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Summary
On episode 391 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Kristin Jones, a former middle school English and history teacher who became an online wellness coach and best-selling author, and who now helps women through Kristin Jones Coaching address emotional eating and rewrite their relationship with food.
Kristin argues that emotional eating becomes a problem the moment food replaces communication as your go-to way of getting through a hard feeling, not because you occasionally reach for comfort food.
She and Allan walk through the nine most common emotional eating triggers from her book, When Food is Your Drug, and the accept, forgive, rewrite process she uses with clients to work through the circumstances that drive the behavior.
Links
- https://www.kristinjonescoaching.com
Key Takeaways
- Emotional eating is using food to manage a feeling instead of expressing it. Kristin's line: it becomes a problem when food is your regular go-to instead of communicating, the same pattern as someone leaning on alcohol to get through a hard moment.
- Emotional hunger and physical hunger feel completely different. Physical hunger builds gradually and lets you make a rational choice, like a salad. Emotional hunger hits almost instantly and drives you toward high fat, high sugar foods for the fast comfort and dopamine response.
- Shame drives secrecy, and secrecy makes it worse. Kristin describes hiding food, eating at night, and isolating herself specifically so no one would see or question what she was doing, a pattern she says is common among people who emotionally eat.
- There are nine common triggers behind emotional eating. Kristin's list: lack of intimacy, feelings of shame, fear of challenges, fear of judgment, conflict avoidance, boredom, self-sabotaging beliefs, rebellion against restriction (denying yourself something makes you want it more), and unresolved trauma.
- The process is accept, forgive, rewrite. First accept that something happened instead of pretending it did not. Then forgive, not to excuse the other person's behavior but to release what you are still carrying. Then rewrite the story by finding something you actually gained from the experience.
- Forgiveness is for you, not for the other person. Kristin is explicit that forgiving does not mean condoning what happened. It means letting go of something you would otherwise keep feeding, literally, with food.
- Every circumstance, even a bad one, has something usable in it. Kristin's own example: being sent to her room as a child without being allowed to express emotions taught her, in hindsight, to control her emotional reactions and choose the right time and place to express them.
- Wellness has to start from self-love, not from surface habits. Her position: you can work out daily and eat clean, but if you have not addressed how you feel about yourself, those habits are just a shell sitting on top of the real issue.
- Kristin's three strategies to get and stay well: daily meditation and quiet time to slow the mind and quiet negative self-talk; daily affirmations, placed somewhere you will actually see them, to reinforce the beliefs you want about yourself; and daily gratitude for what you already have, which she says builds momentum toward the habits and choices that support everything else.
“When we deny anyone of anything, it makes us want it even more.”
Kristin Jones
