Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We believe everyone has the right to love their food and feel proud of how they choose to eat. Join the coaches at Confident Eaters as they share their insights and advice to ditch diet culture and step into your power. They've guided thousands of people out of emotional eating, compulsive overeating, and stressful relationships with food. With science based tools and inspiration, what awaits you? Body confidence, food freedom, and joyful ease with eating.
One Plate, No Grazing — Phyllis’ Real Life Session
===
Georgie: [00:00:00] Small steps come before big ones, but nobody wants to start with small steps, do we? Phyllis and I have been working for a long time on her habit of overeating at dinner. We've talked about what it feels like to get satisfied, and we've tried putting a line on her tracker to check off each day that she stopped eating her dinner before she had over eaten, but it just wasn't getting checked off all that often, and that happens sometimes.
When I see a client is not having a high level of success, what we do is take a smaller piece of the habit, which may be a smaller or easier segment, or we come at it from a different angle. In the call prior to the one that you'll hear in a moment, we changed her habit at dinner time to just eating one plate of food to break the habit of refilling her plate with seconds.
Technically, she could still eat past full by just plating up a huge portion on the one plate, but if she was able to successfully stop getting seconds, that would mean she was able to remember her goals and make an intentional change at dinner. And I was happy to call that a win. That would bring us one step closer to stopping it satisfied, which we could then build to.
One interesting thing to notice on this call is how I'm congratulating her and I'm genuinely excited by all of the times I see her checking off one plate at dinner, but you can hear how hesitant she is to be happy about it. She says a couple times, well, it's still too much, but somewhat reluctantly, I do think she's forced to acknowledge her progress here.
We also talk about her upcoming trip to Norway, and you'll hear me comment right at the start of the episode about the colors in her tracker. I'm referring to her scale, which instead of numbers gives her a color to indicate weight maintenance, weight gain, or weight loss. Green means maintaining your weight, teal means you're losing a little and blue shows you're [00:02:00] making steady progress toward a weight loss goal. Phyllis started working with me to stop binge eating, but she's left that far behind and now we're working on that weight loss project, which I think makes this phase of her coaching a really interesting real life example.
For anyone listening who is somewhere on that path yourself, we move down this path by gently working to align her eating with her body signals. By reducing overeating and mindless grazing, and we continue working on skillfully navigating emotional states and distress plus meeting her needs. What you won't hear us doing is counting calories or macros or introducing diet rules, like, okay, no more eating potatoes. Or, no, you can't have any fruit except berries.
If those tactics worked, listen, I'd be using them, but those types of approaches often don't work. Many times fear of feeling shamed leads clients to become less than truthful about their actual eating. Hard calorie limits and rules can cause harm to someone whose relationship with food has already been rocky, and it can even trigger a relapse into binge eating.
So the art of coaching here includes paying close attention to my client's emotional and psychological state, and listening for how they are responding to suggestions of eating behavior changes. I don't have some canned set of rules that I just crack open and enforce on Phyllis. I'm very much talking with her to navigate this journey as a team, and I hope that comes through./ This is the breaking up with binge eating podcast, where every listen moves you one step closer to complete food freedom hosted by me, Georgie fear and my team at confident [00:04:00] eaters. / Yeah, look at the colors on your scale, babe.
Phyllis: Well, pretty good. I got
Georgie: green, teal.
Phyllis: Yes. A lot of green. And then I had couple of teal.
Georgie: That's great.
Phyllis: Back to green, but still, still no gray, so that's better.
Georgie: Yeah.
Phyllis: Hoping to be good. I usually do pretty well when I go away and yeah, I think Norwegian food is mostly seafood, so
Georgie: I think there's a lot of it. I think there's a lot of it there.
Phyllis: Yeah. Yeah.
Georgie: Lots of good stuff here in the tracker. I looked, I see your little summary notes there, which are helpful. So you think you need to focus on the emotions more in real time?
Phyllis: Yeah, 'cause I felt that I was filling in the tracker. I would go in a few days, I'd do really well and then I'd miss a bunch of days and then forget. So I really needed to, you know, as I'm kind of going through whatever's happening, really identify it and, and note what I was doing. Yeah, so I went through that, especially last week. I had that and then I tried to be better about it this week. So, it's, you know, go back to my patterns, right? It, if I don't leave the house, I don't do as well. I guess the good news is it's predictable and you can kind of intercept. The interesting thing I was thinking was like, I'm sure you've already talked about this at one of your podcasts, but I wouldn't really say knock on wood, like really binge much but I definitely still feel my portions are too big, I do graze at times and I am still like an emotional eater. But I guess moving from like having all those normal binges, is that kind of a routine, a pattern?
Georgie: I feel like I have to make like a sign and put it on the wall behind me that has like the progression here. It's like if normal eater is like here, and binge eater is, you know, pretty far down the pathology.
Phyllis: Right?
Georgie: Emotional eat is somewhere in the middle
Phyllis: Uhhuh,
Georgie: so you don't get to skip it. [00:06:00] You have to go through to get to healthy.
Phyllis: Yeah.
Georgie: Happy, balanced, confident eater. So yeah, that is really, really good. And emotional eating versus binge eating are like recreational drinking versus alcohol abuse.
Phyllis: Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Georgie: So, and like alcohol to some degree, it's not a problem. Like if somebody drinks alcohol, you know, a couple times a week or a couple times a month, that's not a problem.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: And then the more frequently it happens, and the more excessive each occasion becomes, the more costs there are.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: Same with emotional eating into binge eating. If you emotionally eat right here and there, it may not harm somebody's weight, it may not harm somebody's health. It may not harm their emotional health because they're only doing it some of the time and the rest of the time they're communicating and meeting their needs and expressing themselves.
But as emotional eating or as food becomes more and more the default for handling emotional experiences, that's when the the costs start to mount.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: Because we're not handling our emotions in other ways. So it's like an opportunity cost, and then it starts to impact people's weight and health.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: And then it just sort of like increases when it becomes a binge, it's more a really large, uncontrolled amount of food.
Phyllis: Yeah.
Georgie: That's rather distressing.
Phyllis: The uncontrolled,
Georgie: yeah.
Phyllis: Yeah. That's what I kind of remember. Yeah. The uncontrolled sort of. You know, you're in a kind of this dazed feeling.
Georgie: Yeah, yeah. Often like dissociative for a lot of people.
Phyllis: Yes, totally. Yes. And even now, like if I'll graze and I know that I'm doing it, you know, it's a shorter time period. It's not Oh, the whole day is now blown because of that. So,
Georgie: yeah. Yeah. That's another,
Phyllis: I'm trying to think about it from that perspective.
Georgie: Yeah. And that is the typical recovery process is you know, not binging, but still maybe emotionally eating, portion's Too big, grazing sometimes.
Phyllis: Yeah. Yeah,
Georgie: and how that progresses is the episodes of [00:08:00] overeating or grazing or emotional eating become smaller with more space between 'em. And we don't necessarily say stuck in that mode. And I put air quotes around mode 'cause we're not really in a different mode. It just feels like there's a momentum to the behavior. Like, I emotionally ate yesterday, so I'll probably do it again today.
Phyllis: Right. And that was what I recall. Like a lot of it was. Yeah. Every day, oh, I'm gonna start over again. But yeah, it doesn't, generally doesn't continue on to the next day.
And I think a lot of that is, is also because I am now make a point of I'm going to eat at breakfast every day and I'm not gonna wait until one o'clock
Georgie: Nice.
Phyllis: And, and perpetuate that whole thing. So yeah, and now I can generally see that if I cook more, it's just healthier 'cause there's less sodium and it's just better food. And I get the steps like I'll, now I can see some more of the results. So now it's just getting myself to do this more consistently.
Georgie: What results are you speaking about? You mean on the,
Phyllis: well, like the weight loss piece, right?
Georgie: Yeah.
Phyllis: Yeah. And then again, I know I didn't leave the house today. I didn't get my steps in, I ordered in. I waited to eat until really late, and then everything kind of progressed to overeating. And so I can clearly now see kind of the cause and effect better.
Georgie: Oh good.
Phyllis: Doesn't mean I'm always doing it, but correctly. But I can see it.
Georgie: I'm more aware of it when I make bad choices.
Phyllis: Right. What is it? First, you have to acknowledge and know that there's And see the problem. Yeah.
Georgie: Awareness has to proceed action.
Phyllis: Yeah.
Georgie: Yeah.
Phyllis: Yes. So.
Georgie: Good. Good, good. That's definite progress. You mentioned you know, having breakfast each day sort of feels like a once every 24 hour sort of reset.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Georgie: One just mental trick that can be helpful is to think of each meal as a reset. Like [00:10:00] maybe lunch didn't go the way I wanted, but dinner reset.
Phyllis: Okay.
Georgie: Dinner didn't go the way I wanted, but breakfast reset and so on. Or I snacked between these two meals. That's okay. Reset.
Phyllis: Reset. Okay.
Georgie: You can reset so an overeating incident doesn't have to take up a calendar day, and really there's no reason that it,
Phyllis: mm-hmm.
Georgie: It does. Other than our mental way of chunking time in today's, but you can even reset. Every minute if you needed to. You know, each moment is still 100% under your control.
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: So,
Phyllis: yeah, understood. And I think one of the other things I was thinking was, so today, again, since I didn't do any exercise 'cause I was trying to actually stay off my foot, but, so I was in the house and then I started to think after lunch, oh, I want something sweet. Well, I kind of, the good news is I didn't really have anything. So I had an apple with some peanut butter, which again, was I really that hungry? Probably not. But another lesson I know we talk about a lot is just not even having the items in the house to, tempt me in any way.
Because generally if I have chips or something like that. When I eat them, it's generally when I'm grazing versus, oh, I'm gonna just have this as a nice part of my meal. So knowing that, like why am I even gonna have it here?
Georgie: Right. So you're saying that you're not likely to make it part of a meal?
Phyllis: Yes, correct. So generally, like if I have chips. There were a couple of times in the past where he said, yeah, I'm gonna have a sandwich and have some chips with it, but for the most part, the chips became some grazing that I had one day. So why am I gonna even tempt myself with that?
Georgie: Yeah,
Phyllis: just don't even have it in the house.
Georgie: When Lean Habits came out. It was 2015, it was 10 years ago.
Phyllis: Wow.
Georgie: And we had a group that we started like going through the habits in the book, like all together.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: And so the first habit is eat three or four meals a day without snacking.
Phyllis: [00:12:00] Right.
Georgie: And then habit two is like feel hungry for 30 to 60 minutes before eating. Habit three is eating just enough. And like by this point people are like, I've had chips in my house and they're going stale. And then it was like a chorus of like, me too, me too, me too, me too. Like all these people that stopped snacking found that they just no longer had a role for certain processed foods.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: So it was like, okay, everybody like group pantry cleanup,
Phyllis: throw them away. Not because you can't have them, but because
Georgie: Right. If you're not choosing them at meals, why?
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: And a lot of people said, because it's not the most satisfying. It's not
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: what I want the most, like, if I'm bothering to put together a meal, I'd rather have X, Y, or Z.
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: Chips just aren't my favorite. So. Yeah.
Phyllis: Yes. And I just think they have, for me, tied to it is that kind of snacky cheap food type thing and the one where I feel more mindless as I'm eating them. So again, you know, I can always go out and get them if I need them.
Georgie: Right. Yeah. They're not gonna disappear from the face of the planet, which is fine.
Phyllis: No, I'm sure it's, they might be $10, but they'll be there.
Georgie: Right, right. I also see like huge, huge progress in one plate at dinner. Wow.
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: Wow. Look at this. It's like, yes, almost every single day. And I remember when there was like, we first started with this one, you'd have like one meal out of two weeks,
Phyllis: right. And
Georgie: wow.
Phyllis: I know we talked about don't worry right now about the amount let's get to the one plate, but the amount is still high. But yes, I think that, and sitting down at the table plating it, all that kind of stuff.
Georgie: Right. See, mostly have broken that habit or you're beating it into submission, the habit of getting seconds.
Phyllis: Yeah, I would say again, the portion size is still over probably than what is needed. [00:14:00] But I have tried to stop going back, like a couple days and I made like pasta or something and I, yeah, I just put it on one plate. That's all I made was that serving and that that was it. So
Georgie: I think we mentioned that that might be necessary to get to one plate to almost make it a bit excessive.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Georgie: So, you know, some people, when we try, when they try to go to eating three or four times without grazing, need to actually make like really big meals to mentally give themselves the confidence and the safe feeling that I can make it to my next meal without
Phyllis: true
Georgie: backing.
Phyllis: And generally it's we've always said that it's dinner for me is the hardest one.
Georgie: Yeah. So taking behavioral win of like
Phyllis: right
Georgie: habit of getting seconds. Now we can, we can tailor the portion size,
Phyllis: the portion size and the speed, I think are two things that
Georgie: Okay. Okay, so portion size and speed.
Phyllis: I did two nights ago though, I actually am like in, I pasta with chicken or something and I actually left some on the plate, threw it away.
Georgie: Oh, what on earth happened? Was the house on fire?
Phyllis: I wanna, I wanna say the phone rang or something, but at that point then I, but that, at that point I forgot about it, so I just threw it away.
Georgie: Wow. Amazing. Who is this person?
Phyllis: I know what is wrong with you.
Georgie: Okay. So proof that if you're distracted and you don't eat everything on there, you were, I'm assuming you were okay for the rest of the night.
Phyllis: Yes, I, I made it. It's okay. Yeah.
Georgie: Survived. Made it to the next day.
Phyllis: Yes. And then another night, a couple times I cooked friends, came over Plated and it was so funny 'cause my friend even made the comment, did you give me to her? Like, more than I took? And I said, yeah. So it was funny, like in that event and I was fine just having even a smaller portion. So again, I think it's just, I guess the mindless [00:16:00] piece.
Georgie: Some of the things that we can do are, one thing that helps with speed of eating is with certain meals, there's like actually a mechanical aid, like using the smaller spoon rather than a larger spoon. Do you already use a smaller spoon?
Phyllis: Or smaller plate or something right?
Georgie: Well, that helps with the portion size, but I'm just focusing on like
Phyllis: Oh, the, the speed. Okay.
Georgie: Consumption, like it just takes more bites if you're using the smaller spoon rather than the larger spoon and then your silver ware.
Phyllis: Right.
Georgie: Do you, do you already use the small spoon or do you use the larger spoon?
Phyllis: No, I probably lose use. Well, or fork. I probably use a larger one.
Georgie: Okay. Would you give it a try to use the?
Phyllis: Yeah, definitely.
Georgie: Okay, cool. So that's one idea here. Try and these are all just experiments because the trick to eating slower is to find ways to do it that do not infuriate you.
Phyllis: Yeah. Okay. Got it.
Georgie: Because I know as well as anybody that trying to eat slowly under the wrong conditions or using the wrong method will make you wanna light yourself on fire,
Phyllis: right? No, absolutely.
Georgie: Okay, so let's try smaller spoon or fork. Some people put the utensil down between bites or
Phyllis: I know, I thought
Georgie: between sips of water,
Phyllis: that's probably a good idea.
Georgie: So you can try the sips of water. I've also found, one thing that makes me eat faster is if I chop up all my food in advance. Like if I'm gonna make a salad and then like I chop up the salad and then chop up the chicken and mix it in, I can just like Hoover.
Phyllis: Oh, okay. That's interesting.
Georgie: Practically
Phyllis: that's funny.
Georgie: But if I, you know, leave the tomatoes in big chunks that I still need to get the knife out and
Phyllis: Then you need to cut it. That makes sense.
Georgie: Mm-hmm. Or cut the chicken like long strips that I then need to get the knife out to like actually cut. That will actually slow me down in a way that does not infuriate me. So
Phyllis: okay. And then I, again, going back to putting the utensils down probably would help.
Georgie: Okay, so plate food in larger pieces are whole [00:18:00] pieces so that you, and cut them up as you eat.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: As you would with a steak, right? Like, we tend to cut one, bite of steak, and then eat it and then cut
Phyllis: and, and again, if I am with other people or if I am going out, I do that. And so it's really focusing when I am doing it by myself.
Georgie: Yeah. Maybe we're just gonna get you a roommate.
Phyllis: There you go. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
Georgie: Get somebody to move in. Advertise the job, would you come? Supervise me
Phyllis: That's right.
Georgie: Eating.
Phyllis: Just make me eat slower.
Georgie: Embarrassment will slow me down.
Phyllis: I'll cook. The good news is I'll get to test it while I'm away, which i'm generally better.
Georgie: And you're gonna be eating with other people.
Phyllis: Oh yeah, the whole time.
Georgie: The whole time you're there. Okay, so we've got three ideas here, really. Smaller utensil, sips of water plate, the food in bigger portion, sorry, bigger pieces that you cut up. So you can practice those while you're away. Let's talk a little bit more on this note that you have need to focus on emotions more in real time. So you said earlier that, you know, if you do the tracker a few days at a time and then don't do it for a while, that you're, that's the delay that that's not real time.
Phyllis: Yeah. So what happened. So you're gonna see the block, like the 26th through the 27th delay.
Georgie: Oh yeah.
Phyllis: I think we're out of order, but some, but, so at that point I must have just obviously not done it and so then I had a hard time recreating you know what was really going on that day? I imagine the day where, just quiet day again, I didn't do any exercise.
I think I just, in these cases, it wasn't an avoidance thing. Right. There's been times where I don't do it because I don't wanna deal with the reality that I didn't do something. I don't really feel like that was, at this time it was probably more just, I just overlooked it.
Georgie: Mm-hmm. And the whole idea with the emotional check-in is to build the sort of awareness of our emotional state as we go through the day.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm.
Georgie: So that we're [00:20:00] aware of. I'm getting a little more distressed. I'm feeling more relaxed. I'm getting more tense now. I'm getting really irritated with this person needs to take a break or,
Phyllis: yes,
Georgie: this is bothering me and I wanna say something. And because when we're aware of all those things, then we can be responding to them as they're coming up.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm. Okay.
Georgie: Even if there's a delay and we don't notice until things are getting like quite intense.
Phyllis: Right.
Georgie: At least noticing then like, wow, I am really charged right now. I am prone to snap at the next person that annoys me. Like when we note that we can sort of like head off the disaster.
Phyllis: Yeah, no, there were definitely a couple of occasions where I know some frustrations with work. Yes, I, that's one I'll, I'll pay more attention to.
Georgie: So what did you do? What was going on? What, when you had the frustration?
Phyllis: I just, I think I just was distracted and tried to. Like one day I know I just kind of listened to a podcast for 10 minutes. I stepped away and I ran out. I guess I tried to do something else.
Georgie: Yeah, those are really good. So handled work frustrations and those are, those are all adaptive choices.
Phyllis: Yeah. And then with dealing with I know I didn't, there were a couple of times that I definitely just didn't answer the phone or we texted back and said, you know, in the middle of meetings we'll get back to you later, or something like that. So, you know, I think that's kind of how I dealt with some of it as well.
Georgie: That's great. Yeah. You're controlling where you put your attention and how responsible,
Phyllis: yeah. More boundaries.
Georgie: Yeah.
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: Good boundary maintenance. And then sort of stepping away from things like even if you're not physically stepping away to take a walk, mentally, you're taking a break from something.
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: Aggravating to listen to the podcast.
Phyllis: Exactly. Exactly. And I think I just also tried to focus on. You know, I'm gonna go on vacation. I've really been like pickleball a lot more lately, like so just doing other [00:22:00] things to kind of get me distracted that are, you know, healthy things to do, but that I've been enjoying spending that time. So
Georgie: yeah, that's, an excellent redirect when things are bothering us. And I think that's a, a really notable progress marker for you personally, because in the past you've been like, I get stuck on this thing and it just takes up the rest of my day.
Phyllis: Right.
Georgie: And now you're like, no, I am choosing not to get hooked on this.
Phyllis: Yes.
Georgie: Think about my upcoming vacation and pickleball.
Phyllis: Yeah. And I'm trying to Right. Put my priorities in place and. So I think that's been helpful.
Georgie: Good for you. I'm so glad to hear. Kicking butt.
Phyllis: So let's just see with yeah, hopefully going away will be fun and healthy and yeah, I think the food, it'll be healthy food will be doing a bunch of exercise, so I think that that'll be good.
Georgie: Yeah. And so when you're eating out in restaurants, since you'll be pretty much the whole time,
Phyllis: although we have, there's actually parts of the trip where we have, I think we're like staying in some kind of cottages and stuff, so we might be able to cook some things there, I guess.
Georgie: Okay.
Phyllis: I don't know what the food's like, but
Georgie: ok, doke. So what do you focus on in a restaurant to try and order a healthy meal?
Phyllis: Well, I think generally, again, depending on where you're going. So in this case. You know what I've read a lot about is there's a lot of really good seafood, which I like. So I think really try a lot of that and I, it seems overall it's pretty healthy what they eat.
Georgie: Trying to keep your vegetable intake up and your fiber intake up can be really tough on you're traveling. So try and focus on as much as you can.
Phyllis: Yeah, definitely.
Georgie: And if you happen to go through a grocery store or something, I'll usually tell people, like, grab some apples or something else to eat that's got five grams or more fiber in it just to help your
Phyllis: okay.
Georgie: System stay happy.
Phyllis: Yeah. No, especially when you travel. That makes a lot of sense. And I guess, you know, drinking a lot of water and
Georgie: mm-hmm.
Phyllis: Exactly. So do you think [00:24:00] probably not the tracker exactly, but just kind of keep notes. Is that the best thing and you think, well, I'm,
Georgie: I think so, yeah. What's your style when you are traveling? Do you keep a journal? Do you keep notes on your phone? Do you not log or like document anything?
Phyllis: So, I'm trying to think. I can definitely bring up this tracker, right? I mean my iPad and everything, so I could do that.
Georgie: Okay, cool. So I'll get you new days.
Phyllis: Hopefully this will be a good. Good couple of weeks and then I'll come back and have good things to share.
Georgie: I'm so excited to hear about it. Great.
Phyllis: I'll send pictures.
Georgie: Great and awesome job these last two weeks. I'm super impressed.
Phyllis: Thank you. I appreciate the feedback,
Georgie: putting in the hard work,
Phyllis: and definitely keep in touch. Thanks, Georgie. Take care.
Georgie: Bye-bye.
Phyllis: Bye-bye.