No-Nonsense Approach To Navigating Stress Eating

Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host. Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.

I remember a time when I used to think that stress eating was a personal failure. I must have done something wrong where I ate the wrong things, at the wrong time, and didn't manage my stress well enough through yoga and meditation that led to reaching for food. All this did was create a shame cycle that perpetuated the same food behaviors I wanted to decrease. I see things very very differently now. Your body is going to experience stress. It will move in and out of a stress response every day for the rest of your life. The work is not to try to never be stressed, but to get curious about what the presence of stress is trying to tell you. Additionally, when you move into a stress response, you're naturally going to crave specific foods that are higher in carbohydrates and sugar. This isn't a sign that you're doing something wrong. Rather, it is body communication that your body is looking for a quick hit of glucose to be able to fight or flee. There needs to be a lot more compassion and so much less judgment when you find yourself eating a bunch of sugary foods. Sometimes you might be able to pause beforehand and get curious about what is going on, and sometimes you won't, and that is alright. I chat about all things stress eating today with Dr. Melissa McCreery.

Melissa is a psychologist, emotional eating expert, author, host of the Too Much on Her Plate podcast, and the creator of Your Missing Peace, the program that supports smart, busy women in creating freedom from overeating and peace with food. She has helped thousands break cycles with overwhelm, overload, and overeating without feeling deprived and without depending on ridiculous amounts of willpower. Dr. McCreery’s approach to helping working mothers, busy professionals, and stressed-out business owners emphasizes leveraging your unique strengths, ditching diet mentality, and using the power of psychology. Her perspective has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNN Health, Good Housekeeping, Working Mother, Fitness, Women’s Health, Real Simple, and Self. We chat about the complexities of stress eating including how stress impacts food choices and behaviors, navigating emotional responses to food, practical strategies for pausing and checking in, building routines around self check ins, acknowledging your needs and who you want to be that could lead to making different food decisions, and befriending stress. Reminder, ways you can support the show are utilize any of my affiliate links, donate to the show, or check out my self paced courses. All links are in the show notes. Now, welcome Melissa!

I am so excited to have you back. I absolutely loved our conversation the last time that you were on the podcast and so for anyone who missed that episode, and I can also put our prior episode in the show notes if anyone wants to check that one out, too, I would love for you just to share a little bit about you and how you got into the work that you're doing, before we get into all things stress eating today.

Melissa McCreery 03:51

All things stress eating, yeah, without making it stressful, yeah. So a little bit about me. I'm a clinical psychologist. I have spent my entire professional career helping women with food, with weight, with overwhelm and stress and eating and their bodies, and just every single way I think that this can get tangled up for us, and does get tangled up. And along the way, technology opened up, which opened up the world for me. I moved from being a therapist in private practice into doing coaching and consulting, which also I think opens up a lot of possibilities. Therapy is a wonderful vehicle, and coaching, I think, is so much more forward focused and focused on potential. And I'm all about potential, and one of the things that was really frustrating me about the work that I was doing is that so much of what is taught around food and eating and bodies and weight is about management and self control and willpower and denial actually right, like telling yourself no. And so many women who are amazing, who are strong, who are capable, who are smart, feel like there is something wrong with them because they can't get it perfect, and they can't manage and they don't have the willpower, which is all really crazy, because the time when we tend to use food to cope is the time when all of those mechanisms are in short supply or gone. And so to make a short story long, I guess I knew that this whole we were in the wrong paradigm. There is this possibility of freedom. There's a possibility of healing your relationship with food and creating a peaceful, free relationship with food, which not only gets you where you want to go, but I was working with so many women who were putting so much energy into this battle, when if they could just lose the battle, they had so many valuable things they wanted to do. So that's what I do now, is help people create freedom from overeating, and it is so much more fun than helping people follow a plan and stay in control.

Stephanie Mara 06:07

I love all of that, and I love your point that also, you know, it's so interesting that, and I hear this a lot from those that I work with as well, is kind of this like, oh, I must not have enough willpower. There must be some part of me that feels weak, and it's like, if anything, what I've seen, and I know on my own journey as well, when you're struggling with food, the times when you are trying to insert the most amount of control, the most amount of utilizing as much willpower as you had to have inside of yourself, you are doing literally everything that you can think of to try to care for yourself, that sometimes ends up in stressing yourself out even more kind of sending this like extra cue of danger that I'm doing everything, and still something is like, quote, unquote wrong.

Melissa McCreery 06:58

Right. And somehow there's this myth that there's this tipping point, that if you can do all the things and if you can get all the things perfect, somehow all the stress will disappear. But really it's a recipe for more overwhelm and more overload and more feeling exhausted. We talked about hidden hungers the last time I was here, but the hidden reasons that we reach for food the more we try to get things perfect, the more we try to follow a plan, the more we try to color within the lines, especially during stressful, chaotic times, the more tempting it is to use easy, accessible, fast coping mechanisms, and reaching for chocolate is one of those.

Stephanie Mara 07:39

Yeah, it's so easy and it's so quick that it isn't something that actually has to take more energy, like I hear what you're pointing to is stress takes a lot of energy to actually stay in and why would we go towards things that utilize more of our mental and physical capacity when we don't have that online as much anymore, when we're already feeling overwhelmed and stressed out.

Melissa McCreery 08:07

And as we're talking about it, it's like layer upon layer of because, well, there's layer and layer and layer of things that we feel like, well, that we've been taught we are supposed to do, and we've also been taught if we can't do them there's something wrong with us. We're weak or to go back to discipline, we don't have enough discipline. We don't have enough willpower, which is layering on more and more stress. And that's one of the reasons I'm so glad to be talking to you today, because we are living in a stressful time, and it there is so much stressful energy out there. People are stressed, people are overwhelmed, people are anxious. There's so much uncertainty and also a harshness. There's just this harsh harshness in the world. And people are reaching for food. People are reaching for easy reasons to cope. People are reaching for that extra glass of wine. People are like to help me feel better. And when so much of the messaging around what you're supposed to do when you find yourself in that cycle is another layer of stuff you are supposed to do when you're already feeling like everything is too much, a lot of people just hold their head and say, yeah, of course, I'm stress eating. What else am I supposed to do? Who wouldn't be and feel really hopeless, or feel like, okay, this is just inevitable.

Stephanie Mara 09:23

Yeah, I've been bringing on in the podcast more and more, just talking about the context of the time that we're living in and that we have to bring in so much compassion that this isn't a matter of utilizing more willpower in this time or really trying to, like, nail things in that maybe you were leaning on before of maybe I need to focus on my nutrition more. Maybe I need to focus more on my physical movement. It's like it will land differently in your body, because your body is not picking up really very minimal cues of safety based off of the environment and the unknown that we're living in that sometimes by the end of the day, all the fear response and the stress response that's been going through you the entire day, yeah, it's like I just want to sit on the couch and eat whatever I want to eat, to have a moment of trying to not feel the way I have felt the rest of my day and that, yeah, we have to bring in just a lot of understanding in this context of this time that we're living in, that it is a lot, and this is, I hate to use the term, like, unprecedented times, like, I feel like that's so overused, but it is a little bit that, you know, it's really scary the times that we're living in. And I know that the idea of trauma has gotten so popularized, but sometimes it's not necessarily about your past and your food behaviors happening because of your past. Sometimes it literally is a response to what's happening right here and right now.

Melissa McCreery 10:56

Yeah, I think what you're talking about is, I talk about, I think a lot about creating an option C for yourself, because I feel like in these situations, for so many of us, our brains want to bounce back and forth between, okay, I just need to get it together. I just need to power through this. I just need to, you know, buckle up and put on my big girl pants and, you know, I just need to, there's that side of it, and then we boomerang to the oh my gosh, I can't, I'm so overwhelmed. This is I just want to numb out. I'm just going to scroll and eat ice cream. And neither of those are satisfying, and neither of those options are helpful. But a lot of times, if you look at what you're doing with food, it's not unusual to be bouncing back between those two options, and you stay strict with yourself until you just can't stand it any longer, and then you go numb. And I think what's really important right now is those are options A and B, what's your option C? How do you get out of the black and white? And the other piece of that is that when we are stressed and when we are overwhelmed and our brains get activated, our brains are in survival mode, and so your thoughts are so likely to be around doing, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? I need to do something. How do I feel differently? How do I stop eating? How do I lose weight? How do I... it's this panic doing which, if you can take a deep breath, and if you can think about it, if you were to follow through on that, it just adds more to that cycle of I'm doing, and I'm overwhelmed, and there's too much, and it's chaotic, and I mean just the rhythm in your head. And so I think option C, which we don't see, it's invisible a lot of the time, is, how am I feeling and acknowledging just what you said, and it's just because we make it small, right? Like it's a little thing, but it's so big. Acknowledging this is really hard. It's really hard. This is amazing how I showed up today. It was really hard, right? I am amazing that I am making it through. This is hard. That's sometimes that is the biggest thing you can do, and when you're bouncing back and forth between option A and B, I don't think that acknowledgement is usually there.

Stephanie Mara 13:07

Such an excellent point that first, I appreciate you pointing out that we sometimes have to practice that pause when we hear the do, do, do, do, do. What do I do? What do I do? And I totally understand what you're referencing of the like, do I need to change my food? Do I need to lose weight? Do I need to move my body more? Like, what do I need to do? And, you know, I like to describe that here as a very sympathetic nervous system response, that when we're in that fight or flight response, high stress levels, it's go, go, go, go, go. Like your body feels like it is in danger, and it's gotta figure out what to do to get out of this danger. So I love that what you're pointing out is, first, we need to pause and acknowledge what's happening. And I completely agree with you. like, validate this is hard, like, especially when you're so tired of choosing the food to help you navigate your stress and you're just done with the behavior, but it still feels like the most easily, readily available behavior to lean on. It is really hard to pause and say, you know what? I don't really want to do that, because everything in you is going to be screaming, just do the thing that makes us feel better, even if it's just for now.

Melissa McCreery 14:22

And if you think about the different direction you come from when you make a shift of pausing right like, even if what you're saying to yourself is, I do not want to binge tonight. I do not want to come home and do this stress binge. I don't want to do it. There's a difference between I shouldn't do it. I can't do it. What am I going to do so I don't do it like the whole like, you can just hear the pressure, even in my voice as I'm talking. There's a difference between that and I do really, I really want to do it. Why? Okay, why? Well, today has been hard, and it feels unsolvable, whatever it is, whether it's the state of the world or the state of your job or the state like it just feels, I feel out of control. Whatever it is, the image I come to a lot when I talk about this with my clients, or when we're doing coaching on this in my program, is we often talk about like, what would you do if there was a child that you care about very, very much, who they come home from school and they've had a miserable, awful, horrible day. You know, the world was it was that no good, very bad, horrible day, right? That from the kids book, and they come home and they're tearful and they're grumpy, and you're sitting with them on the front porch and there's nothing you can do. It's just sucks to be eight years old at that time, right? Or whatever, what do you do? And what most people say is, I sit with them, I put my arm around them, I let them cry it out. Or I say, yeah, you know, sometimes kids are mean. Or I...you acknowledge it. You say, this is hard, and we have not been taught in our society that that has value for ourselves, but it is sometimes the there's all this talk about bubble baths, and sometimes, who has time for a bubble bath? Or sometimes you don't even like a bubble bath, but we all have time to just kind of hold ourselves for a minute and acknowledge that we're doing a really big thing sometimes.

Stephanie Mara 16:15

I completely am on the same page with you. I utilize that a lot as well. I've been bringing more into, you know, my sessions and on here, on the podcast, of how important it is just to acknowledge and validate and it is just as readily available as choosing the food, because there's nothing that you actually have to do. You just get to slow down to be with yourself. And I love that you're also naming and I agree with you that it's like, stop fighting that you have the urge to eat food. It's like, okay, I want to eat food. I want to eat a whole carton of food. I want to eat a whole bag of food. I want to keep eating until I'm so full that I'm so stuffed and like, just even in the process of actually verbalizing what is coming up. You hear it, you get to name it. You get to validate that's your human experience right now, it's not wrong or bad to have that impulse. And I find that once we start naming it, that's where we shift into a different part of our brain and our body to then do what you're talking about is like, let me get curious about this. Let me question this. Like, what is this trying to do for me? What am I trying to get from, like, overfilling my physical body to the point where I feel very, very uncomfortable, like, what would that do for me? And with such a lens of compassion that it's like, oh, wow, that feels like it would be my best strategy right now. And maybe there's something else like, okay, so this was a hard day. Maybe there's something else that I can support myself with that isn't always coming from food.

Melissa McCreery 17:50

Yes, and we never get to that question. If we are stuck in the shame cycle of being so mad at ourselves because we ate the food, or being so mad at ourselves because we want the food, or being so mad at ourselves because I really shouldn't be hungry right now, you know, but I am. There's no room for curiosity there and having respect for the fact that there is a reason this is going on. If you know there's a reason you're carrying around that extra five pounds that weren't there last, you know, six months ago, or there's a reason. Okay, so let's get to the bottom of it. And, yeah, maybe right now, I really need the I was just talking to somebody who's who's got a soda habit, right? It's like, I really need that can of Coke right now. Maybe do. So let's learn about it, and let's be kind to ourselves. And there's this place in talking about this where if you're really struggling with this, there's this tendency to just roll your eyes and say, okay, but I really do need to do something. I need to do, do, do, right? We have been taught to underestimate how powerful taking ourselves seriously really can be. And I've had that experience over and over again with clients who, okay, you know, we'll work on the self kindness. Okay, you're right. I'm hard on myself. And there's kind of like, okay, we'll do that. And there's huge surprise that happens when the binges start disappearing, right? You don't have to micromanage your food to get to a place with food that you love. In fact, the path that you take to get where you want to be with food when you get there, that's what it's going to feel like. And if you are following the rules that your brain has learned in diet culture about micromanaging and being rigid and being harsh with yourself and shaming yourself and feeling like you need to hide your hungers, and then guess what? Even if you get to whatever that goal is, that is exactly how you're going to be living with food.

Stephanie Mara 19:43

Yeah, it's such an excellent point that if we want to create the kind of interactions with food we want to have, we have to start being in our body and in connection with ourselves in the way that we want to have the same relationship with food, which means connected, which means listening, which means validating ourselves. And I agree with you that again, I think I had this experiences myself where I was just like, what would actually naming what's happening for me right now actually do for me? Like, okay, yeah, so I'm feeling really sad right now, what is that actually gonna do? But I find that even that, like eye roll, like you were talking about or like poo pooing, it sometimes is protection from actually practicing doing it, because it can feel really scary to start to name what's here and to start connecting with it and feeling it and moving through it. And if we don't know how to do that, then it can kind of be easier to just be in the skeptical doubt of it. But I have found, like you're describing, that the more that I have practiced, the more that those I work with have practiced this of just validating and naming what's present the opposite happens. They think like, oh, if I give this attention, aren't I just feeding into this? Or isn't it just gonna grow? Or, you know, I don't want to, like, just, like, give my emotions all their attention and then they just take over. I notice that there can be a lot of fear, but when we actually embody the experience of being with ourselves, we actually feel relief, and sometimes it like takes time to update that. I don't know if you've noticed that with those that you've worked with as well, that we have to practice it over and over and over again and be like, wait no feeling my emotions and validating myself brings relief, not further intensity. And then we do it again and we're like, wait no. That brought relief, not further stress and overwhelm. I'm not sure if you've noticed the same thing.

Melissa McCreery 21:45

Well, and in myself too, right? And I think there's also, and maybe you were talking about this as well, there's also this layer of especially when it comes to stress and external stress. I work with a lot of high achievers who are very capable, and part of their identity is being very capable. And so there's a fear that if I really let myself feel this stuff, I'm not going to be able to do anything about it anyway. So it's just going to create a big mess. So whywould I want to feel it? You know? Duh, I'm stress eating. Of course, I'm stress eating. But the idea of really feeling it and exploring it and kind of mucking around in there. It feels like it's going to be mucking around in there. And there's, I think, a fear that you're going to open this big box of goo, and then what will you do with it? It'll just be all over you forever. And you're right. Feelings when you give them permission to move through you, they move through you. And you may not be able to change the stress, but when you change the way you treat yourself in stress, you are changing things.

Stephanie Mara 22:45

Yeah, so I'm curious, because I know that a lot of people ask me, but how do I pause, like, how do I even catch when I am stressed? And that seems to be like, they understand the concept. They're like, okay, this totally makes sense, but I have such a hard time remembering when to check into myself, how to check in with myself, I'm curious if you could speak to that, and what you've maybe explored with those you've worked with.

Melissa McCreery 23:12

Oh, we were just talking about this in my group program, and somebody was saying, all right, I have collected all these strategies. Now I have my strategies. I know what to do. How am I supposed to remember to do them in the moment? So I think there are a couple things, and you probably talk about at least some of these. One is just practicing when you don't need to pause. It's starting to create a ritual around doing that. And for me, it's really simple. It's just literally, I always when I do it, I just put my hand on my chest, because feeling my aliveness engages my relaxation response. It grounds me. But taking a deep breath, there is a reason that is a part of our vernacular, right? Taking a deep breath and okay, what is going on? Or what do I know about what I'm feeling? What do I know about what I'm needing? What do I know about what I'm wanting? So practicing that, when you think about it, or trying to connect that to other habits, is often useful. And I think it's so important not to get locked into this perfectionistic model of what it is you're somehow supposed to do. Anytime you Remember to pause, it is helpful. There is no rule that says, oh, I need to catch myself the moment I have a craving. Or I need to catch myself before I dish up the ice cream, or before I put the spoon in the pint. Or I need to catch myself. No, you know what, if you pause in the midst of a huge shame attack after all of this has happened, you're going to learn something valuable, and you will have an opportunity. Okay, wait, I am here. What is going on right now? What am I feeling? I am feeling, here's the dialogue in my head. Okay, what would be helpful to focus on? What do I need right now? Those questions are absolutely valid wherever you are in this cycle, and again, we have learned so much, all or nothing thinking in diet culture and in culture at large, right? Now it's ruined and it's spoiled, and there is always space for curiosity. There's always space to just make a little tiny pivot. How can I do this a little bit differently here? How can I care for myself? How could I hold myself in this moment? And honestly, there's so much focus on getting it perfect at the beginning. Whatever perfect actually is, I don't know, but anybody who's listening, think about if you could take a pause after you've eaten the thing, whatever that is, at that moment where you are about to decide it is all ruined, right, that this was a catastrophic thing, that it's, you know, now you're going to have to start over. If you could just there, like, take a breath and start to practice remembering. Well, guess what? I don't have to go down this road. There's another road I could go down. How much would that change you're eating and you're thinking and what transpires over the next two days or three days or four months, it can be huge.

Stephanie Mara 26:07

You make so many beautiful points here. One, I love your reminder not to practice some of these pausing and checking in around when you're already feeling the most overwhelmed, the most stress, the most intensity inside your body, that it actually has to start when you're just waking up in the morning, when you're having a lovely moment with a friend, when you know you've had maybe even kind of an easier day, like starting the check ins, when it doesn't feel as intense. So you can just start to build that pattern of what it's like to check in with yourself, to name what's present for me right now, and that that experience in your body is going to be a lot easier to be with when you're not first practicing trying to sit with the most emotion sensations in your body.

Melissa McCreery 26:58

Nobody is at their best at their worst time of day, you know. And that's what we do. We target, for so many women, it's the end of the day or it's the evening with food, and so we focus on how to be who we want to be at that time. The reason you're eating is because you're depleted. You're out of gas, your hidden hungers are, you know, rumbling around all over the place. So one of the tricks that we play with in my program is, what is that time that feels insurmountable, and then back it up two or three hours, and start asking yourself, what you need. Then what do you know about what's going on? Then how could you nourish yourself? Then it might be food, sometimes it is food, but it could be a lot of other things. What is going on when you actually have some capacity to listen to yourself and to respond to yourself?

Stephanie Mara 27:47

Yeah, I teach the same exact thing that we can't start practicing, you know, I talk a lot about somatic work and somatic practices here, but we can't start practicing somatic work once the train has left the station of the binge urge, or the stress eating urge. You know that it's just like, once it's already on its way, it's really hard, like, it's not impossible, I want to name that, I certainly have practiced it in, you know, my very distant past binge eating years. But it's really, really difficult to kind of pause and check in when there feels like this voracious wolf inside of you that's like, feed me all the things. And I loved that your other point was also that sometimes this work starts with how you check in with yourself afterward. I feel like there's a lot of pressure that it has to be you have to do the check in beforehand so that the behavior doesn't even happen to begin with.

Melissa McCreery 28:43

I think I did a podcast episode on this about how some of the most valuable stuff you have in terms of learning how to beat this stuff comes from your failures. Again, if you are in shame mode or guilt mode or we shut down, not because there's anything wrong with you. That's just the human response. You've already decided, oh, it was my fault. There's something wrong with me, and so there's nothing left to be curious about. But when you can start to develop a capacity to be curious about your worst days, or even your so so days, or the days that went perfectly until 4:30 and then, for some unknown reason, everything fell apart. When you can start to wonder about those without deciding ahead of time that it's all your fault and you've blown it and now it's ruined, and I mean, you all know the rest of that cycle, you can learn some amazing things. That's when you start to learn why what you tried didn't work. That's where you start to learn more about what you really needed. You thought you had it handled, but, oh, it turns out no that that intervention that you had decided was going to work for yourself was never going to work after your Wednesday meetings, or that way of pausing it didn't resonate with you. Or there's so much gold there, and we've been taught that especially highachievers, right? And I will speak as one. We're not supposed to make mistakes, and when we do, especially for verbal we're super good at hiding them and kind of distancing ourselves from them, and then never, ever walking into that territory again, because we're used to being high achievers. There's so much we talk a lot in with my clients and in my program about, like, let's just mess it up. Let's just do it imperfectly. Like, that's great. You had an awful week, you know, let's look at it, because there's a lot to learn here. Maybe, you know, maybe you don't have to have it again if we start to figure out what went wrong. So it's really shifting your brain in a different direction.

Stephanie Mara 30:38

Yeah, I love what you're pointing to is that we actually have to engage in the pattern over and over and over and over again to learn from it. And what I find that you're also speaking to is it's that it's not doing the pattern in the same way, like once the pattern has happened, because you may enter into the same internal state in your body that kind of is fueling maybe the stress eating, or the binge eating or the emotional eating, but what can be different is how you show up for yourself afterwards, so that the pattern starts to feel differently, and you're able to say, okay, so that happened. I can't go back and change that. I don't have to judge myself that it happened again. What do I have to learn from it this time? And what I found, and I know I experienced this, is that the more that I got to bring in curiosity and say to myself, I didn't do anything wrong. I just ate a bunch of food like that's all that actually really happened here, that even my desire to want to go towards that started to decrease, because it didn't feel as alluring. It didn't have as much of a draw anymore, because I got to start to learn what is that food behavior trying to support or protect me from, and I actually want to start supporting and protecting me in a different way, because that's not actually supporting or protecting me, but I first had to be in my body to notice that and collect that, I like to call it body data.

Melissa McCreery 32:13

Yes. So there's a training that I teach in my program called spiralocity, and it's all about a vicious cycle is a hamster wheel. It is a closed circle. The way to get off a hamster wheel, the way to break that cycle and stop running around faster and faster and telling yourself, if you just can do it perfectly, you'll somehow get somewhere. We open that up with compassion and curiosity. And when you do that, it becomes a spiral, and it's just like you're describing. You move up, you go through the same stuff. Maybe the holidays are a challenge for you, or maybe summer vacation, or maybe whatever. Wednesdays are hard, and you keep having those. But if you open yourself to learning, you find yourself in a different place every time you go through and then someday you realize, and this is the part I love, like, wow, I just realized I haven't binged on a Wednesday in four months. You don't fight the habit. You lose it by making improvements and by making changes. And so back to what we were talking about, about stress eating and eating at night and trying to intervene at your worst moments. The way I always describe it is like, it's like, somehow life bumped you up to level 12 of some video game, and you're mad because you can't beat it. You were doing really good at level three. All of a sudden you got thrown up there, and now you've decided, Oh, it wasn't working anyway, and I'm a failure, and I didn't really learn anything. No, you're really good at level three, but sometimes life takes you to level 12, and just because you haven't mastered level 12 doesn't mean you're not on your way. And that may seem like a whole bunch of words, but you all, the way we talk to ourselves, and the thoughts that we have and the thoughts that we run on repeat in our heads are so powerful, and so many amazing women are out there telling themselves that they are failures with food and having all these self punishing thoughts and telling themselves they just need to work harder and they just need to rein it in. And yes, life is stressful, but there's nothing we can do about that. So we just need, I mean, if you just think about how you feel hearing it, so many women are hearing that 24/7, and it's stressful and it's exhausting and it's such a disservice. It's just, it's my passion to get help women get rid of that. We deserve better.

Stephanie Mara 34:26

I love that analogy of just the video game and that, yeah, it's just not a level that you have experienced before. And so why would you possibly know how to be a character, a player in that level, when you've never been there yet. And so for anyone who's played any game or learn anything new that you know, it takes time to be in something new and to experience it and to have that feel safe and to get comfortable with it, and that every time you practice showing up for yourself in level 12, that's like, what I hear you is also like, widening your window of tolerance. If we were gonna bring some language to it, of like, yeah, you're just your window of tolerance isn't there yet, but every time you get to level 12, and you practice before, during, after, like you said earlier, there's no time that you can't meet yourself with curiosity, that any moment could be a moment that you start just bringing curiosity and compassion with what you're navigating, and that the more that you practice that the more you're going to be widening your window of tolerance to be able to meet yourself at level 12, and that does take practice. That every time that you practice it, the better you are going to get at showing up for yourself in that.

Melissa McCreery 35:50

And for people who are listening, who are thinking curiosity, like, how do I get curious? What does that? What does that mean? Because it you know, these are just these sound, these concepts. If you're not using them, and you don't think that way your brain is like, what? And I think the phrasing that I like to use is, what do I know? Not what am I feeling? What do I need? Because that, again, there's this harshness and there's this expectation that somehow there's an answer. What do I know? What do I know about what is going on? What do I know about why this afternoon was so difficult for me? Why do I know about why I ate all the cookies? And the answer doesn't get to be because I'm a deficient person in some way, right? What do I know about what I'm feeling? Maybe I don't know anything about what I'm feeling, but I know I have a headache. That's something you know about what you're feeling, right? What do I know about what I need? I don't know, but I can tell you 12 things I don't need right now, okay, like, let's start there, and you just start collecting. What do I know? That is what curiosity is. It can be that simple. It's just putting your hand on your chest, taking a deep breath. And what do I know? I know I do not want to be standing here practicing this silly thing right now. That's okay. Okay. You are now one inch more grounded than you were before you did that.

Stephanie Mara 37:04

Yeah. Thank you also for just bringing it into because sometimes I find that some individuals I've talked to, they get so overwhelmed in the moment of sometimes the shame and the intense internal self judgment that can occur even afterwards. And I love that you're bringing it into just even the simplest of I don't want to check in with myself right now, or I don't know what I don't know, or I don't know what I know. And so like just being with those things first, like really, actually coming into what is my actual lived experience, just in this second, I find slowly starts to shift us into more of that prefrontal cortex, where we can rationalize more and think through, okay, I can start to think through, yeah. You know what? Today was a hard day. I didn't sleep well last night. Then I had a hard day at work, then I had an argument with this person, and starting to, kind of like, play it back, but I love that you're leaning in so simple at first of just going into what I know right now is I don't like that that just happened, even just naming that and validating and acknowledging yourself and like I am disappointed that happened right now gives you a lot of space to be like, okay, I'm feeling disappointment now. How do I show up for disappointment? Rather than staying in the story that the disappointment means something about me.

Melissa McCreery 38:24

And to add on to that, like, yes, sometimes it is slowly, sometimes it is this process of layers. Sometimes it isn't. Y'all, sometimes it can be really fast, and the more your brain gets adept at doing this, sometimes stuff just happens really, really quickly. I think what we're both talking about is you don't have to do something huge here. And if we're talking about stress eating and stressful circumstances, you are going to be better served by not trying to do something huge here. Even, let's say it's eight at night and you find yourself mysteriously in your favorite comfy chair with your pint of ice cream and your spoon, and you have the wherewithal to pause and ask yourself, what do I need? And maybe you do it half heartedly because you don't really want to do it, but you just listen to this podcast, and your smart ass brain says to you, I want to be numb. That is what I want. I really want to be numb. Okay, what if you challenge yourself instead of shaming yourself and telling yourself you shouldn't want that, or telling yourself yeah, but the ice cream isn't going to help, or eating more ice cream just because you can, because you're going to shut that stuff up, what if for just a moment you honored the experience of, I want to be numb, right? 15 seconds, 10 seconds, you know, I do want to be numb, and I'm going to let myself own that feeling, and then I'm going to dip into the ice cream, and I'm going to do whatever happens next, but I'm going to start practicing letting myself know what I want and what I need. You know, it doesn't always look like unicorns and fields of daisies. Sometimes we just want to be numb. We can be honest with ourselves about that, and that can be so powerful.

Stephanie Mara 40:04

Yeah, I hear you listing two things of like first, the more that you practice this, that there won't be as many layers. And I've also experienced that, that it goes quickly from I want to be numb, I feel better that the fact that I acknowledge that I want to be numb, it just is a lot faster of how it processes within me of like, oh, wait, I don't have to fix that. I don't have to do anything about that. I can just want to be numb right now. Cool, great. And then I just get to move on. So I love that you're naming that. And then the other piece that I heard you kind of say is that when it comes to stress eating, it's do less, not more. The stress eating is increasing because you're already doing too much, and the food is trying to help you do less. And so what I hear you kind of describing is, if you start to try to practice doing less, food might be needed less to help you do less.

Melissa McCreery 41:02

Yeah, there's something about permission here, permission to step to the side of this track that you're on and to stop for a minute. And sometimes I think the question could be, instead of, what do I need to do? What should I do? What do I have to do? Who do I want to be right now? How do I want to be which is also, how do I want to feel? Right? How do I take care of myself? But it's often not by doing. So we don't get much practice in stopping.

Stephanie Mara 41:30

Yeah, that's such an excellent point that, again, like we're talking about that sometimes the focus is so much on, how do I change the food behavior? That's just the tip of the iceberg, and that we have to kind of even sometimes shift where the focus is happening. Of who do I want to be in the experience of wanting to reach for food, like if I was going to be showing up for a friend who called me up and said, oh my gosh, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream right now. Or your example of, like, you know, kiddo comes home from school and they just had the worst day. Like, how would I want to show up for them? And what kind of person do I want to be showing up for myself in a really hard moment? Also just shifts the focus away from, what do I do about this food thing and more, how do I want to be in this experience of having a craving?

Melissa McCreery 42:26

Yeah, and we're talking a lot about expanding how we look at things and stress narrows. I just keep thinking about what happens to our brains when we're under stress, and it gives us blinders. So there's nothing wrong if you get into this reactive mode. There's nothing wrong that you're thinking, what do I do? There's nothing wrong that you're going on autopilot. That's a stress response. And I know you talk a lot on your podcast about what to do about that, and how to how to ground and and also just thinking about, so what else is going on here? Because I also think it just to throw this in, but I think it's important, stress eating is such a label I'm stress eating. Okay, so let's make sure you look at in that, in that pause or in your reflective moments, what are the things that that are also depleting your bandwidth that is making you less nimble with the stress? Stress on its own can lead to stress eating, but stress on its own can also be because you're too busy, or you're not getting enough me time, or now you're sleep deprived, right? Or you're being too hard on yourself. There's not enough compassion. So again, there's possibilities there. And this simple act of taking a breath and connecting, it isn't really a simple act. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's, it's very rich.

Stephanie Mara 43:43

Yeah, and I appreciate what you're pointing out also is like, take away in the label of stress eating, the word eating, you are just stressed, and that we all have a different response to stress for a lot of different reasons. And what you're pointing to is that we need to learn not how to like, you know, I hate the whole idea of like, stress management, or like, you know, we have to get rid of our stress. Whereas, just especially as we've been kind of talking about that we're living in very stressful times, is, how do I befriend stress? How do I show up for stress? Like, I know, a lot of the people I've worked with we've had a lot of conversations on the movie Inside Out. And so if you can imagine just stress as a character inside of yourself, and invite stress to the table, stress may be just a part of your world right now, and start to create a relationship with stress so that it maybe doesn't feel as much like stress is taking over, or that stress is now behind the driver's wheel instead of in the passenger seat. You know that it's like, it's okay, that stress is here.

Melissa McCreery 44:50

Or there's something wrong with you, because stress is in the house, like there's something wrong with you. Who were you to invite stress in? It happens.

Stephanie Mara 44:57

Yeah. So I'm curious as we move towards wrapping up right now. You know you've offered so many amazing baby steps today. I usually like to wrap up with like a baby step that if someone was going to start to be like, okay, I really want to be in relationship with this, I'm going to use the label stress eating differently, what's a baby step that maybe you would offer someone listening here to move towards being in relationship with this kind of pattern with eating differently.

Melissa McCreery 45:27

I think there are two. If your brain is asking, What can I do? I need to do more. I would send you to my hidden hunger quiz, because, as I just said, you can target a lot of different aspects of stress eating. And the quiz, which is free, it's on my website, simplifies things. It really helps you identify what's the component that is leading me to eat and what's a simple thing that I can do that's going to be actually targeted to that component. And I think what you want right now is to minimize overwhelm, and so the more you can be targeted and focused and have somebody say, do this small thing it will work, the better. So you could take the quiz and more ethereal direction. I think it's and it's not give yourself credit. We've talked about these strategies of pausing and taking a breath and all. But also, don't discount how much negativity and being hard on yourself is flowing around inside your body, and you can start to shift that by what are three things that went well today? There's a reason everybody talks about that exercise, right? What is going well? What did I do? What was hard that I did today? Okay, yes, I binged tonight, and where did I show up for myself? Make those things stickier for your brain, because our brain just disregards that and focuses on all the ways we screwed up and all the things we didn't do well, and that, again, creates a cycle of overwhelm and stress and using food to cope and numb and not have to think about your negative thoughts. So give yourself credit.

Stephanie Mara 46:59

I love that. It also points out that sometimes our mind focuses so much, like you said, on the binge eating, but you had an entire 24 hours where you were not binging, like what also happened in the rest of the day, that you could be proud of yourself, or you tried something new, or you just even woke up today. You woke up and you rolled out of bed and you did your best. And I love that you're bringing that in, that it's, can you shift also the focus away from, okay, yes, binging did still happen today and what else? Because I had a whole day where that wasn't happening all day.

Melissa McCreery 47:36

Yeah, the more you focus on the binging, the more you focus on the binging. The more you grow the part of your life where you're not binging, the more the binging starts to lose its footing in your life. It sounds overly simplistic. It is that simple.

Stephanie Mara 47:50

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, I just again, loved our conversation. I always do. So I'm so excited to share this with everyone, but I'm wondering how listeners can keep in touch with you and the work that you're doing.

Melissa McCreery 48:04

Well, I would love that. So pretty simple. My website is too much on her plate.com. T, O, O, too much on her plate.com. That is my handle on Instagram and Facebook. And then I have a podcast that episodes come out three times a month, and that is the too much on her plate podcast, and you can find that where you listen to this podcast, and Stephanie is going to come on that podcast and share her wisdom over there too. It's going to be great.

Stephanie Mara 48:30

Yes, yes. I think in a couple of weeks, I'll be on your podcast, and I'm looking forward to connecting with you again. So I'm just like, so glad that you were here, and I feel like this is such an important conversation to have, because I do agree that with the times that we are living in right now, stress eating is skyrocketing. And so this is so important to also just have the conversation of if you are experiencing an increase in your food behaviors, you are not alone. It makes so much sense. And so just thank you so much for being here and having this dialogue.

Melissa McCreery 49:01

Oh, thank you. I just had so much fun talking with you.

Stephanie Mara 49:04

Awesome. Well, to everyone listening as always, reach out anytime support@stephaniemara.com if you have any questions, and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of your day. Bye!

Keep in touch with Melissa here:

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