that my clients say. And changes in your estrogen, progesterone and testosterone directly impact your neurotransmitters, those happy molecules of serotonin and dopamine, which regulate your mood.

So you can have less stress resilience, declining levels of progesterone which is your calming peace and people pleasing hormone. I talked about it a bit last week in the boundaries one, how that people pleasing hormone is declining. It can make us more reactive to stress and less likely to put up with other people's nonsense.

And it also disrupts your sleep because progesterone helps us sleep. So if you're having less sleep, you're less, you've got less serotonin. happening in your body. Also your stress resilience is declined. You're less like we're all like giant toddlers basically, if we haven't had enough sleep.

It's the reality of it. We're less likely to be able to hold our tongue or have a filter in place or, work through a situation calmly and clearly we're more likely to flip it, flip our lid and lose it over the situation there as well. And that sleep deprivation, which I've talked about before in previous episodes, only needs to be one, one night of less than six hours sleep.

And that can be considered sleep deprivation. I talked about it in the insulin, episode. Because that changes how you metabolize your metabolism and your fat storage. But it also changes your stress hormones and reduces your ability to make choices that are keeping with your health goals.

As in, you'll get more cravings and more cravings for carbon salty stuff as well. Think chips, crackers cookies, that sort of thing. Yeah, so emotional changes as well, fluctuating hormones, changes your moods, your mood swings, your emotional response in situations, especially if they're highly charged, but even the not highly charged ones.

So you might notice maybe you're more anxious. Maybe you're more irritated, might snap at your loved ones or feel that really underlying frustration or impatience. When did everyone become an idiot? It's really hard to shake it. And yeah, just feel really impatient with them and, or really angry. And then after that anger sort of come on and taken over, and you've maybe said something that you didn't really want to say It's hard to come out of that time after time. 

So there can be a lot of shame and self recrimination as part of this as well because if you have reacted strongly or over reacted lashed out guilt often follows and shame and judgment and if we get stuck here emotional eating becomes it's your way out to try and avoid processing these feelings and it's okay to feel all of those things.

I feel a bit of guilt or shame or judgment thing. Oh, I wish I hadn't done that. I shouldn't have done that. Don't get stuck there though, because that's what drives things like emotional eating and leaves you feeling really bad and rubbish about yourself for a long time. We're all human. We have changing hormones, things going on.

We can't necessarily. Stop these things from happening, and if they have happened, we can't take it back, but we can apologize or try and rectify the situation and move on. And the first part of that really is forgiving ourselves, and being kind and generous and compassionate with ourselves, just like we would with a friend or a child.

So I want to talk about autopilot because much of our life, let alone emotional eating happens because we're living in autopilot mode. This is where our subconscious, our monkey mind is running the show and repeats those familiar behaviors to keep us happy, healthy, upright, doing the things that we need to do using the least amount of resources.

And part of that and living on autopilot too, is because there's so much information coming into us all the time into our brains. We can't deal with it. Our brain just can't deal with it all at once. So it sifts out a lot of the stuff that we're seeing based off past interactions, our thoughts, our beliefs our conditioning, behind it.

And then it will take part of the information coming in and extrapolate it or make it mean what it thinks it is telling us or meaning based off our thoughts and beliefs and that. So that's all happening in the background. So it's easy to see why we might, why we might feel or get stuck in things is often because of these unconscious or subconscious thoughts that are driving that feeling and how we're feeling about things.

If we sit and look at it and always think, would this pass the judge duty test? Would she say that's fact? Or is it fiction that my brain has made up? And so that's what I'm thinking about. If I'm feeling a particular way or I'm thinking, Oh, they said this and this and that. What meaning am I? What am I making that mean?

And why? And is it factual? No. Often it's just a story that my brain is making up or I'm getting stuck in and spiraling down with there as well. And this is really important skill, I think, to teach yourselves, but also your, kids, especially teens and young adults so that they don't get stuck in a spiral and, making things mean things that they are not.

So yeah, I, sometimes what is emotional eating. A lot of that happens on audio pilot as well. So we might not even be thinking about it, but it's just like like you're grazing mindlessly or are are you going to the pantry, getting the whole block of chocolate, sitting down and eating it all.

So some emotional eating can go either way that sort of grazing constantly, not really thinking about it or grabbing a block of chocolate, sitting down, numbing out on watching a show and eating all the chocolate. And your brain is just going to default to what it knows brings relief.

What makes you feel a bit happier in these times? Grab the chocolate, pour the wine, scroll on Netflix or whatever, what it, or reach for that chips, popcorn, whatever it is. It's fast, familiar. It doesn't require any effort and your brain knows it's going to in this short term, get rid of that feeling.

It's going to make it stop. When you stop the activity. Those feelings are going to come back though, because they're really just a short term solution. It's just a short term relief. We haven't actually resolved the underlying issue, which is I'll talk about in a minute here at there as well, but you know, it's important to know as well that when you repeatedly turn to food or drink for comfort, your brain strengthens those pathways and makes it your go to response. 

So it knows, right. Every time we do this, Sarah gets a hit of dopamine. Let's do it again. But remembering you get that dopamine adaptation. So your brain has more receptors, dopamine receptors in the reward center. Because it's like more is more and so you'll need larger quantities to feel the same level of comfort. It's why you might eat like the whole block of dairy milk chocolate. To, be you have to eat the whole block to get that comfort. Whereas you didn't in the past. So to step out of autopilot mode, we really need to be intentional and pause, reflect, interrupt those patterns, interrupt those stories, interrupt those thoughts, and think more of the longterm than the short term.

And I know that's hard and yes, it's uncomfortable and it's unpleasant doing this because you have to actually address and resolve the underlying thoughts. That's creating the feeling that's driving your action to emotional to eat. And The results that you get or how how you feel after that maybe bloated or uncomfortable, or maybe it's not helping you get rid of that visceral fat around the middle or any of those things, depending on what your aims and your goals are.

So awareness is really the first step in overcoming emotional eating, and that's what I'm going to talk about now. Because addressing emotional eating, it really requires curiosity and commitment from yourself to reflect on the thoughts that are driving the feelings and those actions and, or behaviors.

So feelings, emotions, same thing. They either stem from a physical symptom like pain, all your thoughts. So they either survival, like, ah, geez, I've got to take my hand off there because it's burning my fingers. Or Oh, don't walk on that ink on that foot because my ankle is sore. That's a physical feeling physical.

Raise cause driving that. Otherwise they come from us and our brain and our thoughts, our thoughts underlie our feelings. And sometimes those thoughts aren't even ours. They're in ones we've inherited from childhood, from the people who raised us and a lot of our thoughts, formed before we're even three years old, before we can even logically rebut them or question them. They're just there inside our brain. So what I would suggest is that when you feel the urge to eat emotionally, just pause and ask yourself, first of all, are you actually hungry? Are you physically hungry? Yes or no. And if you are, then solve the problem. You want to know what am I really hungry for here?

Is it actually food? Do I physically need food or water? Or am I trying to avoid an emotion and think about when is there a pattern, are there specific times, events, or relationships that trigger you? You can do that right now. Feel free to pause, have a think about that, and then come back from the next question.

What are you drawn to eat and why does it remind you of comfort or safety? Was it something you were given as a child to either make you stop crying. It's okay. It's okay. You're right. Stop crying. Have a lollipop, have an ice cream, have some chocolate. Let's go to the shop and buy a burger whatever, what it is.

When can you first sort of link that memory back to it being used to comfort you or to help you stop crying or stop feeling a negative emotion and when you're going to the pantry or the fridge. What, how are you feeling? What are you thinking? Literally ask yourself, what are you thinking?

But in a kind and loving way. And so what is coming up for you? How are you feeling? What are you thinking? And how are you talking to yourself about these feelings? Are you judging yourself? Are you feeling guilty, are you feeling shame, or are you approaching it with curiosity and compassion trying to interrupt that circuit and that spiral there as well.

So really thinking about the thoughts behind the emotions that are driving this emotional eating will help you interrupt the pattern and explore healthier ways to address your feelings because that's ultimately the longterm solution. We need to address this. the feelings or the thoughts under behind those feelings and change them gradually to avoid the need for emotional eating.

So before we finish up, just reminding you that breaking free or moving away from this pattern of emotional eating really starts with self compassion. Often we choose self comfort or buffering over feeling because we just don't like the time we, because we lack the time we don't have the support or the capacity to process what's actually going on for us.

And it can feel scary and overwhelming to think about the emotions behind. The eating or that habit or what we're trying to stop ourselves from feeling and thinking, but I really encourage you moving into this holiday season, give yourself the gift of time and space and reflect on your thoughts and feelings each day instead of pushing them down, express them, talk to, talk to someone who you trust and that you can happily just debrief.

You might not you might not necessarily need a solution from them or help solving the problem, but just need to talk it out and get it out and have your thoughts your feelings and thoughts validated. So if you need some guidance, I have blogs and podcast episodes on self coaching, setting boundaries without guilt avoiding burnout in the holiday season.

And remember this is part of a series that I'm doing in the lead up to Christmas and the Christmas break. And next time we're talking about self care hacks as well for when life gets busy. So yeah, because I always tell my clients, knowing what food to eat is the easy part. I can tell you that no problems at all.

And you can learn that really quickly. The hard part is working with your mind, your monkey mind, particularly, and stepping out of autopilot mode and living intentionally and consciously and learning to reflect and interrupt the patterns and give yourself permission to feel what's there and, acknowledge that life is 50, 50.

Some is going to feel good. Some is going to feel bad, but if we don't experience the negative or the bad, how do we know when life is good? How do we know when we're happy? We don't get to experience that without the dark the light and the dark, the yin and the yang. We don't get one without the other.

Now, if you well, more or you want to know that food part and you want to have some help to work on the mindset part. My PerimenoGO program has a nice mix of both. It's got an entire module dedicated to cravings and emotional eating, which is designed to help you gently uncover what's driving your patterns and learn sustainable tools for lasting change.

So that you can make certainly eat the festive treats and enjoy them. I also teach you in PerimenoGO how to do that so that it doesn't leave you feeling up and down with your blood sugars and crashing and feeling rubbish or bloated and all those sorts of things, or making your hot flushes and sweats worse.

But I really want you to have the time and the support you need to fully in control of what you're eating, not driven by unconsciously to eat things that you don't necessarily drink things that you don't really necessarily want to do. I find that when we can balance your biochemistry, which is what PerimenoGO really helps you do your in the driver's seat and you have a better relationship with food and with yourself because there's less shame and judgment and guilt, but there's also, you're not being subconsciously or unconsciously driven to eat things from cravings and emotional eating. 

So PerimenoGO. If you are on my email list, you would have seen that I opened the doors for a flash sale. Actually, but when this one is released, my doors are opening the next day on the Monday. So this is released on the Sunday and on the Monday for people on my email list or people on the waitlist for PerimenoGO will get a special price, double bonus of like an extra bonus of double support.

So they'll get 60 days with me in the community to ask me questions and chat to me on our power sessions on the live coaching calls to help them feel better before Christmas, but also really settle into it over the new year. And I am running a special, thriving in the festive season session there as well to teach them and remind my clients of how to navigate all the extra bits of Christmas and festive season and enjoy them and participate without missing out, but also without it adding more weight or more symptoms to you and your life there as well.

So if you want to know more about PerimenoGO, you can find the link to the information page and the other episodes that I've mentioned today in the show notes at www.chaostocalmpodcast.com or wherever you're listening to the podcast. This episode in the show notes, you'll see the links there as well.

While you're there looking in the show notes, please, if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe so you don't miss an update. I'd also love it if you could leave a quick rating or a review that really helps more women be shown the podcast and shown that there's another way to approach perimenopause.

It doesn't have to be horrific. And with that, if you know someone who'd benefit from this content, whether it's this episode or one of my other 70 episodes, then don't forget to share it with them, please. And so that my friend is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and sharing your time with me.

I always appreciate it in the next episode. I'm really looking forward to talking about those self care hacks to help you keep a clear head for when life's busy and it is busy at this time of year. So until then, keep transforming your perimenopause journey from chaos to calm.