Hello my friends, and welcome back to not another Mindset show. I’m your host, Dr. Kasey Jo. My goal with this podcast is to take the science of mindset and behavior change and distill it down into actionable takeaways for you. Together we’re gonna unpack research around motivations, self-sabotage, willpower, and so much more, and we’re going to take all of that and translate it into strategies you can immediately apply to your health fitness.

Relationships, business, marketing clients, all of the things. But just to be clear, it’s not all serious and sciencey around here. We’re gonna have a ton of fun too, and I’m so excited to share all of this with you. Alright, let’s go ahead and get into the episode. Hello. Hello my friends. Welcome back to Not another mindset show.

It’s so funny for me because I have actually not recorded a podcast episode in. Three or four months, even though you are getting a new episode every single week, I am not recording them in real time, which I know I’ve, I’ve mentioned before that I do the, the whole batch recording thing, but we really batched like really, really batched.

Um. I guess I can give like a small life update here. I like listening to people’s life updates when they do that at the beginning of podcast episodes. Maybe you’ll like that too. Or you could send me a DM in Instagram and be like, Casey, we’re just here for the information. I don’t, I don’t need to know about what’s going on in your world.

Um, but I’m gonna tell you anyway, I moved at the beginning of the year, well, in February. And not anywhere new. I’m still in Austin, Texas. Just a different area of town. So I mean, we all know how moving process type of stuff goes. I traveled to Australia. I traveled a handful of times, so that was a big one.

We were gone for, me and my friend Chanel, who were gone for almost two weeks. Obviously we have the holidays at the very, very beginning of the year. Gosh, what else happened? I traveled again for my Mastermind retreat. I traveled probably a couple more times on top of that and. We had a live event, thrive Women’s Health Live event was hosted in Austin on March 1st.

Then we went into health mindset coaching, certification, enrollment period time, which is just, it’s the craziest time in my business for everyone on my team, myself included. And because all of this was happening for the first few months of the year, we batch recorded the heck out of the podcast episode.

So yeah, I have been sat down. It is. mid-April right now, I haven’t sat down to record a podcast since November, early December maybe. Dang. So it feels funny for me to sit down and be like, okay, we’re getting back into it. But you get to hear me every single week as if there’s been no breaks whatsoever.

And we’re coming back. We’re coming back hot, talking about a hot topic, which is emotional eating. This is very obviously something that many of our clients struggle with, many of us have struggled with. I’m sure many of you have. Struggled with or, or currently struggling with emotional eating. And then if you’re a coach, you may have used those past experiences as part of the reason why you became a coach.

That’s something that we recently talked about where we’re welcoming in over, I think we have 106 new students into the health mindset coaching certification for our Spring 2025 cohort, which I’m so excited for. We just had our week three call today, so that’s where we’re at, catching you up to speed here.

And we had that conversation early on with the new students about how. We are coaches because we ourselves have gone through so much of what our clients are experiencing, and that really makes this such passionate work. And so much of that passion also just stems from a lot of the heaviness and the emotions that are involved in a health and fitness journey, be it emotional eating or body image or.

Dealing with how to get around, I guess, like social pressures and the people in our lives and how that impacts. I mean, it’s a, it’s a lot of stuff, which is why, you know, I asked students and you can, you can raise your hand wherever, please. Not if you’re driving or something, but yeah, raise your hand if.

You became a coach because you went through so much of this stuff yourself that you now wanna help other people? I mean, it’s, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of people, myself included, so emotional eating and stress specifically. I think there’s a lot of emotions that can cause someone to want to. Essentially get rid of that emotion by way of eating, and we’ll talk a little bit more about how that works and why that happens today.

But stress is a really big one. So I, I almost made this an episode on stress induced eating specifically. But the reality is we’re really talking about emotionally eating. This is a big topic that we have inside level two of the health mindset coaching certification. And not to say we don’t talk about emotional eating in level one.

We talk about a lot of the foundational things like motivation, goal setting, habit formation, stress and self-control, and give you sort of the basics to equip you to help clients using those strategies. And then level two, we get into more advanced content and specific content such as emotional eating.

So with that said. What we know about emotional eating from the research, emotional eating is often linked to being obese or being overweight. That is something we see in the research, and I don’t think that’s very probably surprising for a lot of you because under emotional eating circumstances, we’re not really paying close attention to how much we’re consuming, right?

So very easy to over consume, and if that kind of becomes. I guess, we’ll, for lack of a better phrase, call it a crutch to manage your emotions, and that’s the direction you tend to go. It’s a habit that you formed. Then it can be hard to get out of it and can contribute to overeating, which then can contribute to overweight and obesity.

However, that doesn’t mean it can’t show up for people who are at a normal weight too, and. I would be lying if I said that me at normal weight in the last, I don’t know, five years or so, there hasn’t been a moment where I overeat have over eaten due to an emotion. Right? And I am not overweight or obese.

So I think that really we’re looking at so many of your clients, whether they are of normal weight or they are. Overweight it. It really doesn’t matter here. Everyone can fall prey to this stuff. And something to keep in mind too is that emotional eating is not an eating disorder. However, it can play a role in developing eating disorders.

Things like binge eating disorder, bulimia. We see that a lot, and it’s just something to keep in mind. Obviously we don’t want to cross the line if we feel like there is an eating disorder at play. You’re a health and fitness coach, that’s very much so out of your scope of practice. So I think just. Bear in mind that when we see emotional eating patterns in our clients, that does not mean that they have an eating disorder, and it is something that you can likely assist them with to a degree, right?

To a degree that is important because if it starts going in the direction of disorderly, then it is out of your scope of practice to help them. So really emotional eating is something that you can help with to a degree. But also it kind of acts as an alert. So if this is happening frequently and it feels very out of their control and it’s impacting their day-to-day life and their relationships and all of these things, then pay attention because you may need to outsource the help at that point to someone who is a mental health professional.

And something that I actually thought about this too, and that we see this in the research, is that emotional eating isn’t only related to negative emotions. Positive emotions can be at play too. And I say, I was thinking about this because when I mentioned myself and that I said I would be lying if I didn’t emotionally eat at all, and I’m not an overweight individual.

Um. For me, and I think you guys can all probably understand this, for me, it’s more or less related to positive emotions. You’re having a good time with your friends, you’re my friends are that my friend group is just all foodies. We’re all foodies. So we go out to eat and we order half the menu and we’re passing things around and it’s a great, great time.

But then that could obviously lead to overeating and you could be really present. With your friends and what’s going on, but not present to the fact of how much you’re eating. And then, you know, we’re like rolling out of the restaurant. So, um, it can be emotional eating can be related to positive emotions too.

It doesn’t have to always be, I’m sad, so I’m diving into a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, or I’m stressed, and so I’m just reaching into the pantry and not recognizing what I’m even eating. Doesn’t have to be the case. It could be related to positive things as well. Okay, so everything I’ve mentioned so far, what we know from research in this area is likely not super surprising to you and.

What really is most important here is to better understand what causes emotional eating in the first place. If we wanna be able to help our clients break through negative thought patterns, break through these negative behaviors. I don’t even wanna call it a negative behavior, just a not very goal oriented behaviors.

Since we’re working with people who are trying to. Increase their health and fitness and better their lives in that way. So emotional eating, especially when it leads to overeating, can really thwart progress in that area and also lead to other negative emotions like guilt and shame. So what causes emotional eating?

A lot of things. A lot of things cause it, and it really is so highly dependent on the person and the situation and the, the triggers that are involved. But. What we should be doing is trying to better understand why our clients are doing in the first place, because if you don’t have that information, it’s going to be really hard, if not impossible to help them.

So. What I’m gonna share here is definitely not an exhaustive list. There’s a lot of different causes of emotional eating, a lot of different paths and reasons that people will take and assume, and that leads them to. Reach for food due to their emotions. So a few that I have here, I think were important.

And it’s actually a few that I have pulled from our training inside HMCC level two. And then we go into many more and many other details about emotional eating as far as like tools and strategies and things like that. But the three I wanna talk about here are escaping negative self-awareness, masking theory, and increasing positive emotion.

So when we say. Escape negative self-awareness. When you really, if you even just like think about those words, you want to escape negative self-awareness. So I’m aware of something about myself that I feel negative about, negatively about, and I don’t like that it’s uncomfortable. I wanna get rid of it, I want to escape it.

So. In this case, if we were, if your clients are struggling with this, and I would really encourage you to think about certain clients or maybe even yourself, if this is something that you struggle with in situations where you find yourself, your clients find themselves eating due to emotion, is it possible that there is something going on here where.

Your client is feeling negatively about themselves, and so instead of working through that because it’s uncomfortable, it’s not fun to sit with those feelings. Instead of working through that, it becomes. What can I use as an escape mechanism? And food could be one of those things. And this happens because we are taking our attention away from those negative feelings about ourselves and putting it onto something that is an immediate.

Stimulus in our physical environment. So something that is tangible and in front of us and can just essentially distract us from what’s going on internally. So it’s kind of like a, let me go externally to grab something, ice cream, chocolate, whatever, in this case, glass of wine so I can. Escape what’s going on inside.

And it’s actually like pretty heavy and pretty sad when you think about it, right? And this narrowed attention on what’s going on in front of us. Snacking in this case can. Leave us feeling unaware of everything that’s going on. So we just like hyper-focused on what’s on going on in front of us, but not necessarily hyper-focused on like, okay, now I’m doing this and now I’m eating this and now I’ve had six Oreos and now I’ve had 10 Oreos.

Not even fully paying attention, right? It’s just I’m trying to get out of my, in my brain experience and into something else, and that narrowed attention on the Oreos, on the wine, on whatever. Can lead to overeating ’cause they’re not like fully paying attention. It’s definitely not mindful eating, I guess is basically what I’m getting at here.

So that is the pathway that could be taken. That leads to emotional eating episodes escaping negative self-awareness. The next one is masking theory. And this is, again, similar like a to a, it’s, it’s, it’s a degree of distraction. So we’re trying to mask the negative emotion that we’re experiencing, be it stress or annoyance or sadness with eating.

So the idea is if I’m doing something else, eating. That is going to distract me from the stress that I’m experiencing right now. And we’re essentially masking the emotional experience with a food experience. So you could see where those two, the escaping negative self-awareness and masking theory are quite similar.

But the difference is that with masking theory, we’re just like looking for a distraction, looking for something else. Whereas with. Escaping negative self-awareness. It’s, we are aware that we feel negatively about ourselves and then are seeking something external to focus on instead. But in either way, you can kind of see a theme here that what’s coming up is trying to distract ourselves, trying to avoid things and instead use food as something that will make us kind of feel good in the moment.

Which then brings us to our third one, increasing positive emotions. So people get pleasure from food consumption, and that’s very much so like a biologically wired thing. You need to eat in order to survive. So obviously we’re going to make eating something that is enjoyable, just like we need to have sex to reproduce, so we’re going to make sex something enjoyable.

It makes sense. Right? Um. So we’re doing these things and for, for the sake of taste and enjoyment and like I was mentioning before, socialization and good, good smells and all of the full experience that that is. So there are times whether you’re experiencing a negative emotion or not, where you just want to have a positive experience and food.

Can often deliver that for you. And we, I’m laughing because it, it’s funny too because I, I always say that. When people are laughing, it means because there’s something that is true. And so like, I’m laughing because it’s every, you get it. You get what I’m saying, and I know you do. And there’s also this aspect of the joy that comes from eating like banned or restricted foods, which is something I wanted to definitely bring up and point out because we’re often working with people who are deliberately reducing their calorie intake, increasing their energy expenditure for the sake of.

Fat loss, weight loss to change their body composition. So you have to be careful because if you have a client who is struggling with emotional eating, but they also are on a lower like calorie restricted diet or something like that, it could be that maybe emotionally eating just has to do with their current situation.

Going through like a diet phase, is it something that shows up? At all points of their life, something that they’ve struggled with for a long time. And this is good to just know in general, like what’s, what’s the emotional eating timeline? Has this been something you’ve been struggling for the with for a long time?

Did it show up after like a certain significant life event? Does it only happen when you’re dieting? So very important to note there. You need to know like at what point, and this just goes for. For all of this, we need to understand the triggers, the situation, the context, the person, you need to understand the person in order to help the person.

Right. Okay. And of course, I am talking about emotional eating here, but you’ve men heard me mention stress a lot, and I know I said at the beginning of the episode that I originally was thinking this would be sort of a stress induced eating because I think that that’s really one of the most primary.

Emotions that are related to emotional eating. And one thing to think about here too is that emotional eating is often due to some sort of motivational cue. And when I talk about motivation, I say this a lot where we’re always motivated to do something. You know, in these cases where it’s like. You have a client who’s saying that they’re not motivated, they don’t have, they lack motivation, but maybe they’re also an emotional eater.

Clearly they’re motivated to eat. In those situations, what’s motivating them to do that? The stress, the emotions specifically is a motivational cue to eat, similar to feeling bored. If I feel bored, then I’m gonna go walk into the kitchen, open the fridge, sta in the fridge for a while, and then realize like, why am I in here?

I know you’ve done it too, and so your clients are motivated to reduce whatever negative feeling they’re experiencing, be it stress, be it boredom, be it anxiety, sadness, irritation, worry. Any of that. So unpacking what those emotions are and what emotion is specific to your client that can lead to the emotional eating can really help you better understand how to help them.

And also like even within that, right, maybe it’s not stress all of the time, it’s only stress in certain circumstances that lead them to run to the pantry. It could be. It’s just so different depending on the person. And I know I’ve said that 7,000 times already on this podcast, but it’s, it’s true. Okay, so now that we’re talking a little bit more about stress induced eating specifically, I wanna get a little neurosciencey with you for a sec.

So there is a connection, very clear connection between stress hormones, mainly cortisol. And we’re gonna get into this in a second and. How that relates to stress induced eating specifically. So what happens when we experience stress, the HPA axis in our brain triggers the release of glucocorticoids. Say that 10 times fast.

Glucocorticoid, glucocorticoid. Um, it’s actually not that hard and. Everyone knows our good friend cortisol. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid say that 10 times fast. And when these stress hormones are released in our body, it’s in response to a threat. So your brain is doing exactly what it’s. Supposed to do, and it plays a really crucial role in the stress response.

And I know I’ve talked about this before in the podcast, but everyone wants to demonize cortisol. But we really do need it, and it really is helpful and in the entire stress response is helpful. However, in our current 21st century society, there can be some errors that are made and. Cortisol can impact our eating behaviors.

And according to research in this area, there’s a, there’s a handful of ways that this happens, but a few here, cortisol can increase our appetite, which therefore can increase our food intake. So, and we’re not just talking about any foods, it can increase our desire for high calorie, palatable foods. And this is because we have an adaptive mechanism where in stressful situations, our body wants to replenish energy.

You all know the fight or flight response, right? So that’s your body preparing yourself to flee or to fight. And in order to do those things, you need energy. So when cortisol is released, we’re desiring food calories, specifically highly calorically dense. Foods because we need those calories for energy to fight or flee.

But most of the time when we’re stressed out these days coming from an email or a text message or whatever, we are not fighting, nor are we fleeing. So instead we just find ourselves desiring these calories for, for essentially no reason. ’cause we don’t have that level of energy expenditure that’s requiring the calories in the first place.

So there’s that. We see that increased appetite and therefore desire for food, especially high, highly palatable foods, calorically dense foods for the sake of energy. That we don’t really need that much energy when we are just stressed out because our boss send us an angry email. So one, that’s one thing to think about next is that stress and cortisol and your brain and all the things that are happening there that we talked about can actually alter your appetite regularly regulating hormones, so things like cortisol, glucocorticoids.

Can affect the secretion of hormones that regulate appetite, like ghrelin, which promotes hunger and leptin, which promotes satiety. So two main hunger hormones that help us feel like we are full, or help us understand when we’re hungry, those can get altered due to stress. Because of these glucocorticoids.

So this also can impair your brain’s sensitivity to both leptin and insulin, which then can lead to leptin and insulin resistance. So then we’re in this place where our, we we’re essentially creating a resistance to the very hormone that helps us feel full. That’s a problem, right. Especially when we’re in what we were talking about before, these narrowed places of attention, focusing on the food, not being very mindful of how much we’re consuming though, and just eating, hoping to mask or escape or whatever.

This is just a really dangerous storm of things. Right. And. This may also mean for your brain that it’s not receiving accurate signals about hunger and satiety, which obviously could promote overeating. The last thing I will leave you with, with all this brain stuff is that stress can actually have a true impact on your brain’s functionality.

It can decrease blood flow. Two brain regions that are involved in appetite regulation. We talked about that with the hormones, but also with motivation and self-control, and I’ve talked about this in previous episodes when I’ve mentioned self-control and self-sabotage. That stress sort of lives in a separate part of your brain.

Then the other areas of your brain that are focused on attention and control and. Decision making. So if we are stressed, we’re effectively taking resources away from other parts of our brain that help help us make effective decisions and stay in control. So this obviously can then lead to can increased hunger or reduced ability to resist food cravings.

Lack of self-control, man. But we don’t hate cortisol, right? We don’t hate her. We don’t hate her. I swear. She’s good for a lot of things and we do need her, but I say all of this just because I want you to better understand that this is not just an issue of lack of self-control or discipline or motivation or whatever, that it actually makes a lot of sense from a stress perspective that we would be hungrier, that we won’t feel full when we typically do that.

We’re seeking. Calorically dense, highly p palatable foods. It makes sense. However, from a mindset perspective. Big surprise, I’m going there. Um, I want you to know that just because this is how we’re wired, it doesn’t mean that you or your clients are at a loss, right? That would be a very fixed mindset way to look at this instead, it’s great to explain this to your clients when they’re feeling out of control, when they don’t understand why they’re doing these things and they’re beating themselves up about it.

You can help normalize the experience by sharing this type of information with them. So on that note, kind of moving on here, evidence suggests that this stress induced and insulin related palatable food intake leads to strong associations, strong associations specifically to, I feel stressed and then I eat and I feel better, and.

That is tough, right? Because now we’re creating these pathways in our brains, essentially, and these connections that when I’m stressed and I eat, I feel better. However, it is obviously very temporary, and the problem is we’re still not dealing with the emotion. We’re still not dealing with the stressor.

We’re masking, we’re escaping, we’re doing all of these things. So. The as associ as, as the association gets stronger, which we see and researchers have determined is a real thing, it gets harder and harder to turn it around again, not impossible, especially if you’re recognizing all of these things like, oh, I’ve been doing this for the better half of my life.

No wonder I am having a hard time breaking this habit because I have such a clear association that if I go eat something, I temporarily feel better. So what do we do here? I mean, one direction to to think about is if doing that thing eating makes you feel better and temporarily alleviates the stress or the negative emotion, is there something else that could be done instead?

Something else that will temporarily alleviate the emotion or. Just, just a wild card here. Maybe we look at how we can manage our emotions better, how we can manage our stress better so that we don’t even have to run into this issue in the first place. That better management of emotions, better management of stress.

There is no need for. The stress induced eating, the emotional eating to alleviate that stuff because we have other tools because we’re managing things differently. Okay, so moving on here to findings in the stress and eating field have really highlighted the, the difference between, I guess like significant life stressors versus like daily stressors and hassles, as they call them, hassles that.

We should really be paying attention to those daily stressors and hassles because that is where the stress eating tends to come from. So these are events, thoughts, situations, experiences on a day-to-day basis that just produce feelings of annoyance and irritation and are. Something that you are aware is making your goals harder to reach.

So you’re stressed out because X, Y, Z is like getting in the way of your plans for the day or how you wanted to do things, or your calendar’s getting screwed up. Someone booked a call when they weren’t supposed to. All of those things. So as a coach, if you have a client who struggles with. Stress eating.

It’s important to focus on what those daily hassles look like. Maybe even ask them. It could be an interesting sort of like daily diary approach to just map out like when they were feeling stressed and what that hassle related to the stress was, and then figuring out which of those hassles or the things that are leading them to want to stress eat.

Because again, there may be things that cause them to stress eat. Other stressors that don’t necessarily warrant eating in that situation. So next week’s episode, I am going to highlight a specific tool that you can use with your clients. I know I’m kind of giving general examples here, like a daily diary and like mapping these things out and asking your clients these questions and all of that.

We’re gonna talk about a very specific tool next week, so I’m excited to share that with you. Um, okay. So at this point. You may have already had this thought. What about the people who are stressed out to the point where they can’t eat and we all have friends and like you may also be one of those people who are listening.

You’re like, none of this makes any sense to me. ’cause when I’m stressed, I don’t eat at all. I get to the end of the day and go, wow, I’ve had 75 calories today and I came from my coffee this morning. So. I wanna touch on this in a moment because I know many of you might be thinking this. Um, there’s one study that I pulled that I wanted to share that I think you’ll find interesting.

So in this study, women who classify themselves as emotional eaters. So these women were like, yep, I am someone who tends to eat when I am emotional. They were more likely to report overeating in response to a stressor. Compared to those who see themselves as non-emotional eaters and those women who said that they are non-emotional eaters, were more likely to report undereating when stressed.

So from a mindset perspective, what’s really important here is to understand. If your clients classify themselves as emotional eaters as we’re seeing from this study, and it is just one study, but it’s important that how you see yourself and whether you consider yourself someone who struggles with emotional eating can dictate whether or not you do emotionally eat.

Saying is believing my friends. Your beliefs are a reality creation technique, so if you believe yourself to be an emotional eater, you’re more likely to overeat during times of stress. If you don’t really see yourself as an emotional eater, then you are that person who gets to the end of the day and says, wow, I had such a stressful day, I forgot to eat.

Very interesting. So. If your clients believe themselves to be that type of person, then that’s where we can start to see like fixed mindset, drama really starting to take over in. It could be something like, I’ve, I’ve always been this way. This is what I’ve done for so long. Like I, I don’t know if it’s something I can break.

It’s just who I am as a person, and now they’re just going to start continuing to seek confirmation of their beliefs and how they see themselves. And yeah, that is tricky territory, but that’s why this mindset work is so important. And yeah, this, this study really spoke to me in my, um, in, in this just area of mindset in general, because it’s.

It is crazy and so important how much, what we think plays a role in what we end up doing. Okay. I’m gonna leave you guys at that. I know I, I kind of jumped around between emotional eating and stress eating, and then we talked brains and hormones and glucocorticoids and all of the things. So I hope that this was interesting for you.

Like I said, next week, now that we’ve kind of laid the foundation here, we’re gonna get into a very specific tool and it’s. I, I’m excited to share this with you because it’s not just a tool for stress eating, but it’s a tool that you could really use in a lot of different cases, and it’s something that is one of, it’s truly one of the most popular strategies that I teach inside the Health Mindset Coaching certification.

So I’m excited to bring you one of those tools from inside the certification, and I think you’re really gonna enjoy it. So that is all for now. I appreciate you so much for being here, and I’ll see you next time. And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of Not another Mindset show. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified of the next one.

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Or just wanna connect, hang out, chat a little bit. Come find me on Instagram. I’m Coach Casey, Joe over there. That is where I hang out the most in the land of social media. Alright, my friends, that is all I have for you this time. I so appreciate you being here and love to see you prioritizing your growth.