60. Emotional Eating During the Holidays: Coping with Overwhelm

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger tackles the hidden triggers of emotional eating during the holiday season. From the mental load of holiday planning to the pressure of perfection, discover how overwhelm can lead to stress and discomfort eating. Learn practical strategies for mindful eating, setting realistic expectations, and prioritizing self-care so you can manage holiday stress without sabotaging your weight loss goals. Tune in for tips on navigating grab-and-go meals, avoiding burnout, and embracing a more balanced, intentional holiday season.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody! Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to number two in our holiday series on emotional eating. So, I really wanted to talk about some things that can trigger us during the holiday season to overeat. I guess I’m kind of calling this like a stop over-eating during the holidays little mini-course over the next couple of podcasts.

So, we’re kind of mid-December now. You might already be feeling a little bit of holiday pressure creeping in, some stress eating maybe, or maybe there’s just a lot of extra food around and it’s really easy to just snack, snack. So, let’s talk about overwhelm and how that can trigger a little bit of overeating. I love the holidays. I don’t want you to think I’m talking about all the bad things about the holidays for me not loving the holidays. I love the holidays, but there is a lot to do, right? Especially as a working mom. Right? There’s a lot of mental load. There’s a lot of expectations—cooking the meals, buying the gifts, managing the family calendar, trying to make our house look beautiful, trying to keep up with what we see on social media. It can really feel like you start to drown in the holiday expectations. When the stress gets too much and our brain wants a break, most of the time it’s gonna turn to food.

So, let’s talk about some of these things separately and then, of course, give you some strategies and tips. Let’s talk about the mental load of the holidays. If you haven’t heard of it, the idea is that you’re in charge of everything, and then you have to delegate all the tasks, right? So, you might have a very, very helpful partner, but if your partner is asking you what tasks need to be done, that means you’re still responsible for the mental load. You’re the ultimate manager. The buck stops with you. You’re the default person for all action. That’s the mental load. OK? And so, that can be a lot. That’s a lot before the holidays, but lots of studies have shown that women are most likely to be the ones to plan and organize holiday events, manage the family schedules, and ensure that everything runs smoothly. So, it’s not just about the physical work. It’s the mental effort that can be super draining and feel like a juggling act. From like making sure the gifts are bought on time and sent, the Christmas cards are done, and coordinating meals, and making sure like all the extended family is invited, and then coordinating the holiday parties, and getting the babysitter, and getting the perfect outfit, and making sure the family outfits are coordinated or whatever, planning travel, booking hotels. So, it’s not physical work. All those things can feel like a juggling act. OK? Very easy to overwhelm. I can feel my heart rate going up just talking about all the things that might be expected during the holidays.

When we’re trying to manage everything, it’s easy to forget about ourselves. So, self-care is the first thing to go. Our physical activity, those little outlets of stress we enjoy, are the first things to fall off our plate. So, then we’re super exhausted, overwhelmed, and stress-eating. Now our body is not physically acting up to its best. I know it’s a vicious cycle. Then we’re more tired, we’re not sleeping well, and then we’ve got more cortisol going, and then we really crave high-sugar foods. And then we’ve got cookies everywhere, and candied whatever. And it can be very, very easy to shut off the stress feelings, but as we all know, that’s short-term relief.

So, there’s stress eating and discomfort eating. There’s actually a few different types of eating, but I feel like discomfort eating is when I’m like intentionally going and looking for some things to eat or sugary food when I’m anxious or I’m frustrated. That’s stress eating. And that, I feel like, is more of the rage eating. Like, all of a sudden, I realize I’ve been eating like I’ve almost completely zoned out when I’m super stressed or I’m having really high emotions, and I’m halfway through a meal eating like not looking up, not talking to anyone, barely breathing. I always just call it eating rage eating. To me, it comes from stress. So, there’s something that happened—some stressor—and then we eat. Discomfort is more like I’m just having icky feelings. It’s not super big, but maybe I’m just tired or feeling a little burned out. And then it’s like whatever’s around, right? So, I’m not searching out dinner and overeating dinner without looking up. That’s more like the stress-rage eating. This discomfort eating is more like I feel real buzzy and I just sort of need to do something. So, I might as well snack, snack, right?

So, I hope that was helpful. It might not be, but this is where it’s kind of interesting to tune in to your hunger and ask yourself why you’re eating. Maybe you’ll start to differentiate these for you, and they might feel opposite for you, and that’s fine too. But whichever discomfort eating or stress eating it is, this holiday season is a prime time for both. So, you might get plenty of practice figuring out which one it is for you. We’re trying to run around and be more fatigued, discomfort, but could also be stress and they’re all combined. So, at the end of the day, if you don’t want to figure out which one it is, it doesn’t really matter. But just notice that there are lots of triggers to have all different kinds of eating. So, we have triggers to do this sort of rage-eating where we’re totally zoned out and just going into town, and then there’s plenty of triggers for this low-level buzzy feeling, where all the snacks that we would normally easily be able to ignore all of a sudden just seem a little bit more enticing.

I think a potential obstacle this holiday season is that we’re running around a lot. I know I haven’t even seen the full schedule for the children’s events at school, but when something like that happens and I need to leave work to go to their thing, all of a sudden I’m like getting up two hours earlier, the earliest that I can go to work, the earliest so I can make sure I see the patient, so I can leave, so I can get to the school, so I can do the school thing, and then I’ve gotta run and leave. And like whatever relaxing, normal morning routine I was gonna have is totally blown out of the water. And then usually trying to go shop before I’m trying to make dinner, and there’s just a lot of limited time for meal prep. So, a lot of grab-and-go eating starts. So, instead of having this nutritious meal, we tend to have a lot of junk food and really high-processed food and drive-throughs and things like that during this time. And again, it’s just because there’s so many things to do, so many things get put on our calendar, so many things that we feel like we have to do. So, we see all the people on Instagram, we see all the people like being perfect on TV, and like so we start to have this mommy guilt like I need to do all the things, and go all the places, and have the house look perfect, and make the wrapping paper look a certain way. It can be a lot. So then we start eating whatever we can. We kind of feel bad about that, and it’s a vicious, vicious cycle, where we just do Christmas cookies because we have to do Christmas cookies. As like I’m saying, the pressure is pretty awful, and society has set some pretty high expectations for the holidays and what it’s supposed to look like. Perfect meals, perfectly decorated homes, perfectly behaved families, perfect Christmas cards. Like perfect is whatever you decide it is.

And I want you to hear that. And if you were drifting off, come back to me. What you see on TV and Instagram is not real. We are getting a snapshot that’s been carefully crafted. We always get to decide what is perfect for our family at the holidays. OK? And if we’re the ones truly doing all of it, we probably need to do like 100th of what we think we are supposed to do. Because those kids are not gonna be behaved. They’re still gonna come up, and we’re still gonna have to grab some items. So, we’re not gonna have this perfect picture-perfect thing happening. We’re not expected to. Hear that: You are not expected to. What’s perfect for you and your family is whatever that means to you.

So, I’ll give you an example of how I handle Christmas cookies, and then I’ll try and summarize a conversation I had with one of my clients last year about Christmas cookies. So, your feed, especially listening to your phone now, is probably filled with 100 videos about people making these beautiful Christmas cookies, right? Beautiful Christmas cookies seem to be like the thing around this time. For me and my family, that means there’s a either teenage college-age or maybe she’s in college now, entrepreneurial child in my neighborhood who will deliver you a little set of pre-baked cookies in little containers of icing and sprinkles. God bless her, I order one of those, and that is the cookie decorating that we do. I have two little boys who say they wanna decorate cookies but they do not want to do Instagram-decorating cookies. I promise you. I said the perfect cookie decorating for us is this little cookie kit. I have an idea of gingerbread houses and what that should look like, but I go overboard every year and I’m letting it go. I’m working, and as soon as the pre-made ones come out at Target, I’m buying them. OK? Because normally, I stress myself out. I wanna make sure everyone has one, including whatever neighbors we invite. I like getting way too much candy, spending way too much money, and staying up way too late the night before putting the houses together. If you didn’t know that, that’s the trick to gingerbread houses—you gotta build those little suckers ahead of time so they stay together.

OK, let me tell you about my client who had dreams and aspirations of making the very fancy Christmas cookies that will be overloading your Instagram feed. When we really talked about why she wanted to do that, what moment she was trying to create, what feedback she thought she was gonna get, what feelings she thought she would have when that was done, and then realistically looked at her schedule and time, the alternative came off as to do the really fancy cookies. Another time. There can be spring fancy cookies. There can be summer fancy cookies. We don’t need it to be the holiday season to learn how to do fancy Christmas cookies—not when we have so many demands on our time.

Maybe when there’s all these demands, we let the very fancy Christmas cookies go. Maybe we do the cookie kit. Maybe we don’t do the cookies. Everywhere has cookie kits, by the way. You don’t need a kid in your neighborhood. I just like to support them for having a good business idea. But I know they sell those kits at Target. So, I’m sure they sell them at Walmart and everywhere else.

When we try, we are much more likely to experience very high levels of stress and emotional strain, and then we burn out, and we tend to overeat when we’re having those negative feelings. So, we really need to watch this overcommitting and trying to be perfect, especially when it starts to sacrifice our self-care. This perfect image is just not real, and we can enjoy it if we’re too tired. If we’re exhausted, everyone’s gonna be on our nerves. Those beautiful children that we want to dress up and take beautiful pictures and decorate perfect Christmas cookies with are going to annoy the ever-living doodoo out of us if we are burnt out and running on empty.

So let’s get our strategies. OK? Perfection: set realistic expectations. Because you think you have to ask yourself, is this the right thing for me and my family? What do I hope to get from this? What is the feeling I’m hoping to get? What magical Christmas memory do I think I am going to provide here? And is there a way to do that with less effort? Then, learning to say no. It’s OK to say no. We don’t have to do the same thing we did last year. We don’t have to go to every Christmas party. OK? If we’re overwhelmed, just prioritize the things that matter to you. Like, if you decide this holiday season you really wanna make it magical for your kids, then maybe if we don’t go to all the parties we’re invited to, without them, maybe they would, because I said to my kids, we can decorate cookies or gingerbread houses. I’ll give you a task, and they’ll tell me which one they want. But then putting effort into something that will be more meaningful to them because they’ve asked for it.

Realistic expectations, what’s the rest, and then let’s do some mindful eating even with our grab-and-go meals. It’s an obstacle we need to anticipate. We talked about last week. Kind of be ready. Even if that means we just have stuff for sandwiches. OK. And then loop in with number one. Just simplify the holiday plans. Delegate. You can just simplify the rest. Overwhelm, perfection, and mental holiday. I’m really just burned out, and then the only person not having a magical holiday is you, and that’s not what anybody in your family wants. And it’s not what you want. So let’s not be perfect. Let go of what Instagram says. I wonder if we intentionally ignored what we saw on Instagram, and it would instantly be better. I have a feeling it would. But let’s just pick the couple of things that are important, and if you’re sacrificing your self-care, that should be a flag, and I want you to re-examine it and say, something’s off.

Alright, so prioritize you a little bit, and that’ll be the nicest gift you can give yourself this holiday season. So write everything you think you have to do down and then cross out half of it. And if you’re not sure what to cross out, ask the people that you’re trying to set this magical season for. Like, ask the kids, ask your partner, ask them what they really want. What would be special to them? And see if we can just do less.

Alright, I will talk to you next week. We’ll talk about one more little thing for the holidays, and see how we do. Please share this with a friend if you think it would be helpful. This is your doctor’s prescription to do less. Bye!