56. Unpacking Emotional Eating, Family Dynamics, and Holiday Stress

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives into the complex relationship between emotional eating, family dynamics, and holiday stress. As the holiday season approaches, many of us face triggers that can derail our weight loss efforts and mindful eating practices. Discover how family gatherings can activate emotional eating behaviors and learn practical strategies to navigate these challenges.

Stacy discusses the importance of awareness, compassion, and setting boundaries with loved ones, helping you manage stress and maintain your weight loss goals. Whether you struggle with emotional eating or want to adopt mindful planning techniques, this episode offers valuable insights to ensure you enjoy the holidays without the extra baggage.

Tune in to explore how to create a supportive environment, identify triggers, and foster healthier relationships with food and family. Don’t let the holidays sabotage your progress—listen now and equip yourself for a joyful, balanced season!

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

Transcript

Hey there! As we approach the holiday season, many of us find ourselves navigating this joyful idea of being with our family and maybe a little bit of extra emotional baggage being with family. So I want us to talk about family dynamics, how it can impact our eating behavior, and some tips and tricks to get through the holiday season unscathed, or at least with the scale not moving. So stick around!

I’m Stacy Heimburger, and this is Weight Loss Made Simple. I think this is a topic that a lot of us struggle with, especially during the holidays, and it’s emotional eating. I think it is activated or triggered by being with our family. And we love our family, right? But there is a lot of opportunity in a family gathering for some triggers.

OK, there’s a lot of family dynamics, and these family dynamics can play a crucial role in our eating behaviors. Emotional eating is often triggered by psychological factors, including stress and anxiety. Sometimes, our family dynamics can lead to stress and anxiety, so I thought this might be helpful as we’re moving in. We’re just a couple of weeks from Thanksgiving, so let’s talk about it.

OK, so emotional eating is defined as consuming large quantities of food, often when you’re not hungry, triggered by emotional distress. So if you’ve ever noticed that you snack more when you’re stressed, it’s not just you. So it’s not just stress either, right? You could be bored; it could be sadness; there’s lots of reasons. Any eating that is not tied to hunger is emotional eating.

So why do we do this? We’ve talked about this before, right? If our brain is in big feelings and we don’t want to have those feelings, or we’re trying to enhance those feelings, we turn to food because it adds dopamine to the fire. So if we’re having bad or negative feelings—stress or sadness—it will give us a temporary reprieve because we get a little dopamine hit. And then we don’t feel those things. If it’s something like happiness or excitement or celebration, that is like fuel to the fire—that’s the good stuff, right?

So it’s the idea of, “I’m having fun. Let’s have more fun!” Being around our family can have all of these things. We can be really excited that we’re gonna see our family. Especially, like, I don’t live close to my immediate family; even my husband’s family is still like a three-hour drive. So it’s fun to see family, right?

But the holidays, to me, are stressful just by themselves—like trying to make sure everyone has what they need. Am I cooking? Is someone else cooking? What am I bringing? Is someone else bringing? Are we doing presents now? Are we doing presents later? Do I need them to be in cute clothes? Can we just be in yoga pants? There are a lot of things, right? All these family traditions—I uphold family traditions, but I want to start new traditions for my family, right? So there are all these little bubbles that are opportunities to be triggered.

Let’s talk about our manuals, and I know we’ve talked about this before, so let’s talk about our programming—our manuals for family. I really think this is where a lot of stress comes in. And, you know, spoiler alert: even if you work on your manuals, you will see how other people in your family have manuals and how it will show up during these times as well.

We’ll talk about it using the idea of family traditions. So if your family’s manual growing up was a specific food tradition—like everything we have these ten foods every Christmas; we have these ten foods every whatever holiday—we have these ten foods. If you try and break that program, people are gonna be mad, right?

So there are unwritten rules that everyone should follow the family traditions. There are unwritten rules about everyone should do this, everyone should do that. And if you don’t know those rules and don’t live up to them, people get mad. If people don’t live up to your rules, we get mad, right?

The example—I did this in another podcast, and I use the example of your spouse, right? So if my manual for marriage is we go to bed at the same time, and my husband’s manual for marriage is not that, it’s gonna cause a conflict. Because I’m gonna make that mean more than it does. If he doesn’t come to bed when I go to bed, I’m gonna start making it mean like he doesn’t love me, as opposed to the fact that he just does not have my manual, right? And I didn’t tell him that was my manual.

So I’ve set him up—I talk about these like love tests, right? Like I’m setting him up for this love test that he doesn’t even know I’m testing him on, and he doesn’t know the material because I haven’t told him. The more members of our family we have together at once, the more this is all gonna be in play underneath the surface.

So awareness is the first thing we need to do. And then the next thing we need to do is to be super compassionate, right? Because if I mess up my own manual, I’ll use today’s example. Academically, for the kids, I want to do a little bit more hands-on with them when they get home from school.

So in my mind, I was like, the new manual for after school is that each kid does 30 minutes of academic work with mom. By the time I got home and picking them up and just listening to them in the car, I had already had to adjust my manual—like, “Kid does 20 minutes with mom of academic work, and then we move on to whatever else we need to.” It didn’t go very well, right?

But that was my manual, and it didn’t work. And it was something new, and I was super, super compassionate about it. I was like, “Oh well, we’ll try again tomorrow,” right? I’m not mad at the kids because they didn’t follow my manual. I didn’t tell them that that was the rule, right?

I didn’t tell them that was the new expectation. I was just winging it and seeing how it would go. They did not comply; it did not go well. I didn’t make it mean they’re bad kids or I can’t teach them or I’m a bad mom. I didn’t make it mean any of those things. I was super compassionate about it because I know we’re all just human. We’re all flawed, and things aren’t always gonna go as planned.

That’s exactly the attitude we have to have about our family members for these holiday events. If Aunt Edna says something about my weight and I’m triggered, I don’t mean that Aunt Edna is a horrible person, and Aunt Edna should know better, and how dare she, and she’s the worst, and she’s awful, and I never want to see her again. And I’m gonna go to every other family member and talk bad about her now because she said something about my weight.

Because she should know that we don’t talk about people’s weight. Well, that’s not her manual. And I’m pretty sure most of us always talked about people’s bodies, even though we know they probably shouldn’t. But that’s not their manual. So be compassionate.

But if I didn’t know that she didn’t know that she broke my manual, I didn’t tell her the rules. Like, I didn’t give her the test material, and then she failed, and then I want to make it mean horrible things about Aunt Edna. She just didn’t know.

So we have a tendency to be compassionate with ourselves when we don’t fit, when we don’t live up to the expectation. We are compassionate with ourselves, and we find all the reasons why we didn’t live up to that expectation. But we have a very hard time giving that same grace to other people.

And so that is tip one for making it through the holiday season with your family being less stressed: really let it go. They don’t know if you’re triggered because they didn’t follow your manual. They didn’t meet your expectation. They probably didn’t even know that that was the rule. If the situation was reversed and you didn’t want their compassion, right?

So cultivating self-compassion and compassion for others can really help, and we can let go of a lot of judgment toward Aunt Edna and everyone else. Yeah, that’s not to say we shouldn’t have some boundaries. OK, so we can have boundaries.

So we can say, “Oh, Aunt Edna, I really didn’t like that. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about my weight. If you feel the need to talk about my weight, I’m probably just gonna walk away.” So just to let you know, that’s what’s gonna happen, right?

I’m not yelling at Aunt Edna. I’m not telling her she’s an awful human being. I’m not telling her I hate her, and I’m never talking to her again. I can be compassionate—like she didn’t know—and then I can set the boundary.

“If you talk about my weight, I’m probably gonna walk away because I feel really triggered, and I don’t want to talk about it.” That’s just a boundary. Walk away; we let it go.

Tip two is really just about being super aware—like noticing any changes in your body when you’re around your family or when you’re at Thanksgiving dinner or whatever it may be. Getting a little anxious to eat more because I’m anxious, because I’m sad, whatever it is.

So this awareness about what’s going on in your body will really help, and then we can maybe even journal about it if we want. We can talk to our coach about it if we want—like, “Hey, I was doing great at the party until Aunt said something about my weight, and then I got super triggered and felt like trying to glass the line and then talk crap about Aunt Edna for the rest of the night and kind of fell out of integrity with myself because it’s not how I wanted to show up for this meal.”

Maybe we need to go for a walk or something like that. OK, supportive—just like having these conversations. We need to encourage our family to be open and honest with each other. That’s gonna help.

And then cultivating this idea of just being really compassionate—so identify your compassion. Those triggers—someone not meeting an expectation because they didn’t know, like they just not meeting my manual. Can I set a boundary for next time? Can I tell them? Like basically, you’re telling them the manual; you’re telling them the rulebook when you set a boundary.

And we can revisit boundaries. That’s not like a threat or anything like that; we just say, “If you do this, then I do this.” So if you talk about my weight, I’m gonna look; I’m gonna leave; I’m gonna walk away.

I want to talk about it. OK, so we can identify triggers, try and find compassion, set some boundaries, and then just be super mindful and be aware of what’s going on in your body.

I want this holiday season to be a really joyful experience. I don’t want any of my listeners to gain the 5 to 10 pounds that people do during the holidays. And I think this is like trigger number one or these family gatherings—not just because of all the other things. I’ll do some episodes on as we navigate this holiday season together.

But I think this family dynamic part—like we love our family and we want to see them, but sometimes the dynamics just make it really difficult to stay on track because it generates a lot of feelings. I think these triggers and finding compassion and setting boundaries will get rid of a lot of it and try and make it easier.

So I really invite you to be aware. I would love for you to share your experience and if any of these strategies work for you as we come through this holiday season. I would love to hear about our family dynamics influencing your behavior.

Now that you’ve heard about this, like, “Yeah, that totally happens to me all the time.” Like every time I go to Aunt Edna’s, I drink more than I said I was gonna drink. Turns out it’s because I didn’t tell her to quit talking about my butt or whatever it is.

So I would love to hear. And let’s just try and find support for each other through this holiday season. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review—that would be amazing. I would love that! Until then, I will talk to you next week. Bye!