97. Fuel, Feelings, or Flavor? The 3-Second Check-In That Changes Everything

Ever find yourself standing in front of the fridge at 9:30 p.m. wondering how you got there — or what you're even looking for?

In this episode, I'm breaking down the simple, powerful framework I call the 3 F’s of Eating:

👉 Fuel (your body needs energy)
👉 Feelings (you're eating to soothe an emotion)
👉 Flavor (you just want something that tastes good)

You'll learn:

• How to recognize true physical hunger vs. emotional urges
• Why “rage eating” and “snacky snack mode” happen more than you think
• How to name your reason without guilt — and decide what to do next
• Why eating for flavor isn’t cheating (but unconscious eating is a trap)
• The exact question to ask before your next bite that can change everything
• This isn’t about shame — it’s about awareness. And it only takes three seconds.

Mentioned in the episode:
🎯 Emotional Eating Vault — Lifetime access to Dr. Stacy’s private client tools to stop emotional eating for good.  https://www.sugarfreemd.com/vault

If this episode helped you feel more in control or gave you an “aha!” moment, share it with a friend or screenshot and tag me on Instagram @sugar_freemd! https://www.instagram.com/sugar_freemd/

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

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I want to talk to you today about why we eat and just doing a three-second check-in that can really add some clarity. But before we jump into that, I want to give you a No Buy 25 update. So if you don't know, I decided to do a No Buy 2025 — where I am really trying not to bring anything new into our house.

So I spent most of 2024 trying to declutter, and I realized it doesn't really help to declutter if you keep bringing stuff in. So I've tried very hard not to buy anything all year. And so I'll just give you a little update. There were a couple of purchases. I did buy some shorts for the kids, so I felt good about that. They went to camp and they needed white shorts, which are impossible for kids. So I did end up getting Owen one pair of shorts, and then all the shorts were on sale, so I went ahead and got JT shorts for school. So I did buy shorts for the children and I'm more than happy with that purchase. That was fine.

I also bought new pillows, and let me tell you how happy I am with the new pillows that I bought. I don't know when I last got pillows. The improvement in my sleep is ridiculous. I am so mad that I didn't get them earlier and I'm very, very happy that I did buy new pillows. So I got a couple new pillows and I think that was it. I think that's all I got. So I think that's pretty good. That's over the last month or so. So pillows and shorts, and I feel good about those purchases.

The only other thing — I did help JT. He broke something of Owen’s and so I did go halfsies with him to replace that for Owen. So I did give half purchase to JT. We did start budgets with them and allowance, and so I've been making them get stuff with their own money — which should shock no one that they have wanted to buy less things now that they have to pay for it. So that's been excellent as well.

All right, why do we eat? So I have been thinking about this a lot and I think it really comes down to three things. I'm calling it the three F’s of eating. We're eating for one of three reasons — either for fuel, for feelings, or for flavor.

So if it's like 9:30 at night and the house is quiet and you're in the fridge or in the pantry, I want you to just ask the question, why am I here? What am I doing? I want to call this a little 3 F check-in. So we need to ask ourselves: Am I eating for fuel? Am I eating for feelings? Or am I eating for flavor?

So I'll go through all of them.

Fuel is pretty self-explanatory, right? This is our physical need for energy. So if your body is saying, “Hey, I’m low on gas here, I need some fuel,” that is why we're eating. That might be our stomach growling. That might be we're a little hangry, right? A little crankier than normal. Maybe we're having trouble concentrating, our energy is just dropping, and our body — when we check in to our hunger signals — our body's like, “Yes ma’am, I am hungry, please feed me.” That is eating for fuel. So that one is pretty easy.

Another way someone described this to me, how you can kind of check, is: Would I eat broccoli right now? If I'm eating for fuel, I would eat broccoli. This is not like, “I think I need fuel but I really only want a donut.” Okay, maybe it's not for fuel then. So fuel is our body physically needing energy, and we need to feed it.

The second one, which can be a little bit more complicated, is feelings, which we talk about a lot, right? So emotional eating is something that happens — and it happens to everyone. And I don't want anyone to think you're bad or wrong because you have moments that you eat because of your feelings. Everyone does it.

The key is just recognizing it and trying to backpedal a little bit and do some management of those feelings so that we know it’s not the only tool in our arsenal when we have bad feelings. We don't always have to eat. That’s not the only thing we know how to do.

You'll know this because when we say, “Why am I eating?” — food's not really going to fix that feeling. It’s only going to distract temporarily. So if while we're eating we're still having this thought stream that goes into forever, right? If we're perseverating, if we're doing the “what if, what if, what if,” we are probably feeding a feeling.

And this can range. This is why I think this one’s a little bit more difficult. I've definitely in the past caught myself rage eating — where I'm a number of bites into whatever I'm eating before I even regain consciousness into like, “Oh my gosh, I’m eating.” So if you are just eating, eating, eating and haven’t really even noticed that you're eating — that is most definitely from a feeling. And it's most definitely, I think, on more of the anger-rage side. I always call it rage eating — where you're just so mad and you're just eating and thinking about how mad you are and you've eaten a good amount and you didn’t even fully recognize that you were eating.

But it’s not just rage, right? We can eat because we're sad. We can eat just because we're frazzled at the end of the day — like we are a little overstimulated. Talk about that, right? Where we get this feeling of, “I just want it to stop. I just need to relax. I deserve a break.” That's all feeding feelings. That “I just need a snacky snack,” right? That snacky feeling — that is a feeling, okay?

So these are all emotional reasons that we're eating. These are not fuel, and it is not failure either. Okay? It's just information. It’s just good to know so that we can recognize it and say, “Okay, I think I'm eating because it's just an uncomfortable feeling.”

And then we can make a conscious decision. Like, well, do I still want to do that? And sometimes we do, okay? Sometimes we really do want to continue eating because of the feeling. But that is something — an opportunity — to learn. Where when it's processed through and done, and we're done eating and we're not feeling as icky as we were feeling, we can go back and work through that and ask ourselves: What could I have done differently there? Could I have stopped this further upstream?

Is what I like to think about it, right? Could I have managed this feeling differently so that it didn't get to the point where I felt like my only option was to eat something?

Emotional management — even if we can't recognize it in the moment or we can't change it in the moment. We can either not recognize it at all and we just eat, and then at the end we're like, “What happened?” Like spring back into consciousness — “What happened there?” Right?

So we can recognize it when it’s too late. That’s still great that we're recognizing it. And we can still do this analysis of: What could I have done differently? How could I have maybe managed that upstream a little bit more?

We can notice it halfway through and decide not to stop — and that's okay too. And then we can do this analysis as well. But any recognition during any part of that process is an amazing, wonderful thing because lots and lots of times we don't even recognize that that’s what we're doing.

So if you can recognize, like, “Hey, I ate that and I really — that was not for fuel, that was definitely for a feeling,” that is amazing. And kudos. And gold star your calendar because that is great.

The next step is to ask ourselves, what could I have done different? Is there a way that I could have managed that earlier or managed that differently to not eat?

Sometimes when we recognize the feeling and we decide we are going to eat or drink — this works with alcohol too — it might take a little bit more work to figure out: Why did I want to keep doing that?

So I recognized it was a feeling but I decided to eat or drink anyway — why? Sometimes it’s just the feeling was too big and maybe we need help processing that feeling. Or: I just didn't want to be responsible. I just wanted to zone out and turn everything off. I needed a full mental break. Okay — how can we get that differently than food?

It is fine that we eat because of our feelings or eat for reasons other than fuel. The recognizing — and the changing it if we want to — is so powerful. And it is 100% within your power to do so.

Because I know sometimes we feel like we're eating against our own will. And I think it’s because it’s the unconscious piece, where we don’t recognize that it happened or we don’t recognize why we ate until much, much later. And then we just sort of beat ourselves up for it, and we never go back and say, “How could I have done that differently?”

So emotional eating is not necessarily the problem. It’s eating against our own will because we’re not recognizing it. So the recognition is more than half the story — and then dealing is the next half.

And I still have the Emotional Eating Vault available — that is going to be open anytime. That’s not like an open-shut course. It is lifetime access for $97. It’s my most powerful videos where I go into all the reasons we have emotional eating and real tactical tips of how to undo that if we want. So I’ll make sure that link is in the show notes.

But what I want you to know about eating for feelings is that it happens — and it's okay. And that doesn't mean we're bad or broken or the world is ending. We can change it. We just need some better tools. And if you recognize it, you're already more than halfway there. So that's really strong work, and you should be proud of yourself.

The third reason we might eat is for flavor, right? So there are times we just want to eat something because it tastes good. We know we're not hungry, right? We're still going to do the check-in. We're going to check in — I know I'm not hungry, I know I'm not trying to mask a feeling, I just know what that tastes like and I want some of it.

All right. That's fine. We just need to be honest with ourselves. Sometimes things just taste really good, okay? We're not starving, we're not distressed, we just want to eat it.

Brownies are my new weakness. I used to have a problem with donuts — that has passed — but brownies are now a problem. It's okay. It's not actually a problem. But this eating for flavor is not a problem if we can recognize it and just make some conscious decisions about it.

I don't want you to go out of yourself, be unconscious eating. That is a dangerous place to be. We just want to be conscious. So we want to say like, “I'm choosing to eat this for the flavor.” And then what I want us to do is to really enjoy the flavor. So don't be distracted. Don't be sneaking it in the closet, right? Say to ourselves, “I'm going to eat this.”

We check in — I'm not hungry, I'm not stressed, I really just know what that brownie tastes like and I want a piece of it. Great. Then we sit with that brownie and we eat it and we enjoy it. And we do a full sensory experience of eating the brownie.

If I eat a brownie, I promise you my children are nowhere around because I don’t want them distracting me from my bites of brownie that I want to eat and I want to enjoy. So we just have to name why we’re doing it. And it’s not cheating, okay?

Now, if we're eating for flavor like four times a day every day, we might need to revamp what our health goals are, okay? But if this is like our joy eat of the week and we know that we want to eat for flavor or it's a really special occasion and this is like a little bit of “I only get this once a year” or whatever — we can choose to eat for flavor.

If we're eating just for flavor, we can still control how much of it, okay? We always have a piece of control here. And the more mindful and conscious we can be, the better we can be in control, right? The more control we can have.

So why I wanted to teach this today is because all your eating is going to fall into these three categories, right? And so if we get into the habit of asking ourselves, “Why am I eating?” it just keeps it conscious. It keeps us mindful. It keeps us present while we are eating, so that we don't go into this place where we're just not even paying attention to what we're eating. We're not paying attention to whether we're hungry or not. We just eat, eat, eat. We don't care. We don't worry about, “How could I have done it differently?” And then we come out of the haze months later and we've gained a bunch of weight and we're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm terrible. What happened?”

Right? We just want to stay conscious. We want to stay mindful. Whatever words you want to call it — we want to be present when we are putting food in our mouth. And so the easiest way to do that is to just stop and ask yourself, “Why am I eating this?”

And it will always fall into one of these three things:

• We're either eating for fuel, because we need energy and we're hungry and we would eat broccoli if that’s all that was available.
• We're eating for feelings, because we are having some sort of feeling — either we're bored, either we're stressed, we're angry, we're overstimulated, whatever it is — it's a feeling. And we just need to recognize, name the feeling, and then decide: Will eating help this?

(And it won’t, by the way. Food only solves hunger, if you want to remember that.)

But we get to decide, and then after we decide we need to ask ourselves, “What could I have done differently here? How could I have stopped this further upstream so that it didn't get to the point where I felt like I couldn't say no or I couldn't stop?”

Okay, so we want — if we're eating for feelings, it is okay. We just want to figure out — we need to do some sort of post hoc analysis: What happened? How could I have stopped it earlier?

And then the third reason would be for flavor — and it's just, “I know what that’s going to taste like, and it is going to be good, and I want it,” and that is fine to do every once in a while. We don't want to do that all the time necessarily. But when we do have that moment and we are just eating for flavor, we need to be so mindful and so present so that no one ruins it for us, right?

Because this isn't something we're going to do all the time. So if I'm going to eat for flavor — nobody better be in my way. I want to be so present and so mindful and enjoy it so much and really just take advantage of it so that I don't have to do it all the time.

So again, we just want to be super mindful. We want to get in this habit of just asking ourselves, “Why am I eating? Why am I eating?”

And if it is feelings, we want to ask ourselves if we could have done it any differently. Like, if I had to do this day again tomorrow, what could I have done differently to not get to this point?

And if it's for flavor — kick everybody out of the room. Don't let anyone mess with you. Be mindful. Be present so that you can enjoy it. And then maybe you can get all the flavor you need out of two bites instead of twenty.

All right, I hope that is helpful. So remember — just name the F here when you are getting ready to eat: Is this fuel, feelings, or flavor?

And then you will stay conscious, and this will be so good for you — and gold stars all around.

If you thought this was helpful, please, please, please share it with a friend. I'm going to link the Emotional Eating Vault offer into the show notes in case you want to do that. This would be a great time to sort of get those feelings in check — that emotional eating in check — before the holidays, before we have to deal with family.

So you might be interested in that. I will make sure it is in the show notes.

Other than that — I will see you next week. Bye.