59. Emotional Eating During the Holidays: Coping with Grief

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger explores the impact of grief on emotional eating during the holiday season and offers practical strategies for managing emotions without turning to food. Whether you're dealing with the loss of a loved one or adjusting to changes in your eating habits, this episode provides actionable tips to cope with sadness, stress, and holiday pressures. Learn how to embrace self-care, acknowledge your feelings, and stay on track with mindful eating and weight loss goals during this challenging time. Tune in for expert advice on navigating grief, emotional eating, and staying balanced through the holidays.

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

Transcript

Welcome back to this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple. I’m Dr. Stacy Heimburger, and welcome to December! The holiday season is absolutely upon us, and I want to talk about, over the next couple of episodes, different things during the holidays that can really lead to that average 3 to 5 pounds of weight gain that most people see happen during this time. So, today I want to talk about emotional eating due to grief.

Grief is a very powerful emotion, and I’m not necessarily talking about big trauma. OK, there are trauma-informed coaches, and that’s a little bit beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today, but I do want to talk about how, during the holidays, it can just be a little bit tougher because the messages are about joy and togetherness, and if we’re not feeling some of those things, it can be pretty hard to manage. I also want to talk about grief that’s not necessarily about the loss of a loved one. It can also include loss of things that are familiar to us around eating, food, and celebrating. So it could be adjusting to the fact that we’re trying to change our eating a little bit this holiday season—we’re trying to have less sugar—or maybe we’re on a GLP-1 now, and we’re just not that hungry and there’s not that much room. And there’s this feeling of missing certain holiday foods, OK? There are nostalgic foods that give us a lot of feelings and generate a lot of thoughts that have nothing to do with the food, right? So, grief might not be obvious, but it can be there for a variety of reasons.

OK, so why do we turn to food, and how can we manage it? Don’t worry, I’m going to leave you with a couple of very specific strategies.

So, grief is natural, right? We lose something, we are sad. I see in my practice all the time, everyone wants to try and get rid of this negative feeling. People come to me, they’re like, “Oh, I think this patient is sad, like they need something,” and I work in inpatient medicine. So if someone is sad, there’s usually a reason, and it doesn’t mean that they need to be medicated for it, right? We can have sadness and grief and all those feelings, and we don’t necessarily need to medicate them away, whether that’s with pharmaceuticals, drugs, or food. OK? It’s not just about, “Oh, no, that was very hard to deal with the holidays. Maybe this is the first holiday without someone we love that we lost.” Very difficult, very sad for us, right? Maybe we see, you know, everyone with their family, and our kids aren’t coming home for the holidays, or maybe we were in a relationship, and now we’re not in a relationship, and we see all this messaging on TV. So it can be about loss of any of the people, OK? But it can also be the loss of this idealized lifestyle, right? Where we used to be able to eat whatever we wanted, or we used to be able to drink whatever we wanted, and now we don’t have those things anymore. So these are sort of more subtle losses that we might not even consider, right? We don’t understand why we’re more drawn to those sugary foods or those nostalgic foods, but maybe it is this grief about food, and that’s a real thing. So, I want to let you know, I don’t think that’s minimized. I’m not minimizing that at all, and depending on where you are in your journey, it can feel very significant. So either we’ve had a health issue, and we’ve been told to eat less of something that we used to love, or we are just trying to be healthier, we’re trying to increase our longevity, we’re trying to have fewer inflammatory foods, which most of our holiday foods traditionally are, or again, we’re just eating less because these GLP-1 medications, and now we feel a little deprived. And maybe we don’t know how to handle social situations or what to do with our meal at the holiday table.

Emotional eating is often a way to cope with these feelings—distress, anxiety, sadness, and any sort of negative feelings, especially when society tells us we should medicate all of those away, right? That those aren’t OK to have. This emotional eating can take over because, as we’ve talked about a bunch of times, when we eat, we release dopamine, and that makes us feel good. It’s just temporary feel-good, though. And we’re really sad about what we aren’t sure how to deal with. We just keep eating to cover it up. It’s not going to resolve the fact that we might just need to feel it, right?

I feel like a lot worse during the holiday season, and the holiday season, right? They expect you to go to parties. There’s a million holiday parties. They expect you to want to have these big family gatherings. Maybe we’re not in that type of family right now, where maybe it doesn’t make us joyful to be around family, and that’s actually a big cause of stress. We’re expected to indulge in food and indulge in alcohol, but they can feel overwhelming, right? Because when we’re grieving or we’re sad, usually our response to that, our actions from that feeling—remember, thoughts, actions, feelings—when we’re having feelings of grief and sadness, going out to a party is usually not the action that we take. OK? It often, I think, leads to this feeling of wanting to hunker down. And maybe we start taking care of ourselves, maybe we let our self-care go because we’re feeling low, and then we start to rely on food to numb those difficult feelings. So we retreat from ourselves in the form of our health goals, and we’re still not confronting the grief because it’s easier to eat it away, right? So these habits are hard if we don’t acknowledge that sometimes there’s grief there, sometimes there’s sadness. So just to acknowledge it, it’s OK to feel sad that things are different this year or they’re not quite how we want them to be. And I know there’s a lot to talk about gratitude, and we definitely want to practice gratitude, but those things can be simultaneously true. We can be thankful for what we have, and we can still feel sad that we’re not exactly where we want to be, right? So I can be thankful for my family, and I can be sad that they’re far away and that I don’t get to see them, right? So I can hold those two feelings simultaneously. I can still practice gratitude, and I can still have grief about something over the holidays, and that’s OK. I’m here to tell you that’s not wrong. It’s wrong when we try and shove it down with food, OK? Feeling still not wrong, but we want to do some different actions around this time.

These picture-perfect Hallmark holiday movies, right? First of all, let’s be real, most of those have a little piece of grief in them, right? There’s usually some discomfort that’s happening, and then it ends up amazing, right? That’s the whole promise of these movies, but it’s OK to not feel happy all the time during the holiday. It’s OK to not want to go to every holiday party. It’s OK to not want to spend time with family. It’s OK to feel sad that our favorite foods are really no longer on our menu or on our protocol. It’s OK to feel sad that we can’t eat as much as we used to because we really like those foods. All of the feelings are OK for whatever thought it is that is causing them. It’s all OK. That feeling is not wrong, and wanting to immediately discount it, change it, usually leads to overeating—overeating and ditching self-care and not hanging out with people. So acknowledge it and feel it, right? So we have permission. We say it’s OK that we have this feeling, and it’s OK to feel the feeling. It’s OK if you need to sit in a room and be sad and cry, even though it’s December, OK?

And it can be really powerful here. We can write about what we’re feeling—sadness, anger, or frustration. We can talk to our trusted friend or family member or therapist or coach. I hope people process feelings all the time, right? Not fixing it, manage the feeling, we acknowledge it, we feel it, we process through it, and then if we want to go back and do some work and pick a better thought to have a better feeling, we can process it. We’re going to assess how it feels in our body, right? What is our body doing physically in response to this emotion? Where do I feel it? What does it feel like? Is it high? Is it cold? Does it have a color? Is it changing? Does it travel? Right? Really, if we can figure out why we’re feeling it, that’s great. If we can’t, that’s OK. Just feel it for now.

OK, and preemptively anticipate that we’re probably, at some point, gonna have some negative feeling this holiday season and think about some healthy self-care things that are not food. So this is the beginning of the month. It’s a great time to make a list. Maybe going outside, maybe reading a book, maybe taking a bath, maybe doing a meditation practice or tapping practice. Off your phone, take a break. These little moments of self-care, we don’t need to go and spend the day at the spa. Although, if you have the time, I highly recommend that, that would be amazing. But ways to give yourself permission to rest and recharge without food to your feelings. And that’s our second strategy. So we’re going to acknowledge it’s perfectly normal to have negative feelings this season. It’s perfectly normal to have sadness about something. There’s a long list of things, right? And being sad or having a negative emotion is half of the human experience. So it’s totally fine. We’re not bad or wrong or broken because we’re having a negative feeling during this happy season. OK? Acknowledge it, feel it, and process it. What does it feel like? If we can figure out why I’m feeling this way, even better. What does it feel like in my body? Where is it going? Color—all the things. And then maybe write it. All part of the process.

Strategy is to have some preplanned self-care activities that we know will make us feel good. So these little breaks where we’re being mindful or tuning in or tuning out, whatever you need, OK?

And then strategy three, I really recommend finding some sort of physical outlet for your stress. Meaning deep breathing, meditation, physical activity, yoga, stretching—these can all be very good for sort of releasing these big feelings and lifting your mood. Find someone to reach out to.

OK, so our key takeaways: I would say it’s totally normal. Let’s normalize that people are gonna feel sad during the holidays for whatever reason—from the biggest grief to the smallest grief. They all count, and it’s all totally normal. And being sad or having discomfort, having a negative emotion, is 50% of the human experience. So there’s no reason to expect that we would make it through, let’s call it a six-week holiday season, being joyful and happy the whole time. That’s not real life. OK? So perfectly normal, you might be through journaling or whatever you need to do and process through, and then preemptively, like we plan for any obstacle, let’s make a list. What are some self-care things that do not involve food that would just be nice to do for myself if I’m feeling a little sad? What nice can I do for myself? What’s the little happy that I can prepare for? Right? Maybe buy yourself a little stocking stuffer and have it for a day that you’re feeling down. For deep breathing, physical activity—I just got back from, well, I’m recording this a little ahead of when you’ll hear it, but I got back from Miraval. But if you’ve never been, I highly recommend. But I did a class, it was called restorative yoga. We just got to comfy stretchy positions and laid there for like ten breaths. It was amazing. I felt great when class was over.

So it doesn’t need to be some amazing coping. It can just be laying and breathing and stretching, giving your body and your mind a break. That’s what we’re looking for, OK? Because that’s really what your brain is asking for when it’s asking for food, when it feels uncomfortable. It’s asking for a break from that uncomfortable feeling. So these mechanisms for stress, these little self-care things, that’s what I want you to think about. How can I give my brain and body a little break? That’s not food, right?

I hope this has been helpful. I want you to think about what are some things that might trigger you this holiday season? What are some things that you can plan ahead of time so that you’re ready for them? And more than anything, I just want you to know it’s totally, totally normal to not be perfectly happy this holiday season. OK? Let that Instagram happiness and TV happiness—you know, that’s not real. And it’s OK. All right? So I’d love to hear how you’re doing. Please share your experiences with me. You can shoot me an email or reach out on social media. I would love to hear from you. If you found this helpful, please share with a friend. All right, I’ll talk to you next time.