61. Emotional Eating During the Holidays Part 3: Travel Stress

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger explores how holiday travel stress can trigger emotional eating and disrupt your healthy habits. Learn practical strategies to manage food temptations, plan healthy snacks, and set mindful boundaries during stressful travel times. Dr. Heimburger shares tips on navigating family dynamics, handling food cravings, and maintaining your routine while on the go. Tune in for actionable advice on how to stay on track with your weight loss goals and make the most of your holiday travels without the stress eating!

Free 2-Pound Plan Call!
Want to jump start your weight loss? Schedule a free call where Dr. Stacy Heimburger will work with you to create a personalized plan to lose 2 pounds in one week, factoring in your unique circumstances, challenges, and aspirations. Schedule now! www.sugarfreemd.com/2pound

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com

Transcript

Welcome back, everybody! I’m Dr. Stacy Heimburger, and this is another episode of Weight Loss Made Simple. Today, we are going to talk about holiday travel and how stressful it can be, and how it can trigger some extra eating that maybe we weren’t planning on.

So, if you have not experienced the chaos that comes with holiday travel, God bless you! Like, amazing. I want to be you. But if you have experienced the chaos that comes with holiday travel—whether it’s long hours, flight delays, worried about your work schedule, trying to keep your routine together while navigating airports and family dynamics—all of that becomes a comfort we are dealing with, especially when we start feeling a little out of control when things aren’t going exactly as we planned. Which, let’s be honest with travel, can absolutely be the case.

I want to talk about this today because most of us got a little break from this during COVID. I’ve had tons of people tell me how much nicer they thought the holidays were in some aspects when they could just stay home, right? When they didn’t have to travel, when they weren’t driving or flying or doing all those things, when they weren’t trying to manipulate their schedules, when they could keep their kids on a sleep schedule, when it was a little quieter. People felt like the holidays kind of got back that meaning of just being together. Most of us have gone back to how it used to be, right? We love to see our families. We want to see our families. Holidays mean togetherness with families for a lot of people, and so that means travel. And that means stress. So we’re gonna talk about it, and then of course, I’ll give you some strategies at the end.

So, what makes travel so stressful in the first place? So, besides travel logistics, I think that there can be a lot of family dynamics here. So, either there’s this expectation to maintain tradition, where maybe every year you did go to someone’s house, but now your family’s bigger, maybe your partner’s family wants to do something on that day, and you feel this guilt and pull. You know, where should we go? Do I need to do the same thing every year? Is it a tradition if I don’t do the same thing every year? Maybe there’s some guilt from family if you don’t maintain the tradition that they are used to, or just family dynamics. And maybe you’re spending time with people you haven’t seen all year, and so you’re trying to hang out and balance their expectations of hanging out with them and spending time, but you also need rest and downtime.

And then the pressure of just trying to keep everything in order—keeping up with meals, making sure everyone’s fed, and maintaining some semblance of your normal routine. Maybe trying to get exercise, keep kids on the sleep schedule. So, I know for us, it was always very stressful when we were going with the kids when they were little. We had so many bags at the airport—those car seats in the bag and then checking the car seats, and then kind of praying the whole time on the plane that the car seats make it to where you’re going. And then having to wait for bags, and the kids just want to run around because they’ve been trapped in a plane the whole time. And hopefully, they didn’t spill all over themselves on the plane, and like, did I remember to pack an extra set of clothes in case they spill all over themselves? And what if they’re sick and throwing up or coughing and everyone thinks they’re sick? You know, I don’t know. I find it. I love to fly with my kids, but I find it very stressful every time. When they were little, it was even worse—bringing two water cups for each of them. They had to be empty when we went through security, but then we have to fill one with milk or water. My husband thought it was crazy, but you can see how it looked pretty quickly, right?

So, I remember always feeling, getting off the plane, feeling like I needed a drink, right? And normally, where I might not eat the little snacks they bring, sure betcha, I was eating the snacks on the plane, right? Anything to turn down that buzzy feeling of being overly anxious and overly nervous. And I think driving, for me, is even worse than flying. You know, I know there’s more accidents on the road around the holiday times, and so it’s like I really don’t want to have my kids in the car when we don’t need to. You know, we love our family. Can we see them a different time?

Okay, so it can be just really stressful to travel, and I think that expectations and family dynamics are just a small part of it, but they can be big causes of stress and lots of food temptations, right? So, when we’re driving, we stop to get gas. We run inside. Everyone wants sugary snacks. Everyone wants junk food. When we’re at the airport—sugary snacks, lots of stuff—and stressful on top of it, like when the bag of Goldfish costs $12 at the airport. So, it can just really get stressful really fast, and it can get really easy to eat really processed food, especially things like that, to calm down a little bit. The reality is, you’re gonna feel more sluggish later on.

I didn’t even get into, like, vacation. When we get to where we’re going, and oh, it’s vacation now, so the rules don’t count, and I was stressed, so I deserve a break, and these are my favorite holiday foods. So, just easy food becomes really easy to turn to when we’re really stressed out around the holidays. It’s a quick fix when our nerves are a little frazzled, but it’s also temporary. The thing about stress that I find interesting, especially anxiety and stress with travel, is that our brain almost needs some sort of resolution, right? So, like, our adrenaline was so high, and then it needs something to kind of say, “Okay, we’re done. It’s over.” It needs an endpoint. So, just think about that. Is there a way that you can be very clear with your brain that the stress is over now?

And I thought about this a lot because when I would, even especially if I would travel by myself with the kids, I’d be so frazzled while I was traveling, but I really wouldn’t want a drink until it was over, right? So, like, it was when I really wasn’t even stressed anymore that my body was like, “Oh, we should have a drink now.” And I think it was because it was just trying to find closure. So, just something to think about.

The dangerous spiral we can get into is when we are stressed, and then we kind of get that dopamine hit from food, and we calm down in the short term. It can lead to guilt, and then we have more emotional eating because of that, and it’s just so common when our routine is disrupted, right? This might be something that we worked on when we’re at home, this idea of stopping the emotional spiral of guilt after we’ve eaten something, but when we’re, like, frazzled, we might not have the emotional resilience to do that. So, we’re traveling, and it’s high stress, and something that normally we could bounce back from has the potential to spiral down even further.

Okay, high-stress times absolutely increase the intake of high-calorie foods up to 30%. Psychological Science did a study on stress eating, basically stress eating those high-calorie foods, overly processed, less nutritious, right? We’re going to increase how much of that we eat by 30%.

So, let me give you a few strategies. When we ask ourselves to travel, we might want to, and that’s okay. But we should always ask first before we make decisions—we need to ask ourselves if we like the reasons. So, do I need to travel? Do I want to travel? If the answer is yes, okay, how can I make it less stressful?

One of the things is just planning ahead, right? So, we can plan some healthy snacks. We can pack those in our bag. We can grab snack packs. Okay, I did it with Chick-fil-A. It wasn’t like it was homemade or anything, but I brought chicken on the plane in one of those little bento boxes. My kids still talk about that as the best thing on the plane that they’ve ever had. Okay, so can we just maybe make our own grab-and-go? And then can we think about some other mindfulness or stress-relieving techniques? When travel gets chaotic, some deep breathing, some little meditation breaks, some progressive muscle relaxation. Where you can, like, tighten specific muscles, let it go, and kind of work your way down your body with that. Or, Headspace or Calm would like short meditations. And preemptively assuming travel is gonna be more hectic than you assume and sort of mentally preparing for that ahead of time I think can really be helpful. So just this idea, like anticipating it’s gonna be stressful, anticipating it’s not gonna go right, giving yourself some ideas of what I’m gonna do when that happens. Like, am I gonna do some deep breathing? Am I gonna have, like, download the app ahead of time? And then, can I pre-pack some stuff so at least my nutrition’s on point so I’m not having sugar crashes on top of all of it?

And then a few food boundaries are fine. You know, I’m totally against restriction, but I am totally for boundaries. So maybe that means, like, I am only gonna have alcohol two of the four nights that I am away. I’m only gonna have, you know, not cookies, or I’m gonna have cookies on this day. Would be amazing here, like, 80% of the time, we still like our nutritious food, but 20% of the time we understand life happens and we’re ready. Okay, so it’s all about being ready, prepared, ready to be mindful, and then just some general boundaries. I think the most important thing really is, do we have to travel? If we do, like, it’s gonna be stressful, and knowing that and preparing ahead of time for that I think can be really, really helpful. Just anticipate things are gonna go wrong and kind of be ready. And then, is there any way to make it less stressful? Like, maybe we were planning on staying with family, but it’s gonna be really tight quarters, and it’s been a disaster the last five years that we’ve done that. So maybe, hell, okay, maybe we just change it up so that if we need to stay on a routine, we have more opportunity because we have a little more autonomy.

So that’s just a thought as well. I hope this has been helpful—just mindful and planning, and if we have to travel, just like have our little bag of stress-relieving techniques or our ideas of how we can help the situation, and setting just some general boundaries. And whether that be, I need to stay somewhere else, or I need to pack my food, or I’m only gonna have alcohol this many times—whatever boundaries it is setting. Those boundaries are just going back to being mindful and planning, which is really all it comes down to.

I hope this has been helpful. If you have specific questions or something specific coming up and you wanna reach out and talk about it and I can help you make a plan, I would love to do that. Just book a 2 Pound Plan call, and I would love to help.

Alright, we’re getting closer and closer to the holiday season. I’m gonna switch gears. I think next week, we’ll talk about holiday overeating, and then we’re gonna start working into goal-setting so that we are ready to go when the new year comes.

Everybody, if you found this helpful, please share with a friend. Until then, I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.