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Summer:
This is eat the rules, a podcast about body image self worth, anti dieting and intersectional feminism. I am your host. Summer innan, a professionally trained coach specializing in body image self worth and confidence, and the best selling author of body image remix, if you’re ready to break free of societal standards and stop living behind the number on your scale, then you have come to the right place. Welcome to the show.

This is episode 313 and I’m talking about how to manage holiday over eating, quote, unquote, as well as some other resources to help you through this holiday time where you’ll be surrounded by food and maybe people that you’re a little bit worried about being around. You can find the links and resources mentioned at summer Inn and in.com forward slash 313,

I want to give a shout out to Globo, who left this review. I’ve just started being interested in making peace with my body and food and seeing diet culture for what it really is. It’s a lot to unravel. I’m so glad I found Summer. Summer style is very positive and upbeat, and I believe her. She knows her stuff. Also, she has a very pleasing voice, and that’s a plus. Sometimes I don’t like other podcasters voices, and I’m enjoying learning from summer, and really like the body image series that she has. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I’m really glad you like my voice. When I was in high school, everyone said that my voice sounded like Darlene from Roseanne. It was just every like people would just be like. Has anyone ever told you that you sound like Darlene from Roseanne? Do you remember what she sounded like? It was like a really disaffected teen voice. I don’t know if I still sound like that, probably sometimes. Anyways, thank you. You can support this show. If you have the finances to do so, please go to my Ko, Fi account, K O dash, fi.com, forward slash summer in and in that’s linked in the information for this episode, as well as in the show notes. You can make a monthly contribution there of as little as $5 helps to support the production of this podcast to keep it on the air, and you also get access to my mini course conquering negative body talk. And if you don’t have the financial means to do that, you can subscribe to the show or leave a review. Leave a review on Apple podcast. Search for eat the rules, click ratings and reviews and click to leave a review. I have free resources for you. You can find those at the body image coach.com I have a body image coaching roadmap for providers as well. There’s a free 10 day body confidence makeover that you’ll find there too.

I wanted to redo this episode. So this episode was actually one I did many years ago, and I just wanted to update it a bit. I think it’s a really common concern that people have around the holiday time, concerns about overeating, concerns about what people are going to think of them, whether someone’s going to make comments about their food and their body. And so I wanted to specifically talk a little bit more about the overeating thing. So I’ll talk about the role that dieting and restriction play in overeating, why I really don’t like the word overeating, how restriction can cause us to overeat, and what we can do to manage that, particularly during the holiday season, I wanted to provide some other resources to you as well that can be really helpful during this time of year.

So first and foremost, I have an amazing podcast episode with Amy green Smith. It was episode 247 and it’s called How to Respond to diet and Body Talk with scripts. It is one of the best episodes that I’ve done with someone around how to respond if someone were to make a comment about your food or your body, and I think that it’s really good to have a script that you can rely on, whether that be just a one liner or not even something to say, but something that you can just do if someone were to make a comment. I love this episode so much, so I’ll link to it in the show notes and definitely check that out. In addition to that, I think that coming out of today’s episode, if you want to learn more about the diet cycle and what the research says about weight loss, I have two really great episodes. So one is episode 217 it’s called why diets don’t work, and Episode 218 with Alexis connison, which is called what the research says about weight loss, they are more comprehensive guides on the diet cycle and why dieting doesn’t work, and that could be a good refresher for you this time of year. I think it’s always helpful to revisit what the research actually says about weight loss, because it’s easy. To get caught up in the false promises of the diet industry.

Okay, let’s get into today’s episode. I want to briefly go over the diet cycle, because I think in order to understand overeating, we have to understand the diet cycle and in order to help ourselves to have a better relationship with food, we need to understand what disrupts that relationship with food. I’m not going to go into this in too much detail, but in general, the diet cycle looks like this. So we start off with feeling bad in our body, which is not our fault. It’s coming from our culture. It’s coming from anti fatness, and it’s coming from the fact that we’ve been told that our value is in how we look. And so we believe that I need to lose weight, and maybe we even believe that we have to do that in order to be healthy, which is also something that gets unpacked in those other episodes that I suggested. We also do this because we just feel bad in general about ourselves, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that how we look and the size of our body defines how we are and who we are and how we should feel about ourselves. That’s what I meant to say. And so that is, then what prompts us to say, think, Okay, I’m going to make a change. I’m going to do something about this. And so then we start to make a change to what we eat or how we exercise in relation to this goal of trying to lose weight and feel better about ourselves. And so immediately, once we start to make those changes, we’ve triggered the diet mentality. And the diet mentality is just this mentality that, like, if I eat this, it will make me gain weight, or if I eat this, it will help me to lose weight, and it causes us to start seeing foods as either good or bad, and our choices around food and exercise are now intertwined with our weight. And once that happens, that’s when our relationship with food starts to get messed up, because now we’re instead of looking at food as a source of pleasure, a source of nourishment, something that can help us to, you know, feel good. We’re looking at it as this is either going to help me gain or lose weight. And what happens is, is, once we start that restriction, once we start to cut back on, whether it be like macronutrients or calories, or, you know, certain foods, then we’ve created this caloric deficit. And our body doesn’t like that, because our body wants to give us the adequate amount of energy that it needs to survive, and so we can usually maintain that restriction for a certain length of time, often longer in the beginning, often shorter once you’ve been a chronic Dieter, and our body starts to fight back, and that’s when we begin to fixate on food, or we have really strong cravings.

So we might think like, I’m just always craving sugar at night, or I can’t stop myself once I start eating sugar. And eventually, what we believe is our willpower, which is not it’s just our body trying to keep us alive, wears thin, and we end up then over eating, binging, breaking our diet, sabotaging ourselves. And all of those words, and like when I say those words, they all have really negative connotations to them. They’re all associated with doing something morally wrong. They’re all intended to make us feel guilty, make us feel ashamed. And so then we feel that guilt, and we feel like a failure, and we think, why can’t I do this? I don’t have enough willpower. What’s wrong with me? And then we end up gaining the weight back that we’ve lost, and oftentimes we end up gaining back more, and then we feel even worse, and we blame ourselves. And we think like, well, I just like, you know, I just got off track. Or I, you know, I just, I didn’t plan well enough. And we blame ourselves instead of the fact that our body just has a weight that it wants us to be at, and when we fight against that, it fights back and pulls us back. It’s like an elastic band, right? You’re going to pull it one way, it’s going to snap right back. And so that self blame and that shame and the guilt that we feel, what I find is that it really just chips away at our self worth and it chips away at our body image.

And so we go into it thinking, if I diet, this is going to make me feel better about my body, and the result is that it most often makes us feel worse about our body because we think that there’s something wrong with us because we haven’t been able to do this thing. So we felt bad about ourselves before, and now we feel even worse. We feel like guilty and like a failure, and because we had this dream that we thought, like, Okay, I’m gonna do this, everything’s gonna be so much better, and then it wasn’t. And so then we feel kind of hopeless too, and we blame ourselves, even though our body was literally just trying to protect us from going into a famine. And so that’s the diet cycle. And so then we. We feel so crappy that we think, Well, I just have to try something different, or this time it will work, and we do it again, and there we are, 40 years later, and we’re still doing the same thing. And I know that because I did that for two decades of my life, and most of my clients have done that for decades of their life, and it takes a really long time to realize that you’re not broken. Rather, the system is broken, and it can leave us just feeling trapped and pretty crappy about ourselves. And that’s why I really stress focusing on body image work, because if we can feel more comfortable in our body, then we can step out of that cycle. So stepping out of that cycle is done through accepting your body. Because if you accept your body, if you know that your value is not in how you look, then you’re not going to be going through that pattern of tying your food choices with like this is going to make me gain or lose weight. And I’m making that sound kind of easy, and that’s not for some people, this is really, really difficult work, and for some people it is easier. And I don’t want to tell you what is right for you, but I do believe that we can all get to a place where we eat more, quote, unquote, normally, where our food choices are not connected to our weight, and eating just feels easier, and we don’t really think about food that much, and there’s no guilt or shame or judgment or shoulds, and we’re really able to trust our body and honor its signals. And sometimes that means we will still overeat, or sometimes we’ll still eat foods that don’t feel good for us, or sometimes we’ll still eat to soothe our emotions, and that’s okay. We accept that. We do that sometimes because we’re human, and obviously, if it’s creating a lot of distress in your life, then, yeah, that’s a place where you can get support around that.

I do believe we’re all born as, like, quote, unquote, normal eaters, and we just lose this intuitive ability to eat because we are exposed to anti fatness, and we live in diet culture, and we adopt these rules and moral associations with food and anti fatness. And so it’s important to have this conversation before we talk about overeating, because overeating really exists in the context of diet culture, if you didn’t care about your weight, like if your weight wasn’t a big deal, I question whether overeating would be a big deal either. I think for most people, overeating is a big deal because of the panic that sets in around weight gain, and that’s why the body image work is so key. So let’s just talk a little bit more about overeating and dive into that a little further. First of all, I really don’t like the term overeating, and if it resonates with you, cool, but I personally think it implies that there’s some magical amount that we need to be eating to and so I don’t say that to dismiss or diminish a binge, or if you do eat to the point where, like, it feels physically uncomfortable, it’s more about the language and how it’s loaded with shame and moralization. And this is always going to be a personal thing. Like, if I was working with a client, I would say, like, what is, what does the word overeating mean to you? What is what feelings come up for you when you have that experience, and maybe that word is not a big deal, and that’s cool, but for a lot of people, I think it’s really closely tied with with shame. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally eating past physical fullness, and we all do that, even people who are like quote, unquote, normal eaters, we do that, but you’re able to just move on with your life. There’s not there’s no fear, there’s no panic, there’s no guilt, there’s no shame. There’s just, like, that physical discomfort and like, oh, ate too much lasagna, which is what happens to me when I eat lasagna, because for some reason, lasagna doesn’t hit until like, 30 minutes later, and it’s really good, and then 30 minutes later, I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s that I’m feeling that. Then I just move the hell on with my life. Okay? Maybe I just won’t go for, you know, I won’t be able to, like, chase my kid around the block after that, because it’s feeling a little uncomfortable. That’s why I don’t like the word overeating. And so maybe we use the word eating past physical discomfort. Maybe you use a word that works for you. I mean, there’s always nuance to these things, right? The reason I think a lot of people do eat to physical discomfort is because it’s a reactionary response to restriction, though, and so if you eat to physical discomfort once in a while, it’s not a big deal, then that’s I would consider that to be pretty, pretty cool, pretty good. But if you find yourself sort of worrying about it, if you find yourself trying to resist it, if you find that it’s happening like you, you kind of get home from work and then you just, you know, raid the fridge, or you can’t stop eating ice cream like. Right to me that that indicates that maybe there’s some restriction, and that that is a reactionary response to that restriction.

And so restriction can take place in two forms. One is physical restriction, and that’s when we actually deprive ourselves of of calories in some way, shape or form. So if we’ve let’s put this in the context of the holidays. Sometimes people will kind of like, quote unquote, watch what they eat in the days leading up to the holidays. Or they’ll exercise excessively. That’s going to put you in a bit of a deficit. So yeah, you’re likely going to eat past physical discomfort in response to that restriction. Or if we choose to eat like a quote unquote, lighter lunch because we know dinner is going to be really heavy, then you might be setting yourself up for being starving and therefore eating past fullness. If we are overly hungry, our animal brain just goes into alert and we just need to eat. And we’re often looking for whatever is the quickest energy source, which is smart, like our body is designed to save us, and so that’s a smart response that our body is doing. It means your body’s working properly. But when that happens, it can often feel like a binge or, quote, unquote, overeating, but it’s really just your body responding to that intense hunger. It’s trying to protect you. And I think a lot of people that when I start working with them, they don’t think that they are restricting. But when we really dig into it. There’s often a bit of restriction there, because it’s really hard to fully heal your relationship with food like that is a really hard thing to do. I think for some people, they go, they sort of take it a little bit more like step by step, which is totally fine. And therefore there might still be some like, some rules at play, or some this idea that, like you should only eat a certain amount when really your body might need more. And so the best thing that we can do to mitigate this, especially around the holiday holiday times, is just like, eat like you normally would. Eat like a grown ass adult, you know, nourish yourself. Eat to fullness. Eat your holiday meal like it’s any other meal, move on with your life, and it’s oh and and give yourself permission to eat to physical discomfort. And if that happens, just be kind to yourself.

And I know I’m saying it like just be kind to yourself. I realize it’s a lot more complicated than that. The other way that we restrict is mental restriction. So that’s when we look at foods through the lens of this food is good, this food is bad when there’s some sort of like list or rules or should or shouldn’t around food. And this can be really sneaky too. So we might eat what we want, but only within the confines of what we’ve deemed safe or familiar, or we might be eating what we want, but it’s still really governed by that fear of weight gain, or we might have just like, these certain kind of like ways that we look at food in our in our brain, and we sort of think like, oh, God, I can’t eat that. That’s like, super, super unhealthy. All that stuff can sort of contribute to the diet mentality and mental restriction. And so I think that to know if you’re restricting, I would, I guess I would just say, like, do you experience like, are you second guessing your food choices? Are you kind of thing sitting there and thinking like, oh, I shouldn’t eat that, or I should eat that, or I ate that earlier in the day, so I shouldn’t eat that now. So thinking about food a lot or obsessively planning it, if you’re seeing food through the lens of like, Is this good or bad, if there’s judgment around your food choices, if your food’s tied to a desire to lose weight or fear of weight gain, all of those things indicate that there’s some diet mentality there.

And so something worth exploring, if you’re into that, if you want to explore it, in order to really heal, we have to give ourselves permission to eat so our body knows that food is coming consistently. Once our body knows that food is there consistently, the famine is over, that’s when we can really build up that trust, and we’re not going to have those reactions so much anymore. And I don’t think we can. That’s not just like a flip of a switch. I think most of the people I work with are Type A achievement focused, and they want to just rush this process. And I would love to do that too, but unfortunately, I think because so much of it is tied to our self worth and our body image, and that work can take a long time, and we have to have a willingness to want to change that too, and that’s hard, because we live in a culture where that choice is scary, like, it’s pretty counter cultural to accept your body, you know, so that to the choice to do that can be really terrifying for for some people. For some people, it’s easier because they’re just so done and they know that diets don’t work. And for others, it just feels like, Why the hell would I do that? Like, that’s so scary, and we’re giving up our coping mechanisms and everything else, so just go gentle on yourself.

And I think the other thing to keep in mind is that we will eat to physical discomfort sometimes, and that’s okay, and if you do that, just treat the next day like it’s a normal day. You don’t need to undo anything. One of the ways that we mentally restrict is by saying. Okay, okay, well, I will just start a diet tomorrow, or I will just do better tomorrow, or I will just work this off tomorrow. All of that stuff actually triggers the diet mentality. So keep that in mind too. And I think getting through the holidays, you know, trying to reduce our stress as much as possible, trying to focus on our self care, trying to be chill about it as much as we can is going to be the most helpful thing. And so if you’re newer to this work and this is your first holiday meal, then go easy on yourself. You are still healing. It’s natural to have moments where you feel the push pull of the diet mentality. Keep reassuring yourself. Take it one day at a time, get support if you need it. And I don’t think we have to like be mindful or savor every bite, either, because I think that’s often a recommendation to help with overeating, quote, unquote.

I think that’s really up to you.

I don’t do well with mindful eating and savoring every bite. I really like to have some type of entertainment going on when I’m eating, whether that be, I mean, if I’m eating with, like my family, then there’s, you know, conversation, but if I’m by myself, you gotta know that I will be watching TV, I will be scrolling on my phone, I will be doing a million things while I’m eating, and that’s just what works for me. I like it. And so it’s really find what works for you. If eating mindfully and savoring works cool. But to me, that’s just like, no hard pass. Okay, the last thing that I wanted to get to here is just guilt, because I think when we talk about overeating, there’s feelings of guilt that come up. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I feel like it’s, it’s a useful reminder. Guilt is an emotion that we feel when we’ve done something out of alignment with our value system. So one of my values is authenticity. If I do something inauthentic, I might feel guilty about that. It’s an indication that I’ve done something against my value system. The problem is that a lot of us have values, or a lot of us think that we value things that we’ve been taught from the dominant culture. What I mean by that is diet. Culture has taught us to value being thinner. Beauty. Culture has taught us to value beauty like as a currency, as something that signals that you have more value. Capitalism has taught us to value productivity as well as like hoarding things and possessions. So all of these things, the list, goes on and on and on, but we’ve adopted a lot of values from the dominant culture. And so it’s important to keep in mind that sometimes when we feel guilt, it means that we’ve gone against one of the values from the dominant culture, and not necessarily one of our values, in which case that guilt is a sign that we’ve done something good. Let me break this down. So dominant culture has taught us to value thinness. If we overeat, we we are thinking, I’ve done something wrong, like we’re feeling guilt because we’ve been taught to value thinness from the dominant culture. But really, maybe that guilt is a good sign because you’ve gone against the values from the dominant culture. And so guilt can sometimes be a sign that we’ve done something good. When you feel guilt, it’s always important, especially if you are a woman who’s been conditioned in this culture, or really anyone with, like, multiple marginalized identities, if you’ve been conditioned in a certain way to really question your guilt and think like, what am i What is this indicating that? What value is this indicating I’ve gone against and then question that that value. Once we know our true values, it really becomes easier to identify when the guilt we’re feeling is useful versus guilt that’s resulting out of conformity to dominant system values. So that’s always something useful to kind of question in yourself.

Okay, so that brings us to the conclusion of this episode.

I hope that this gives you some reassurance and support as you go through the holiday season in terms of fear of weight gain, because fear of weight gain is obviously really closely tied to the concept of overeating. Check out my podcast episode number 279 when you fear weight gain. I will link to that in the show notes as well. That gets into it in a lot more detail that will be helpful for you. So hopefully that’s given you some good resources. Don’t forget to support the podcast via ko fi, if you can KO fi.com forward slash summer in and in. Thank you so much for being here today. Rock on. You.

Hi, I’m Summer innan, and I want to thank you for listening today.
You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at summer innan, and if you haven’t yet, go to Apple podcasts, search, eat the rules and subscribe, rate and review this show. I would be so grateful. And. Next time rock on you.