65 The Science Behind Overeating and What To Do About It Healthy Living Part 3

You are listening to the Great Leader Great Mom podcast, episode 65. I'm Liz Jolly, founder of the School of Courage. I'm an engineer turned life coach because I saw the need for more. courage in my own life as a mom and wanting to be a great leader. I use the skills we cover every day in my own life and I'm excited to teach them to you so you can unlock your own potential. Well, welcome to part three in our healthy living series. This one is all about how to stop overeating from the science side of things. And as we talked about last week, we have an overeating problem and an underfeeling problem. We talked about how we're not taught growing up how to deal with our feelings and we're also not taught about the fact that life is 50-50 where there's 50% of life that's gonna have negative experiences and 50% of life that's gonna have positive experiences. And with that'll be negative emotions and positive emotions. We're not supposed to feel happy all the time And this is one of the biggest reasons why we buffer, why we eat our emotions, why we try to numb out on anything that feels negative We want to go back to feeling happy, to feeling that that that instant hit of pleasure in our lives. And we have an overeating problem and So if you missed last week on buffering and about how our feelings and how we don't feel them impact our eating Check out last week's episode, episode 64. We talked about the role our feelings play related to buffering or numbing out our emotions. A lot of times we use food to numb out And this week is all about the science behind why we overeat, why we're in the situation we're in in society. Because the solution to overeating is to reduce our overhunger. We want to bring our hunger back to its natural state of desire, where we can be our natural weight. What we're going to learn today is how to get your body in a fat-burning mode versus a fat-storing mode, which will be all about when you eat and what you put in your mouth. I'm not going to go over like what specifically to eat, because this isn't a diet. This is more of a general category as in what are you fueling your body with to meet your body needs And to get you into this fat adaptive, fat burning mode. And I'm not talking about caloric restrictions, because that os often makes us go crazy and we can't live that as a lifestyle. And so we want to eat what our body needs as fuel and what our body is naturally good at processing. And just the reminder to everybody that recalibrating our hunger and our desire is going to feel massively uncomfortable. And so this is part of the process. We are working against our brain's default, the motivational triad, which is to seek pleasure, to avoid pain, and to use the least amount of energy as possible. And every single marketing thing we see around food and really everything else, they know this and so they appeal to our desire for pleasurable food, for comfort food. all at our fingertips with minimal effort. Like you have to do so little to just now go pick it up or it shows up at your house. Right? And think about how our whole society centers around eating. All the huge social events or even small social events we go to have food. And it would seem like you committed a cardinal sin if you had hosted a gathering with no food or no alcohol People would be so upset because everything we do in our society really does center around food. And our society has made it perfectly normal to overeat and to eat all the time Think about Thanksgiving. I always laugh about Thanksgiving because it feels like the whole point is to overeat. Right? It's like you eat until you want to be rolled out of the room, out of your chair, or at least to a more comfortable couch seat to let your food digest so that you can walk again and then go eat dessert again in a few hours. And I find it fascinating because we also our brains are conditioned to see food and then want it. Like I see with my children, they'll watch a show and they eat something on the show, like say strawberries, and the kids are like, I need some strawberries. purely triggered by their brain and that association of, yeah, I want to eat that. So our brains are fascinating and The more we understand this, the more we can be in a watcher mode of when it comes to these societal norms or how our brains are conditioned, the more power you have over it to decide, is that what I really want to do? Or like, am I actually hungry for strawberries? Or no. And we have this notion that we should eat three times a day, right? Breakfast, lunch, dinner. And let's snack for entertainment. A lot of times if we're bored at the movies or we're just sitting on the couch. Overeating is a way to avoid pain, right? To numb out, to seek pleasure, and to use so much energy. Like we just sit there and open a bag of chips and eat it. And I think about how many times in corporate America I've been to an all-day meeting for something, and there's literally endless food. It's like Oh welcome. We have coffee and we have full breakfast. And then in like an hour or two they come and change out the breakfast for morning snack tray. And then in another two hours you have lunch And then when everybody's really tired at like 2 p. m. , they switch that out for a mid-afternoon snack of salty and sweet treats. And then you end the meeting and go to a happy hour and potentially a huge fancy dinner where you overeat. And I'm not mocking it, I'm more just talking about, isn't it hilarious when you notice how our whole lives really end up being centered around food and we don't even question it Our society has taught us that it's acceptable to buffer, to numb out. We buffer our boredom. We can buy comfort food ice cream. We can buy like Um things that claim to, oh, you know what, you deserve this, like to take out your stress or your anxiety or your sadness We find ourselves eating our restlessness. We find ourselves wanting to eat ice cream when we're rejected or disappointed or you're in grief. How many movies do you see? I always think of Legally Blonde when um her boyfriend breaks up with her and she goes and eats like all the chocolates and the ice cream. It's like, yeah, that's what we've been trained to think. Like, let's go have some ice cream, you'll feel better And I have seen myself do this with my children and I just didn't realize how that's not the way our body needs fuel. Like that's our societal norms to actually buffer out negative emotions and not feel them. Like everything we do in our life, whatever we practice and we repeat 1000 times, we get really good at. And I was thinking about We've probably had more than 10,000 hours on all this kind of stuff related to food. So we're probably like proficient and experts at it. And those neural pathways in our brain are very strong. So now we're gonna reprogram this part of our brain to go back to its natural state. And again, it's gonna feel awful. It's gonna feel terrible. But the magical part of our brain is that it's elastic and so that we can restore ourselves back to our natural state and rewire those Neural pathways. Amazing. Our brains are amazing. So all this to say, expect this to be hard. It's not gonna be easy, but it is worth it for you to live the healthy lifestyle that you really want and go back to that clear why in episode 63 and and really put that in front of you all throughout your day and remind yourself And I know it would be easier to just look at all the diet pharmaceutical world right now, whether it's something you take as a pill or you inject or whatever it is that it's so easy to not do that uncomfortable type of work. But no matter what, that's uncomfortable too. Like you have to have maybe surgery if you choose one option, or you have to give yourself shots and there's side effects. I mean Let's do the the problem solving at its root, not the easy way out, because we do hard things, right? Let's solve our overhunger and our over-desire, but in a way that is sustainable and truly brings our body back to what it does best. Like let's go back to our natural state Reminder here, we don't have to spend or we shouldn't spend the rest of our lives beating ourselves up and wishing our bodies looked different or wondering how we fell off the wagon or how we just amazingly unconsciously ate everything in front of us without even thinking about it. We want to bring more consciousness, especially to our lives when it comes to eating. and drinking and exercising, like all the things in which we want to do, we know how to do it, we just don't do it. And so that's what this is all about. The more we can understand it, the more we can be conscious of it This is how we get our power back over living a healthy life. And we do love food. Of course we do, because it gives us this dopamine hit, this pleasure. rush, the serotonin in our bodies, and now because of our society and the way we treat food, we're really out of whack. We need to reset them and we need to remind ourselves what is a real food that we in our bodies are meant to process. So let's talk about this from the science, from the hormone level. when it comes to eating. So there's three main hormones that I'm gonna teach you about today. The first is insulin, the next will be leptin, and then we're gonna talk about ghrelin. Insulin, and this is the most important hormone when it comes to the three related to weight gain and weight loss. Insulin is a storage hormone. When it's at a high level in our blood, our body cannot use fat as a fuel. And this is what we want. It tells your body to either burn or to store fat. And if we have too much insulin in our blood, our brains tell us store the fat and we have to store all this before we can really start burning the fat. Whereas if our insulin levels are low, our body says, okay, burn the fat. This is our fuel. If we are hungry and our insulin is low, our body will burn our fat. I um jokingly call this it's time to dine in. Um and we'll talk more about this, but it's kind of a goofy phrase. It's weird, but you'll never forget it. Okay, insulin. And insulin resistance and diabetes, they've all skyrocketed with the increase in the consumption of high sugar, high starch foods, and concentrated foods. This means is like All the food, like juices, smoothies, everything that's been processed, it's become a concentrated food. All the things that we've like supercharged to make them really sweet and we've added a bunch of stuff to it so it tastes really sweet, that's what we're talking about. Our body is not made to really process that. And so our insulin levels go crazy. And when we have high insulin levels, this mask the effectiveness of our other two hormones we're going to talk about. And when we mask leptin and ghrelin Are s their signals, which really help us maintain a healthy weight and not not gain a lot, is blocked by this oversupply of insulin. Ghrelin think gr like this is the hormone that tells us we are hungry and no longer hungry When we eat concentrated foods, like say apple juice, where we took six real apples and we turned them into a concentrated juice. uh in like a cup of liquid, your body is confused because it doesn't recognize it as a caloric intake. So refined foods, these do the same thing. One cool thing about our body is that we can train our body as to when we're hungry. The ghrelin, the gr I'm hungry, will be a habit. Like if you eat at the same time every d time in the morning, that's probably because of habit. And you can actually retrain your body as to when you're hungry. One of the things we're gonna notice is when your ghrelin tells your brain, okay, we're hungry, to notice like where am I on a hunger scale? If minus 10 is like I am ravenously so ridiculously hungry And plus 10 is I'm like Thanksgiving full. Where are you on that scale? And I would say you want to operate between like minus four and four. Like you don't you want to be in this sort of normal tighter bandwidth This hormone is very interesting in terms of one, you can reprogram it, you can train it, and and two, you want to be able to hear it because if your insulin again is too high. Your body won't tell you the real times you're hungry. It'll tell you you're hungry all the time because your insulin will be saying We're storing all this food, we're still hungry, because you're not eating actual food it recognizes as caloric intake. When we get hungry, we get this wave of hunger, and it really is a wave, and If you don't eat right away, your body will use your fat storage as fuel. It will burn fat. And trust me, like if you're starving in the morning, say at 9 a. m. and you can't eat for another hour to do a meeting. And you're gonna notice your ha your body have this wave of hunger and it'll like pass in you, and then you won't be hungry in like an hour after the meeting. It's crazy the way it goes in waves. And once your body is triggered to start burning fat, it's it's getting its fuel source. And so that hunger, that ghrelin, dampens away Let's talk about leptin. So leptin is what tells your body that you're full. And if you have too much insulin in your blood, your body is gonna Think you're still hungry because again it's massed the signal of leptin and your body thinks, I'm so hungry we need more food. I'm just in fat storing mode, not fat burning mode. You can't hear your leptin. The goal of these three hormones, the goal that we're after with these three hormones. is to keep our insulin low so that we can be re-sensitized to the signals that we're actually hungry and we're actually full. So we eat food, our insulin rises, and then it drops when we don't eat. We are either in a state of fed or fast. And it rises to the level depending on what you put in your mouth. And then when you don't eat, it drops. Insulin is artificially high when we eat flour and sugar in that concentrated food I talked about And insulin is released when any large amount of glucose is in our blood. So think of then how if you drink a soda It's kind of liquid sugar, right? And it drives excess insulin and this confuses your whole body and it's no longer in its normal functioning mode. And I like this idea of your body is either in fast mode or fed mode. And we want to keep our body in fast mode so that we can burn fat and we can minimize our time in the fed mode. but still get the fuel we really need. Again, I'm not talking about stop eating or totally go on this caloric restriction thing that's really unsustainable. To keep our insulin from rising to excess levels when we do eat, we want to eat unprocessed food. And this is like around the ring of the grocery store on the outside. Where all the food that your body knows how to process, like the fruits and vegetables, the the the the milk, the protein, the the things that are around that outer ring, right? So when you keep your hormones balanced and your insulin at normal levels, then the hunger full signals are clear and your body can do its normal thing, that it can go back to that normal state. And our overhunger is caused by this imbalance of hormones. So when we eat too often, our body is always in fed mode, which means the insulin is telling your system, we need to store, we need to store And that means you cannot access your fat stores. You're not burning your fat stores for energy. And if you want to lose weight, you want to burn the fat. If you want to just have a lean body with a not a lot of excess fat, you want to burn the fat. We want to train our body to do this, and we do it by extending our daily fast. Every single one of you fast while you're sleeping, right? So that's what we're talking about. It's not eating for twelve or sixteen hours so that you can train your body to be what's called fat adaptive. And this is where your body is using your fat as fuel. It's amazing. So we're gonna dine in, right? You won't forget it. When we're not fat adapted, we eat all the time. So to be fat adaptive, to use the fuel that we have on our system, the fat We want to keep our hormones in balance and we wanna look for the clear signals of hunger. And to do this, we want to keep our insulin levels low. We want to eat the food that your body knows how to process. It's not concentrated, it's not processed. No flour and sugar, and then we want to extend that overnight fast and eat like twice a day. And this drives us to burn our fat. It's amazing. And you won't be hungry. That's what's so cool. Is you can retrain that ghrelin when you're eating the food your body is meant to process. then you only get hungry when like in this tight eating window that you've decided to work around for your whole day for food, for fuel. And note that when you give up flour and concentrated food and sugar, this is withdrawal and it's gonna feel awful for a couple weeks. Like you're gonna be wanting to crawl out of your skin But if that is happening, you're doing it right. Welcome. Remember, this is gonna feel awful because you're recalibrating your brain. You're rebuilding these neural pathways and you're weaning yourself off the things that Your body gets dopamine, gets that pleasure from, and you're you're resetting that excessive, like fake pleasure for the pleasure of having your body work at a normal state. And I will be honest that after a while those things don't even look good to you anymore. So we want to get to the state where we don't even desire those things. Like you can walk around And see all the cupcakes and the beautiful desserts and be like, I just that's actually not what I want. And what is funny is if you do take a bite How often you notice, especially once you've reset your body in this more fat adaptive mode and you're like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go have some cookies or whatever, you feel awful. Like you really legitimately notice the difference versus your natural state when your body was working the way it's supposed to. Where you will get to is You notice your body wants something and we call this an urge and we're gonna spend the whole next episode talking about how you allow an urge, which is a feeling. But you get to where you kind of question it. Like, I know my brain is telling me, we definitely need that cupcake. We've had a long day, or we need that glass of wine or we need the the comfort food of the pasta with the garlic bread. And we're gonna talk about how to allow those urges. and consciously decide and how to work through them. So let me give you the examples of when I eat To keep my levels normal, and I will tell you, I feel amazing and I feel like I have so much energy and I eat twice a day. I eat at like noon-ish, sometimes dependent on a meeting or when I can actually eat And then I have my last bill, my last meal, like I'm done eating by 7 p. m. And I notice that my hunger levels in between are really like I don't get very hungry and if I do and I just notice it like I said before it's just that wave of hunger and then it goes away because my body is then Dining on my own fat, which is just amazing that our bodies do that. I feel really good and I want every single one of you to do this because you can do this. I'm not telling you to starve yourself from a standpoint of eat less per day. I'm telling you to decide when you eat. And you may want to start with like a 12 hour gap and then kind of work your way and see again using that hunger scale of like am I a negative eight? Am I like a negative one? Am I like as in I'm pretty hungry or I'm extremely hungry? Or am I like Eating to where I'm overly full. Like stop and pause maybe a third through your plate and be like, am I actually still hungry And sometimes you'll catch yourself, I I know I do this where I'm like, why am I eating it just because it's on my plate and I feel the need to clean my plate? Like that's let's challenge that again. That's a societal norm. Where often we just eat whatever's in front of us and we don't think like, am I full? Like where am I on the hunger hunger scale? Am I like a three? Am I a four? Okay, I'm gonna stop eating. It's okay. Like the other example I love to think about for myself is Do I want to waste food and just throw it away because I can't eat it or it's, you know, no one's gonna eat it in my house? Or am I gonna waste food in my body, which then is so much harder to get rid of Because now I've had excess calories and excess intake and my body is gonna be storing that as fat. And that trade-off between like Am I just gonna waste it and it's gonna go in the garbage versus am I gonna waste it on myself, which really that's so much more valuable to you. Why do we consider the need to eat food to quote unquote not waste it when we're wasting it on our own body. So let's love ourselves so much that we stop eating food just because it's there or we want to clean out the fridge and let's put in our body what is most precious for us, what's most appropriate for us. That is a big difference I found in my eating journey, if you will. The other thing I'll say is we're also in the next episodes gonna talk about what more specifically to eat. And Right now, like the first step you can take is if you're not ready to give up, say flour or sugar, but maybe you want to give up some of the processed food, just start there and just try to do your extended fasting. Just try as your first goal to get to where you don't eat for 12 hours or may and then you maybe get to 16 hours and just see how your hunger changes. But what I will say is because you'll if you're still eating flour or sugar, you're gonna still have higher insulin levels And so just start consciously noticing like what is it you're eating and how does your body respond? Because your body will tell you One of the um okay, so there's a book I would recommend called Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pillon. And um he did a ton of research on all kinds of diets and then tons of scientific papers and I mean it's really interesting. And he he challenges a lot of the um rejections of extending your fast, like why people think it's awful. And what he finds is that so much of it is just not true at all. Like one of the big questions that comes up is like, well what is this going to do to my metabolism? Am I going to be all screwed up metabolism-wise? And the research shows that no, not even when you fast for like Well over a day. Okay, so there's tons of details in there. I don't want to regurgitate them to you. If you're really interested, go look it up It is so interesting. And he talks about how it affects other hormones as well, the fasting and how it affects like working out, which was interesting. One of the things I will share is that he talks about Just because you work out, it doesn't mean you have to eat and that a lot of times if you do work out and you're still in that fast mode then you will burn more of your actual fat and you're just as effective performance wise Up to like, I mean, I think the ultramarathoners start like had to eat something, but for pretty much all of us normal people that don't do ultramarathon things that uh It's actually probably more beneficial if you go into a workout and you are in a fast mode and not a fed mode. So check that book out if you're interested. If you want to do the um identifying your buffering and and how to really help yourself feel the feelings, which again is one of the main problems that drives our overweight and our overdesire, then go to the link below and download my worksheet on all of it. And I'm also gonna start doing a Healthy Living Masterclass signup opportunity where we'll get all into the nitty-gritty of this. So Next week, we're going to learn about what to eat, and then we're going to learn about how to allow urges. So I hope you join me. I've heard some good feedback from some of you about how you're excited about this healthy living series and I wish you all an amazing week with that take care everybody