Fuel Success Through Food

Speaker 1: [Music]

Speaker 2: our relationship with food and our bodies is a reflection of our relationship with ourselves and it is valuable and imperative that we prioritize

Speaker 1: it hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the shiled experience with Melanie join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in thank you for joining us Jessica you are the founder and leader of your business escape from emotional eating this is something we have not talked about on the Sheil it podcast yet and I know at one time or another during our lives we have all leaned towards doing it tell us about your business and why did you decide to launch it since

Speaker 2: 2011 I have been helping women who strive for excellence heal the roots of their emotional eating so they can embody their full potential and I got into this work and created escape from emotional eating because I was an emotional eater for a really long time and didn't know it and then when I got over the shock that I was an emotional eater because I didn't have hundreds of pounds to lose at that point I had already had professional expertise and certifications and nutrition and health when I went to look for support I didn't fit into any of the boxes or the support that was out there like I didn't fit into some as extreme or severe as an eating disorder and I knew I needed something more than just eating healthy and working out because I already was doing that this is what my background was in so that's what led me down this path of dedicating myself to Healing my own relationship with food and then reaching this point where other people were like what are you doing and why do you look so happy and what's going on and that was where escape from emotional eating birthed from because there were more people showing up who were just like me who didn't fit into these typical support systems and I knew there had to be a level of support for women who operate at a high level to heal these deeper Roots because if we have a high level of stress and a high level of pressure put on us we need need to take care of ourselves differently in order to deal with it so that's where escape from emotional eating came from

Speaker 1: you have been featured in media Outlets such as ABC CBS and mindbody green what is the number one thing that you hope someone listening will take away from your

Speaker 2: conversations our relationship with food and our bodies is a reflection of our relationship with ourselves and it is valuable and imperative that we prioritize it but also really value it even if other people do it differently

Speaker 1: or value it less from a business perspective those media spots they're pretty big names I got them on my own I didn't have a PR agency I didn't have any real background in how to pitch media assume we have to have all of the things in order to get to the next level but what I believe and this applies to our relationship with food or our relationship with work is that we can create so much with what we already have

Speaker 2: and good for you for pitching on your own and having the confidence and saying I'm G to do this because they said yes yeah they did even people that look at their relationship with food can be in our house or can be around us so you're right that it's so important that we think about our personal Journey regardless of who is around yeah and it's especially important because a lot of dysfunction with food can be passed down and passed around in relationships whether that relationship is between friends how do you relate to food what do you guys do and how is that different than when you're on your own how do you engage with food when you're around family what's the expectations the unspoken expectations in those Dynamics and then even with your children if you have children what are those unspoken expectations and how different our relationship with food can be if we don't have that strong foundation with ourselves first and that's so true because we can even think oh I'm eating healthy but I just recently trained and ran a half marathon and I'm even thinking okay how can I be more healthy and fuel my body in an even healthier way than I was doing before yeah that's a mindset of people who strive for excellence is taking times of intensity and saying okay what do I need to support myself to be able to per perform at my best or perform at this high level where the default setting for a lot of people is okay this time of intensity is coming what can I do to take the edge off let myself off the hook and then after the intensity or after this time then I'll get back on track what makes successful people more successful is looking at these opportunities and saying how can I support my myself rather than the conventional thinking would be okay how can I sabotage myself or how can I not support myself so interesting to think this through on the deeper level because we don't always do it and it became apparent to me when I started training cuz I was hungry all the time and I thought okay first of all I can't eat and then run so sometimes I'd have morning meetings and I'd see oh how can I how long can I stretch without eating not because I was trying not to eat only because I knew if I ate wouldn't be able to run and then if I didn't run I wasn't training I hadn't thought so much about it and then I thought I'm starving all the time if I'm running 10 miles how am I going to continue to fuel myself in a healthy way and I'm sure within a business work day we work all day and we don't eat and then we eat a giant meal

Speaker 1: at night it's how can we fuel ourselves in the way that's going to sustain us for that high level successful living that we're striving for yeah and that's something I hear all the time especially for entrepreneurs is oh my God I love my work so much I forget to eat I want to call that out because you're actually disassociating from your body if you go more than three four hours if you're not training for a marathon the common window and this all is individual so everybody's different but if we're going more than two three hours without eating we are putting our bodies into a stress response and we are setting ourselves up for oving later on and then it becomes this cycle how do we negotiate our needs of the business of our bodies of our own energy of our personal goals into this giant package because a lot of people will go through their day like we've been talking about and either just completely disassociate or be in this regimented okay it's 12 o'clock I have to eat okay it's 7 o'clock I have to eat dinner and don't even connect with their body and are you hungry are you actually hungry or are you emotionally hungry because those two languages of our bodies are very different and then for myself when I was emotionally eating I was hungry all the time but I was not training for a marathon emotional hunger so I think it's important if we're going to show up at a high level in our lives both personally and professionally that we are getting serious and also having those same intentions to making sure that we can show up fully speaking of

Speaker 2: digesting our emotions you believe in digesting our emotions not just our food how do you work with clients to do this

Speaker 1: so digesting emotions is actually a nine-step process that I created first for myself and now it's something that I teach my clients because something that I I was always hearing from therapy and various ways to try to heal my emotional eating was feel your feelings okay I hear you saying that but what does it mean because in my mind if I felt my feelings I was not going to come out of that experience alive I literally had this fear that my feelings are tsunami I needed a way to be able to walk myself through a process of feeling but also a process of moving through it and onto the other side because I had to show up at work I had to be a functioning human being I couldn't take tons of time to feel my feelings especially when they were inconvenient or overwhelming so that's where this tool came from and the first phase of it is helping identify what it is that you're feeling because there can be so much Mind Body confusion we can be feeling one thing and think it's anxiety but it's actually excitement or we can be feeling this thing but is actually this thing so it starts to number one help to name it it so you can tame it is a phrase that we use and then be able to connect the dots so that you're understanding why you are feeling the way you feel and this is really helpful for people who are sensitive and often pick up energies or emotions that aren't even theirs because if you can't connect the dots to the what you're feeling it's usually not yours and then it's where we get to in the end of the process is really understanding what's the unmet need Underneath It All and how to meet it because that's really why emotional eating shows up in the first place our body is trying to communicate like a warning or a sign or something a need and we haven't been trained or equipped to understand what it's trying to say and what actually needs to be done so we just try to like stuff it with food so this allows my clients to be able to have a healthy secure relationship with their emotions and also to have courage and confidence that no matter what shows up in their day or their life or even in the future that they'll be able to handle it because they have this tool among the others that I teach to be able to handle whatever comes and then you can put yourself into taking more courageous risks and doing more in your life falling in love if relationships are something without the fear of losing the person or breaking up and there's just so many things that it can support you in when you have that healthy resilience when it comes to emotions and some people do take on more of other people's emotions 100% some people are more

Speaker 2: empathetic so I see that what do you

Speaker 1: believe is one of the Achilles heel of most successful women I believe it's emotional eating I believe that we can get into a pattern of using food as a way to take the edge off or to try to come down or reward ourselves and it actually stunts so much growth it causes what I call like an invisible divorce from ourselves so it creates a buffer between you and how you're feeling and your inner knowings it really shrinks and disassociates people from their intuition so it's harder to know decisions to make because we can't get a felt sense if we're numbing ourselves so interesting to think about this on such a deep level where when we ignore eating we're not listening to ourselves right or when we eat and we don't stop eating or we're eating when we don't really need to be eating in a way that's going to fuel us we're denying ourselves again yeah and the great thing is that when we heal that we know what we need we know what we want we have direct access to our voice and our courage to be able to put it out in the world we become the creators of our hopes and needs and dreams and desires we recognize this is my life and I get to choose what I want to do and create

Speaker 2: you believe that coping mechanisms are actually roadblocks share with us your

Speaker 1: thoughts on this I believe there are certain coping mechanisms that are healthy and in alignment and then there are certain ones that people will often call vices that are actually old and outdated things like emotional eating or retail therapy as people call it or Mommy wine time if you're doing any of those things I'm not judging you I'm just inviting you to evaluate which of your coping mechanisms are helpful and supportive and which ones are actually holding you back or making you stuck because when it comes to emotional eating oving or if it's over drinking or even overwork or even over responsibility these are all coping mechanisms these are the ones that will hold us back deflate our energy make us more exhausted on top of the exhaustion you already feel it can really stunt your growth so that's where we want to be looking at emotional eating and a relationship with food and how is this actually holding you back in the short term a lot of people be like oh it's good it makes me feel better or I look forward to eating but then it's like all the energy that gets caught up in the shame and the guilt and trying to work it off and what did I just do and I can't keep doing this and the cycle of over and over again and it's so interesting because I'm not really a dessert person I enjoy chocolate but sometimes I think oh I'll have have a little bit of ice cream if I'm out with my family or something little after dinner and then I've learned to listen to myself I don't feel better when I have it I don't have dessert very often but I thought why am I even saying yes to it during those times when afterwards I feel worse and I know everyone is different but now I've learned to say no I'm okay or I'll have a bite or two and that is it because if I eat an entire cupcake I'm going to not feel good

Speaker 2: yeah that's such a great and practical example because if it's not dessert it's a drink when everyone else is drinking or if it's not this it's that what it really boils down to is this unspoken fear of being who we really are when everyone else is doing something different particularly when all the people that we care about the most like our family are doing things that are different and the unconscious and subconscious fears of being called out for it being ridiculed being pressured into doing something you don't want to do so while it's just showing up on the surface as like dessert or a drink what it's actually doing is reinforcing that it's not okay to be ourselves now the beautiful thing for you is that you've already found a way of around it and

Speaker 1: you're like wait this is another option I can say no it took a while though because you're at a birthday party and everyone's having birthday cake and then you think am I not supporting the birthday if I don't take a piece of cake now I'll say I'll take a small one or I'll just have a couple bites cuz I've learned if I eat the piece of cake I do not feel better afterwards and it took a while to think it through because we at a birthday party you're not always thinking oh how am I going to feel after I eat this piece of cake you don't really think that at least I didn't going into it but then I realized I don't feel better after and some people are dessert people some people like sweets I don't deny myself at all from the things that I do enjoy and carrot cake is my favorite but I don't want the whole piece of cake I just want a couple bites and then I'm good yeah it's interesting to Think Through the whole process because we don't always do it and I don't even know if I've even actually thought through me not taking the whole piece of cake until today I know what I'm doing now but I never thought through that entire past and I definitely didn't talk about it yeah now someone who let's say in our work together is experiencing something similar we're going out to eat and this is what I'm quote unquote supposed to do but it's not what I want to do in our work together we're able to identify what is it that you actually want what is it that you actually need and let's take a look at all all the ways that we can create that and how do we manage the situation with other people when it's inevitably brought up so that it's not this awkward why aren't you eating or have more the pressure that is often placed on us when we're trying to make changes in our relationship with food the other part of this that we're talking about without talking about is how we've become so socialized in the ways that we should act around food or what we should and shouldn't do but if we really peel back the layers a lot of this socialization goes against what we really truly need and want and even what our bodies can and can't digest I'm Italian and I grew up in Italian family so pasta and cheese are the main food groups growing up we could never figure out out why I was having these stomach aches and they would become more frequent in the summer and we could never figure it out I even had to be hospitalized a few times it was

Speaker 2: dairy dairy okay I was thinking gluten

Speaker 1: but no it wasn't until I was in my 20s and went on this health Retreat and we didn't have dairy my acne cleared up my allergies cleared up how did I not know this because Dairy was always a part of

Speaker 2: my life wait you mean what I'm eating is actually making me sick this is a thing

Speaker 1: and if you think about it allergies I have a strange fruit allergies people are different some people I know someone who's allergic to zucchini we're all so different in the way our bodies process things too that's another thing that we don't always think about and you

Speaker 2: mentioned the pasta so the night before I ran the Marathon I don't eat pasta a lot my instinct was to get a steak but then I thought I'm running the next day and then everyone around me was eating the pasta and I decided to go with pasta and then I didn't feel great I didn't eat too much I didn't go with my instinct I realized that the next day and it was just one day right and the only reason I had it is because I was running the next day but my instinct was to get the fet and I remember going home going I should have had the fet because my body would have felt normal self I didn't beat myself up I wasn't upset but I just didn't feel as good as I could have and I told myself that night I'm like never again I'm just going to eat what I know my body is going to want and I'm going to feel the best afterwards

Speaker 1: good for you for even being able to receive that instinct because for a lot of my clients they can't even hear that little voice or they'll confuse it as fear and they have a hard time deciphering between what's actually my intuition and what's actually this diet

Speaker 2: culture that's baked into my brain good for you for being able to hear that and know that and be able to revisit the situation after and connect the dots in this process of understanding your body and what works and what doesn't and what is the cause and what is the effect is

Speaker 1: that willingness to try experiment and then no and try and experiment and no and similar to my experience with Dair is that I didn't have the agency to be able to experiment with dairy or even just different foods CU at that time I just thought food's food so nothing could really make me sick but then even after I got home from that Retreat and started to understand okay Dairy is a thing for me there were times where I didn't know there was cheese and pesto and

Speaker 2: immediately found out magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one way that you make sure to find and live your joy finding Joy feeling Joy

Speaker 1: experiencing Joy has been definitely a journey alongside of my healing my own emotional eating because as bernee Brown says it like we can't selectively numb so if we're numbing the hard stuff we're numbing the happy stuff too part of my healing has been to be able to feel it all but also permission to feel the good stuff too because that can just be as unnerving as it is to feel the hard stuff but I would say for me when it comes to Joy and receiving it regularly and daily am I in my body because if I'm not feeling something I'm not here I'm not present so number one is to make sure that I'm in my body like from the moment I wake up task number one is get in my body and then from there to really let myself feel whether it's the weather as I'm locking my dogs or excitement when I look at something on my cou or these little moments because so often we can look for these like big happy moments or be waiting for these big things there's so much joy in the here and now if we allow ourselves to feel it feel the good feelings because the more you do there's different octaves of feeling good and the same way there's different octaves of feeling in dark and that whole range is valuable and healthy and I really believe that we all need a little permission to feel all the

Speaker 2: feelings yes such good advice it has been so much fun talking to you and talking about a topic we've never talked about on the podcast yet so much fun can you tell us how and where we can find

Speaker 1: you yeah so homebased for me is at escape from emotionale eating.com my work is centralized around the four roots of emotional eating which isn't something we got too deep into today but it is something that I really nerd out on so if anyone who's listening wants to learn more about the four roots and even find out which of the four roots is activated for you and causing overeating you can head over to innerwork do me to take the free quiz get the free resources and start working on this deeper level in your relationship with food thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello sheet.com on our shetit website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich stalino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave [Music]