Introduction:
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor’s Pharmacy,
Marc David:
People will say, I know what I’m supposed to eat. I know what I’m supposed to do. I just don’t do it. I sabotage myself. So let’s get a little more nuanced about that and take a dive in there.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Welcome to Doctor’s Pharmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman. That’s pharmacy. We have a place for conversations that matter. And if you’ve ever experienced emotional eating, which I’m sure many of you never have, right? Then this is the podcast for you because it’s with I think, the world’s expert on the topic of the psychology of eating. We often talk about what to eat, but we don’t often talk about why we eat or what’s in the way of our eating well.
And we have as our guest today, an extraordinary man, a very good friend of mine, Mark David, who’s a bestselling author of a book called Nourishing Wisdom, A Mind Body Approach to Nutrition, wellbeing, as well as the slow down diet, which I could learn a lot from eating for pleasure, energy, and weight loss. He’s a speaker and consultant. He’s the host of the Celebrated Psychology of Eating podcast. He’s also the founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, the world’s only health coaching program that’s devoted to teaching the principles of dynamic eating, psychology and mind-body nutrition. He has students in over 100 countries. The institute champions an uplifting, inclusive approach to food and the body that honors each of our individual ways of being, our psychology, our physiology, and sees the challenge that eating challenges us in a way that can help be a doorway to personal growth and to waking up. So welcome, mark.
Marc David:
Mark, thanks for having me. Good to be in conversation with you, my friend.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No, I just want to give people a heads up about what we’re going to talk about because I think the topic of emotional eating is a huge one. We’re going to talk about the three biggest myths about emotional eating, and you’re going to explore what it is emotional eating, where it comes from, why it’s so problematic for so many people, and some tips on how to work with our emotional eating issues. Now, many of us are faced with often turning to food when we’re anxious or stressed or depressed or nervous or bored or confused, and we kind of can beat ourselves up about what we just ate or what we should have eaten. I flew back on the plane ride from Europe a couple days ago and I was like, I just ate the crappy plain food, but I didn’t feel good and I didn’t have anything to eat.
I was hungry. And I think we can often get ourselves in a negative cycle about what we’re eating. So the good news is it’s not about willpower or self-control or it’s about learning how to get unstuck from negative patterns of eating and emotional eating and be free. So I’m excited you are on the podcast. I’ve known you for, I don’t know, almost 30 years now, and we’ve been doing this work for a long time. And I think the topic of emotional eating is pretty hot right now. So is emotional eating, just high level question, is emotional eating the same thing as having an eating disorder? Because I know I emotionally eat, but I don’t think I have an eating disorder.
Marc David:
No, not at all, really. An eating disorder is an extreme eating challenge that generally requires some kind of clinical intervention. Anorexia, bulimia, extreme obesity, morbid obesity. Emotional eating, and you’ve alluded to this already, is something every single human being on planet Earth will do at some point during their day or their week or their month. I feel a little bad. I feel a little down. I feel a little lonely. I feel a little stressed, anxious, so I turn to food. So there’s something very human and humanizing about emotional eating.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And so what are the three biggest myths? You’re talking about these three myths, what are they? And then we’ll talk about each one of them and how we can navigate them.
Marc David:
First myth is that people think, well, if I emotionally eat, there’s something wrong with me. That’s number one. So something is intrinsically wrong with me, this is a problem, and we’re going to bust that one in a moment. Myth number two is that, hey, if I emotionally eat, that means I need willpower to control it. So more of this magical substance called willpower, and we’re going to bust that one as well. Myth number three. Well, if I emotionally eat, it means I must sabotage myself. Somewhere in there, there’s this secret agent who’s just out to get me, and we’re also going to handle that one as well.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Okay, so let’s talk about myth one and the idea that you emotionally eat something’s wrong with you because a lot of people just beat themselves up when they don’t actually eat well and they beat themselves over the head with negative inner dialogue and it’s really counterproductive and it’s actually not necessary.
Marc David:
So that’s the majority of people that I’ve ever met who emotionally eat. So here’s the thing I’m going to say right off the bat, that emotional eating, it’s natural and it’s inborn. If you’re a parent, if you’ve ever been around a tiny infant, you observe that infant and one moment they’re crying or screaming, and the next moment there’s mama to give them bottle or breast. And that infant goes from crying and screaming and upset to relaxed and mellow and happy. And it all happens in virtually an instant. So we have ingrained in our dna, not just from your own memories of this lifetime, but from every human who’s come before you. We have this imprint, this memory called feel bad, eat food, feel better, and it works. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Normal and natural. You go for a holiday dinner, a holiday is celebration.
That’s emotional eating. I don’t know, you go out on a date, date. Date has its own emotional flavor to it. That’s emotional eating. And yeah, you come home from a bad day, a bad experience, and deep in your cells, if I eat something, especially if it’s something I like, I’m going to feel good. Food gives us virtually an instant pleasure chemistry release. If you think about it, what’s the opposite of emotional eating? Would it be unemotional eating? We’re emotional beings. And so I think we really need to get that this is something that it’s natural, that it’s inborn and it really makes us beautifully human. And of course it becomes problematic when eating is our only emotional regulation strategy.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And so what do we do with that? How do we deal with the pattern of emotional eating?
Marc David:
Well, here’s the thing, when we are constantly going towards emotional eating, asking us a question, and it’s asking us on a certain level, what else can you do? What else can I do to regulate, to manage, to be with my emotions other than food? Because food, it’s the infant strategy that we’ve learned. It’s the one that we know it’s ingrained in our DNA. So in order to change a habit, think of habit as automatic emotional eating is this automatic unconscious habit that does itself. People don’t wake up in the morning and say, I really need to try to emotionally eat today. It does itself.
So in order to change an unwanted, unconscious, automatic habit, we need to introduce consciousness. Consciousness meaning awareness. Awareness meaning presence, meaning that witness part of me that notices, oh, I’m about to emotionally eat. What else can I do? And I’ll have people write a list, just write an inventory of everything in life that makes you feel good other than food. Persons, places, things, thoughts, experiences, exercise, music, watching a goofy video, I don’t know. And there’s your menu of options. If emotional eating sort of has its grips on you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I don’t know if I learned it from you or not. It was a lecture, maybe a Kenya Ranch gave decades ago. It was like when you’re about to open the fridge, you go, what am I feeling and what do I need? As a barometer, What am I feeling? I feel depressed. What do I need a hug? I’m angry. What do I need? I need to tell someone what’s going on. I don’t necessarily need food. I think a lot of the times we have these feelings and emotions that we don’t act on through a more productive channel, such as actually expressing that emotion and it gets sublimated into food.
And so I always tell my patients, put a piece of paper on their fridge that says, “What am I feeling? What do I need?” Before you open the fridge or the cabinet and start stuffing your face with ice cream or whatever it is, maybe I’m lonely, I need to call a friend. Maybe I’m tired.
Marc David:
Bingo.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
[inaudible 00:09:24] a nap. My biggest emotional eating thing is when I’m tired. If I’m tired, I’ll just kind of want more sugar or carbs or whatever to keep my energy up. If I have to function or work, and that’s terrible. It’s a terrible strategy. I should probably just take a nap or cancel a meeting or do whatever. But I don’t do that
Marc David:
Part of that one for you. That’s really a reframing because I’m the same way. I think tired equals bad. I should have limitless energy to do whatever I want when I want to do it. So if I’m feeling tired, yes, what do I have to do? Do I drink tea? Do I drink caffeine? Do I go for something sweet? And there’s that moment of consciousness, oh, wait a second, I’ve been going at it all day and all week. I am tired. I am part of the human race, so I need to relax and be tired. And so there’s that moment of consciousness, there’s that moment of awareness that is where the game changes.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So the first bit is basically there’s something wrong with you, but it’s really not true. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just having some experience that you’re managing with food that isn’t about some character flaw, or lack of willpower. It just points to the fact that you need to think about your life a little bit more carefully and what you actually need in that moment and not automatically fill some amorphous need with food.
Marc David:
Right? Because if I think I am emotionally eating means there’s something wrong with me, what I’m missing is that food is actually my solution. It’s not the problem. People think, oh, I’m emotionally eating. Emotional eating equals problem. No food is your solution. The problem is, I have emotions that I feel uncomfortable with. I don’t like. I don’t know how to manage food is my solution. I feel better. So let’s just come up with better solutions. And at the same time, we’re reframing, you don’t, I don’t, we don’t have a problem. There’s nothing wrong with me because what happens when you think there’s something wrong with you is we go into, I’m broken. There’s something defective about me, and if I feel broken and defective, there’s a part of my consciousness where I’m not going to feel good about myself, and I’m become susceptible to all kinds of nonsense strategies and approaches and beliefs that are going to give me some quick fix. So feeling broken often has us going through life not being the real me because I’m broken.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So let’s talk about myth two, willpower and why willpower is not an effective way to deal with emotional eating.
Marc David:
It’s never seen anybody be successful with this strategy to overcome emotional eating. It’s like telling an alcoholic, “Well, you’re an alcoholic. Don’t drink alcohol.”, or a heroin addict, “Well, just don’t take the heroin.”, or a gambler, “Just don’t gamble.” It’s a more nuanced conversation. Also, think about it. Willpower is a noun. It’s a thing. It’s this sort of mythical substance. Where do you get it from? So-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Willpower.
Marc David:
…I think-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You know what I’m saying.
Marc David:
So, I think emotionally, yeah. Yeah. It’s a mythical substance. It’s this holy grail that people think, well, if only I had more, then I can just eat what I don’t want to eat. I can just refrain from eating food and then I won’t be an emotional eater and I’m not going to gain weight, and in fact I’ll lose weight. But really, we don’t need more willpower. We need more nuanced. We need a higher perspective. And what I’m going to say is instead of looking for more willpower, look to how is emotional eating a great teacher for me? So if I’m going to really embrace this challenge, how is emotional eating asking me to grow? And asking that question assumes that you and I, we grow through challenge. We grow through our relationships, our past hurts, our abuses. You had a difficult upbringing, or I have physical ailments, or my loved one died, or I had crappy parenting. Whatever it is for people-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
All the above.
Marc David:
…we can grow through those challenges. Yeah. And then some.
So we’re here to grow through challenge. I’m going to suggest that emotional eating is such a challenge. And let’s ask a powerful question. So if I’m emotional eating, how is that asking me… And it’s going to be different for each one of us. How is it asking me to grow as a person? For some people that might be asking us to, I should examine my diet. I should examine what I’m eating because certain nutritional strategies will influence my emotional eating.
Am I to ask us to look at how am I doing relationship? Am I having a voice? Am I suppressing myself? Am I expressing myself? Do I have a purpose in life? Do I have pleasure? Do I have connection? Do I have intimacy? Am I being true to myself? If I’m not doing some of those, what will I do? I’m going to feel uncomfortable if I’m not expressing myself, if I’m not being the real me, if I’m not showing up in relationship or if I’m longing for love but not reaching out for it. So what do we do? Turn to food, that’ll make me feel better. Once again, it’s the solution. It’s actually not the problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So that’s really helpful. Mark, what about the myth three that if I emotionally eat it means I sabotage myself? Can you kind of unpack that? That relationship between emotional eating and self sabotage.
Marc David:
I love when people say that because we’re always mystified. People will say, I know what I’m supposed to eat. I know what I’m supposed to do, I just don’t do it, and I sabotage myself. So let’s get a little more nuanced about that and take a dive in there. Some of the great psychological thinkers, Carl Young, Joseph Campbell, they talked about the archetypes and the archetypes. Another word for archetypes are voices or personas, different aspects of us. Normally we think I’m a person. I’m me. So yeah, I am me. And that’s how we distinguish ourselves. But the me that you think you are is actually a crowd. So there’s me that’s a father, that’s an archetype or a persona. There’s a me that’s a son. There’s the me that’s a partner to my fiance. There’s the me that’s a teacher. So when I’m with students, I’m in a teaching role.
When I’m with a client, I’m in a counseling role. When I’m playing tennis, I’m in a competitor archetype. You can be in the lover archetype, you could be in the scientist or the nerd. There’s literally thousands of them. So there are different voices, different personas. So oftentimes what’s happening when people say, “I know what I’m supposed to eat, I know what I’m supposed to do, I just can’t do it. I sabotage myself.” What’s really happening is there’s a voice, an archetype that’s stepping in, and it’s unconsciously driving the show.
As an example, a lot of people having them, the rebel archetype. The rebel archetype is the part of you and I that is like Gandhi was a rebel. Martin Luther King was a rebel. Mother Teresa, she was a rebel. It’s going against a lot of the grain. It’s going against what society says, finding a better way and having the courage to say no and to resist. But the rebel can also be a rebel without a good cause. The rebel can be a little immature. So a lot of times when the rebel in us takes over, it’s as if we’re saying, “Nobody tells me what to do, not even me.” And the adult in us steps out, the health champion in me steps aside, and the rebel takes over, and I’m rebelling against whoever. I’m rebelling against my doctor, my nutritionist, my dietician, my own inner voice. I’m rebelling against whatever society is telling me to do.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, how do you handle that?
Marc David:
Well, part of it is starting to notice the different voices that’s operating inside you. So it’s actually doing a little bit of an inventory on what are the voices that might possibly be stepping in. And once we start to learn about them and notice them, this is another brief example, the child, we often think of the inner child. So we all have a child in us. The child is beautiful. Child in you and me, it’s innocent, it’s sweet, it’s loving, it’s open, it’s carefree. And the child could also be a brat. And the child also wants immediate gratification. The child wants what it wants, when it wants it.
And a lot of times, people who are grip with emotional eating, they have been dieting since they’ve been young, or they were bullied for being chubby, or they were told by somebody in their environment, my mother, my father, my sister, my friends, whoever. It was my teachers, that your body’s not acceptable as it is. You have to go on a diet. And all of a sudden that innocence in us is crushed because we have guilt and shame about our body. And at some point, the child in us just wants to scream, “I just want to eat whatever I want. I want to eat the sugar, I want to eat the cupcake.”
And so as we begin, so in answer to your question, how do we work with that. We start to notice when that voice steps in. So you have to be aware because those voices are stepping in beneath our awareness. We’re just not present to it. So we feel like we’re blindsided. Something sabotaging me. Well, it’s sabotaging you because you’re witness witness consciousness or the adult in you or the king and queen in you is just not paying attention. So, oh, I’m on a diet right now because this is what’s going to help me feel better when I don’t eat so much sugar. I have my energy, I don’t have brain fog. I start to drop weight. And so, okay, I’m going to stick to my low sugar or my no sugar diet, and then all of a sudden I find myself opening up the refrigerator and I just want some ice cream.
And it’s helpful to know, oh, okay, that’s the child in me. What does a child need? Generally, a child needs love and attention, and a child also needs guidelines. You know, can’t let a child run the show. You can’t let them run the kitchen. Chances are they’ll eat breakfast cereal all day. So it becomes a conversation with yourself. It becomes a negotiation. What else can I give that child such that I can appease it? And how can I breathe in my adult, my king, my inner queen, to be present and make the choice? So it’s a practice,
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And it’s really important to learn the skills. You really understand the origins of your thinking around what you’re eating, because it’s often not what you’re eating, eating you, unless you figure that out. It’s really hard to clear up the challenges we face around food and eating things that are going to help regulate our mood, our energy, our wellbeing, extend our life, all of it. So I think that’s super important.
Also, I want you to talk about this from a little bit of a different angle because often our feelings can drive us to eat and eat in ways that are not good for us, but also eating in certain ways can drive feelings that are problematic for us. So it’s kind of a bidirectional thing. If you eat the wrong food, you’ll feel like crap, and then you want to eat more. So I’ve noticed that. The more crap you eat, the more you want to eat it. And it’s really interesting to look at the science around that from the point of view of food and food addiction and the biology of food as well as the psychology of eating, because they’re very related.
Marc David:
Absolutely. Food influences mood. Our mood influences our food. I eat what food we eat and how we digest and assimilate and calorie burn it. I think at the most basic, simple level, and you just mentioned this, if I eat poor quality food, if I eat junk food, I’m driven to eat more. Now a part of that, a big part of that is poor quality food tends to be low in nutrient density and head brain and gut brain. The brain in your belly, the enteric nervous system, those two brains are constantly scanning a meal and they’re scanning the nutritional profile of the meal. And body wants good nutrition. That’s what it wants. And when you feed a body food that is bulky, it seems like there’s a lot of caloric value here, but it’s lacking in the right micronutrition or macronutrition. Brain isn’t always smart enough to say, “Hey, you need more vitamins and minerals, you need more essential fatty acids.”
The brain just generally will scream hungry. It wants us to look for more food because we’re not getting what we need. We’re not meeting a nutritional requirement. That to me is the wisdom of the body, for sure. So many of the junk foods that you and I are exposed to are designed unfortunately to addict us to them. They have the right crunch profile, they have the right flavor and sweet and salty profile to capture us. They have the right combination of sweet and fat. There are certain 50 50 combinations of sweet and fat that’ll easily get us hooked. And then once we’re hooked, you feel bad about yourself because you think you’re a willpower weakling, but what’s actually happening, it’s your biology that’s driving you to eat more. But if I think I’m a willpower weakling, I’m going to go down the rabbit hole of I’m a victim, woe is me, and we get disempowered and then we just feel stuck.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, that’s so true. I think Kevin Hall did an interesting study where he basically let people eat as much as they wanted or whatever was in front of them. And they had basically, one group got ultra processed food, which is kind of pulverized industrial ingredients that aren’t really any bearing any resemblance to real food. And then he let other people eat just nutrient dense whole food as much as they wanted. And the people who were given the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day because they weren’t getting the nutrition they wanted, the nutrient density, and it’s like looking for love in all the wrong places.
And actually there’s medical conditions around this. One of them is called pica, where little kids eat dirt in order to get iron because they’re iron deficient. So our biology is smarter than we are, and we’re going to keep eating and eating, but if we keep eating things that have no nutrient density, we’re just going to overeat and then we’re going to get this vicious cycle, and then those foods are addictive and then we gain weight and then we feel worse, and we actually drive hormonal patterns that cause us to eat more.
And so you’ve kind of got, you end up with this kind of mishmash of biology and psychology that is just sort of a disaster.
Marc David:
And you have to really elegantly embrace both of those pillars. Here’s another thing. So many people have been taught that, well, in order for you to lose weight, you have to go low fat. And there’s a lot of people that still believe that a lot of people are on low fat weight loss diets and low fat are low and essential fats. We call them essential for a reason. So your listeners know my body needs this, but a lot of people don’t understand that, they don’t get that they’re listening to old science, so they’re eating low fat, and you show me a person who’s eating low fat, who’s then becoming fat efficient. And I’ll show you a person who will be binge eating and emotional eating and overeating and thinking that there’s something wrong with them because they can’t control their appetite. No. What’s actually happening is you should be on your hands and knees thanking your body because it’s brilliant and it’s letting you know, you have a nutritional deficiency.
The challenge also is that a lot of times if we’re fat deficient or if we’re protein deficient, brain isn’t always smart enough to have you crave fat. So sometimes you could be fat deficient and you’ll just crave sugar or you’ll crave carbs, or a lot of people will be fat deficient and they’ll crave poor quality fats. They’ll want to go for the fried foods because that’s sort of what their body knows, and that’s what their body wisdom is, unfortunately driving them towards. But the point is, it’s easy to be low fat. You’re driven to emotionally eat, and that drivenness is real. You feel it, and you feel, my God, I got to eat, I got to have this because the body isn’t a little bit of a desperate place, it knows that it needs this nutrient. So you can have a functioning brain and a functioning hormonal system. So there’s a little bit of an urgency there, and that urgency feels like something’s wrong with me.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Me. Yeah, it’s so true because a lot of people don’t realize this, but if you are obese, you’re very likely to be nutrient deficient. You have excess fat, but you have low nutrients in your system. And I see this over and over again. I had a patient at Cleveland Clinic was shocking. I call them functional medicine virgins where they’ve… There’s a lot of the patients I see really tried everything, tried to be healthy, eat well. And this was just someone who came into our program who really had never even heard of a vegetable basically.
And they were fairly educated, but they just didn’t understand anything about nutrition. And they grew up eating junk food in their family, and that’s what they ate. And she was massively overweight. Her BMI was like 43, and she had diabetes, heart failure, kidneys failing, liver failing. It was quite amazing. And when I did her testing, I was so shocked to see the level of nutritional dysfunction in her system, deficiencies of zinc and b vits, magnesium deficiency of omega-3 fats. Her omega-6 to 3 fat ratio was 20:1 which is just ridiculously dangerous. And you should be one to one or two to one. It was horrible. And I was like, wow, she’s so overweight, but she’s so malnourished at the same time.
Marc David:
Fascinating. Yeah, fascinating. What the body does, and so many people when they approach dieting is we will generally go to the seeming golden rule of dieting, which is to eat less and exercise more, which works when it works. But there’s a lot of people who are dieting and they’re going so low calorie that what will happen is they’re going too low calorie and they’re eating and they’re not getting enough nutrient density. So what happens if I’m going low calorie or I’m skipping meals? You show me a person who’s…
So many dieters what I see them doing because they believe food is the bad guy, so let me try to not eat breakfast. So they have a small breakfast, maybe they’ll have a cup of coffee, and then they’ll have a tiny lunch, they’ll have a salad with a non-fat salad dressing, and then it is predictable that by three or four o’clock they’re going to be binge eating. Why? Because they’re starving and they think they have a willpower problem. Once again, they think I’m an emotional eater, something’s wrong with me. I can’t control myself. It’s actually, no, you need to learn how to become an eater. And diets are teaching people how not to eat, and most people need to learn how to eat, what are the right foods for me to eat, the right way for me to eat them, the right mental emotional state for me to eat that food? And that’s where the action is.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, it’s true. And I think I want to sort of dip into this because it’s a complicated web of reasons why we don’t have a healthy relationship to food. Some of it can be biological, as we just talked about, where the quality of the food we’re eating in America is driving our behavior, not our emotional problems. But at the same time, there’s a whole set of psychological reasons and trauma that drives overeating or poor quality eating. And I think that’s not talked about enough.
And one of the questions that I have on my medical questionnaire is, have you ever experienced abuse or trauma or in a vague kind of teaser question. And it’s just remarkable how many people have been victims of abuse as children. And we know now through the ACE questionnaire, which is a questionnaire that we have all our patients fill out, adverse childhood events, and it’s highly correlated with cardiometabolic disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, early death. It’s striking how powerful it is in obesity for sure. So like I said before, it’s not what are you eating, but what’s eating you? And I think the question I have for you is, what is the science and psychology tell us about dysfunctional eating and how connected it is to early childhood trauma, whether it’s sexual abuse or emotional abuse, or other things that are happening?
Marc David:
Well, so much research on weight loss resistance and past history of trauma or sexual abuse. So much research on digestive disorders and past history of trauma and sexual abuse. And let’s just take the word trauma for a moment and break it down in a real simple way. Trauma is undigested life experience. Trauma is a stress response that has never had the opportunity to resolve itself. So I might have a stressful event, somebody steals my parking space that I was going to take, I yell and scream in my car, and then five minutes later I get over it, hopefully. So that stress, it gets resolved. Now, oftentimes what happens is, particularly when we’re young, we experienced life events that the child’s mind cannot handle. A child’s mind does not know how to process sexual abuse. A child’s mind does not know how to process death of a parent.
A child’s mind doesn’t know how to process intense violence that it was subject to or saw. So children are good observers, but very poor interpreters. So what often happens is the stress that we experience stays in the body. It lives in the body, it doesn’t resolve itself. And when stress lives in the body as unresolved, it will invariably show up as unwanted symptom and/or unwanted behaviors. So if I have unresolved stress in my system, Hey, what gives me temporary relief? Food. I’m going to want to turn to food because food makes me feel better. It works in the moment, but it doesn’t give us the deep enough relaxation response that the past trauma requires to unwind. It doesn’t give us what that past trauma needs to resolve itself. It’s just a very temporary, fleeting, little drug that we put over it.
There’s a correlation oftentimes with some of the biggest animals in nature are the ones that are most protected. Yeah, you can say the lion is the king of the jungle, but it’s kind of the elephant. Nobody messes with the elephants. They’re really big. You don’t like to mess with the rhinoceros. They’re really big. So oftentimes when we experience a trauma, particularly a sexual trauma at a young age, we will respond by having a big body. And it’s what body wisdom, it’s what the body wisdom of a child knows to do because some part of that child knows that if I get really big and if I gain weight, I’m not a sexual target, I am safe. I’m big and I’m safe. Big equals safe. And big also equals not a sexual target. So some part of us knows that, and hopefully at some point when we become an adult and we have opportunities to understand better and have more wisdom and find the help that we need, then we can begin to unwind the trauma because it’s an undigested experience. It just needs to be processed.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s a very interesting way of talking about it, an undigested experience. And I remember you talking to me when I was going through my divorce and you were talking about we need to be able to metabolize our experience, and if we don’t metabolize them, they eat at us literally, or we eat at it. And I think that’s such a brilliant frame of how to think about way we are in relation to the traumas and emotions that we all go through in life, and how do we not sabotage ourselves and how do we get free a little bit? Because what you’re talking about essentially through your Institute for the Psychology meeting, through your coaching programs and through your incredible online course you’ve offered to everybody, not just coaches called the emotional eating breakthrough. You offer a roadmap of how to work through these things in a way that destigmatizes it and allows people to get free from things that they didn’t even realize they were prisoners of.
Marc David:
Yeah. I love creating programs that work. So often we’re running around in circles and we’re doing the same strategies. People try to resist food and they try to not eat and they try to use willpower. And eventually that becomes so uncomfortable that you turn to food to manage the discomfort that you have about the fact that you turn to food. So it becomes an endless cycle. So there’s all kinds of ways to really reframe and practices to do that help us really transform our emotional relationship with food. And that also helps us begin the process of very sort of more naturally finding our natural weight. A lot of people are wishing for weight loss, and oftentimes before we lose weight, we have to sort of gain some life. We have to embrace our own life and just kind of get to a deeper place of what’s happening.
It’s so much of it as people think, well, when I reach my ideal target weight, then I’m going to be happy. Then I’m going to be the real me, then I’m going to be fabulous. I’m going to be confident, I’m going to be sexy. I’m going to be doing all these things. And when I ask my weight loss clients, “Okay, write down a list of who you’re going to be when you lose weight.” There’s only two things that they can’t do now. The only thing they can’t do now is fit into their skinny clothes and feel like they’re just light and bouncy.
Otherwise, you can start being more confident now, you could be the real now, you could be more outgoing now. You could be dating if you’re not in a relationship, you can feel more sexy now. But if I’m putting that off into the future, then I’m basically proclaiming I am going to be unhappy now, which then leads us to do all these unhappy strategies to lose weight so we can feel good about ourselves and we’re self attacking along the way. I hate my body, my body’s no good, I will only accept myself when I lose weight. So the question is, how could a weight loss journey that’s filled with self-attack or self-hate possibly lead to a destination of I’m happy. Doesn’t work. Journey’s always going to inform the destination.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s so true. It’s so true. I think I would love to talk about how we help people to reframe some of these beliefs around food and eating and how we can change those. Because it seems very tough to do for people. We can understand the high level psychology of this. We can understand it comes from our trauma and we can understand that if we eat nutrient poor food, we’re going to overeat. And we can understand that it’s not our fault. But how do we really, really shift those beliefs around food and eating that are driving us into this?
Marc David:
That’s a great question. Really, really important. I think the first thing to do is to identify the beliefs that need to be changed, the toxic beliefs that are so powerful that they’re holding us back. Example, so many people are walking around with the toxic dietary belief that food is my enemy. Why? It’s food my enemy. I’m trying to lose weight. How does this weight get here? It must have been food. So if the weight is the enemy, the fat on my body is an enemy because if I’m fat, then I’m not going to be healthy and people won’t love me and I won’t be sexy and fabulous like the movies and the songs say I should be. So we conclude that food is the enemy. So that’s where restriction and diet consciousness comes from. Now food is the enemy.
Think about it for a second. What does the brain do when it senses enemy? When the brain senses enemy, it goes into a stress response and the stress response, it’s a graded response. There’s mild, medium, intense stress. But if I’m walking around day in and day out throughout the course of my life, because I learned as a young child, food is your enemy. You’re too chubby, you’re not acceptable until you lose weight. Then if food is my enemy, I’m in a constant stress response. So I’m elevating my insulin, my cortisol. Those two hormones for so many people can signal fat storage, inhibit muscle building stress response, deregulates our appetite. So if you want your most natural appetite regulation, you got to be a relaxed human. You got to be in parasympathetic nervous system dominance. If you’re in a stress state, your appetite regulation is completely skewed.
So people will get in a stress state just by the false belief, food is my enemy. That stress state is impacting their physiology. It impacts your digestion. If you’re eating food in a stress state, you’ll be doing some degree of nutrient excretion. So you’ll be eating the healthiest food in the universe. But if you’re not under the optimum state of digestion and assimilation, which is the relaxation response, you’re not getting the full value from that meal. So we have to notice, do I have this belief that food is my enemy?
Because a lot of people do soon, as soon as they get hungry. By extension, appetite is their enemy. And that’s like saying breathing is my enemy. That’s like saying peeing is my enemy. No, you got to do it. There’s no way around this. So we have to notice that and then we have to, and it becomes a practice. It’s a personal practice. It’s a transformational practice. You can call it a spiritual practice where you have to align yourself with how you are created, with how life made you with how biology works. You’re an eater, food is good. You might as well make friends with it. So it becomes a practice to make friends with food. It becomes a daily affirmation. It becomes catching yourself when you notice you are repeating the mantra, food is my enemy.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s great. It’s such great advice. Let’s talk about this idea of self-compassion and not beating ourselves up, and how do we break these patterns of emotional eating that keep us stuck? Can you talk about that?
Marc David:
Yes. Self-compassion is a very much needed nutrient in the whole nutritional conversation because what happens so much is that in the universe of weight loss, in the universe of emotional eating and overeating and binge eating, what people will tend to do is to self-attack. They will be embodying the archetype of the kind of perfectionist. I got to be perfect. I’ve got to look perfect, got to weigh perfect. I got to eat perfect. And as soon as we’re not perfect, the abuser in us comes in and beats us up for not being perfect. So always around the corner from our perfectionism tends to be self-abuse. You show me a perfectionist who’s eating really well and exercising really well, and I’ll show you a person who at some point is going to be hating themselves and abusing themselves with their thoughts or their own words. So self-compassion is a practice.
What I’ll often tell people is think about it. If your child has baby fat, are you going to tell your child, “I’m not going to love you until you have six pack abs and buns of steel, and you’ll be unacceptable to me until you lose all your baby fat.” Like, no, no, you wouldn’t say that to a child. You wouldn’t say to your best friend, “Oh, you emotionally ate today, I hate you. I’m not going to talk to you. I’m going to punish you.” I’m like, no, you wouldn’t isolate them. So you have to start treating yourself the way you would treat a loved one, the way you would treat your child, the way you treat your best friend. And that becomes a practice. There’s a part of us that thinks that beating myself up is noble, and we absorb that viral behavior from the world and it just doesn’t work.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No, it’s true. And it’s not true. Not just for eating too. True for everything. If we actually said out loud everything we say to ourselves or we said it to a friend or anybody else, it’d be terrifying. We actually reveal our inner dialogue to ourselves. It can be such a powerful tool for healing. I did that work and I spent a lot of time, literally every day writing on all the stupid my head said. And I was like, whoa. And then I began to call in a higher state of witness and awareness and consciousness in my higher self, which sometimes was hard to find, but it ultimately get me so much freedom and allowed me to learn so much about myself and stop having this. Literally, if you wrote it down and then you said it to a friend, they would sort of probably hit you in the head. Say “What are you talking about?”
Marc David:
One of my great memories in life when I first started studying yoga, my yoga teacher, I don’t know, I must have been 19 years old, and the teacher said, as we’re doing all these postures, he said, “Yoga is the practice of harnessing your mind.” And I thought, huh? And he started saying, “Just empty your mind. Don’t look around the room. Don’t compare yourself to other people. Don’t criticize your own body. Just get present in the posture.” And I realized how hard that was for me because I was doing everything he said I should be doing. I was comparing myself, I was criticizing myself. I was thinking, oh man, I’m tight here and I can’t do this and I can’t do that, that she’s better. He’s better. And I think to your point, part of life is in eating as in life, we are learning how to harness the mind and regulate our emotions.
And oftentimes our mind has all these beliefs about food in the body that make us crazy. And our emotions have us do unwanted behaviors like reach for food that end up making us crazy or cause us to gain weight or cause us to feel just as heavy and dense. And it all goes back to we’re being human beings. And it’s kind of what you’ve been taught since you were a child, don’t hit. That’s regulating your emotions. You can scream and cry and complain, but after a while, you got to stop.
And there’s certain things you don’t say to people, you got to be respectful. So we’re learning at a young age, here’s how you be as a human so you can be your best self. And yet we don’t always learn the more advanced course. A lot of times we just end up needing to go take a workshop or go read some good books or do whatever it is that we need to do to really turbocharge our own personal growth. So all for the purpose of being your best self, having the life that you say you want to have begins with starting to look at the contents of my mind and just harnessing it, getting it on a leash,
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Getting it on a leash. It is like trading your brain. We talk about exercise and we don’t talk about training our brain and our thoughts, and we are so undisciplined when it comes to our mind and our thoughts. So I think a lot of the psychology meeting is starting to become aware of it, and then it’s starting to learn how to become more in charge rather than having our thoughts run our lives. We actually can run our thoughts. And that’s a very novel idea to many people, but it actually is this key to happiness and freedom and forget about weight loss, just having a great life. So it’s really so important. I’ll wait to talk about the archetypes you talk about in your work, the rebel, the good girl, the artist. Can you talk a little bit about that? You mentioned the rebel briefly, but talk about how working with those archetype helps inform how you work with people.
Marc David:
Think of the archetypes, the voices, the personalities inside us. It’s kind of like our committee. And if you want to have a good life, it’s good to be in good stead with your committee. It’s good to deploy your committee in a way that works for you. So yeah, we have the voice of the child in us that wants what it wants, when it wants it. I have the voice of the rebel in me that’s just like, don’t tell me what to eat. I don’t like food restriction. And if I let the rebel take over, if I let the child take over and sit at the head of the table and make the food choices, then I’m I the adult in me, the king in me. I’m not going to get where I want to go when it comes to my health, when it comes to being my best self.
One of the other archetypes that often shows up in our relationship with food is the hedonist. And in the positive, the hedonist is the part of us that loves food, that loves pleasure, that loves life, like this is great, let’s eat this. This is so good. And so many of us were so afraid of food. Food is my enemy that we have no pleasure from food, and we are built to receive pleasure from food. And if you’re eating but you’re not getting pleasure because you’re eating and thinking, oh my god, food is my enemy. You’re in a stress response. Stress and cortisol, the main stress hormone, literally blunts our pleasure receptors. So if you’re eating your favorite chocolate cake, and while you’re eating it, you’re stress because you’re saying, I shouldn’t be eating is fattening. It’s bad for me. This is no good. I’m going to stop.
I’m going to eat 10 chocolate cakes and I’ll never stop. Then you actually can’t get the pleasure you’re seeking, and then you’re going to be more hungry. And then you’re going to think once again, oh, I’m a willpower, weak lane. But what’s really happening is your body’s hungering for a pleasure. So there’s a part of the hedonist that knows we need pleasure. There’s another part of the hedonist that also understands or that hedonist can go overboard. And sometimes so many of my clients, students over the years, their hedonist archetype is very strong.
I just want pleasure. I don’t want to be denied. Hey, I’m going to die someday anyway. I might as well eat whatever I want. And I think, okay, that’s kind of reasonable, but don’t complain to me when that’s not working for you, if that’s truly your choice. So with the hedonist in me, I have to negotiate with it because I love pasta. I absolutely love pasta. And yeah, I’ll eat gluten-free pasta, but every once in a while I have to have the real deal. But if I have too much, then I’m in a food coma. I forget, somebody once said, “The problem with Italian food is like seven days later you’re hungry again.”
So it’s learning to dialogue with those voices. There’s another voice in us. I’ll often call it the all or nothing eater. And there’s a lot of us who have an all or nothing mentality when it comes to diet. Either I am following my diet perfectly, I’m eating perfectly paleo, or meaning perfectly vegan or perfectly sugar free, or I’m jumping to the opposite extreme and I’m letting it all go. And oh, I meet a lot of these people. And it’s not only a way that they’ll do diet, but it’s oftentimes a way that they do other parts of their life. And it becomes a lesson in how do you find balance? So instead of saying, well, I can only eat perfect, I’m all in, or I’m all out, it’s like, well, no, let’s build in a little pleasure into the system. Let’s build in a little forbidden foods because you’re going to go to the opposite extreme anyway.
So if we can do 90% healthy and 10% maybe not so healthy, that’s better than all or nothing. So once again, we’re using the archetypes, the voices within us to negotiate and always, always the most aspirational archetype that I’m looking to help my clients invoke, especially if you’re 35, 40 and up is the king or queen in you. The king or queen is the voice in you. That is royal, that’s dignified, that sits on your throne and who you are. And your weight might not be perfect. But a good queen doesn’t sit on her throne and say to her subjects, “Do I need to lose five pounds? Will it make all of you love me more? Will you follow me if I can fit into a different dress?” I’m like, no, you don’t want to follow that queen. So a queen respects herself. She knows who she is, and she manages her queendom. A good king manages his kingdom. So that’s the voice we’re looking to invoke when we’re making our food choices. Or if you like, you can call it the adult in you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Higher self, your higher self.
Marc David:
Your higher self, your a health champion. I got a health champion in me who just loves health. Health it’s so much fun. And health champion is just a great cheerleader. The health champion in me can get a little obsessed sometimes and drive me crazy, but when it’s not driving me crazy, it just helps me feel good. So it’s less about fighting the child or fighting the rebel because that’s what we try to do. It’s giving the other voices more of a say and letting them step to the forefront because then there’s no fight.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
This is just such revolutionary information. So much of the narrative around nutrition is about what to eat, what not to eat was good for you, what’s bad for you. And it’s definitely the world I live in for sure. But your work is just such a breath of fresh air in terms of helping people understand the other aspects of eating, which is not just the science of nutrition, but the psychology of eating. And you really have created this remarkable program called the Emotional Eating Breakthrough. I want you to tell people what it is and what they’re going to learn from it and why it’s so valuable for them.
Marc David:
Thanks for asking, Mark. So the Emotional Inning Breakthrough Program, it’s a 10 week online transformational experience, and it’s essentially designed to help people find freedom with food because that’s what so many of us are looking for. Just let me feel free with food. So those are people who emotionally eat, dress, eat, overeat, bingey, and people who are looking to lose weight, but need help when it comes to managing my unwanted eating habits. So I’m essentially guiding participants through really a true mind, body, heart and soul approach. I like to combine the best of psychology and science and personal development. So essentially through videos, notes, journaling, specialized practices, you get the wisdom and the information you need to essentially let go of emotional eating and find a new relationship with foods, find a new relationship with your body. It’s a holistic approach to finding your natural appetite and your natural weight, but without the fight and without the struggle.
And really the benefit of the program is that when you find freedom with food, it allows you to do the most important thing, which is living your best life. Who do we want to be when we grow up? Who do we want to be when we have that ideal body or when I’m following my ideal diet? And part of that is learning how to become that person now. And part of it is learning how to harness our eating psychology. So it’s working for us and not against us. And once that happens, we’re more available. More available for intimacy, for connection, for relationship, for doing our purpose, for giving our gifts, for having more energy. So that’s the goodies that you come away with from the program.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So good. So how do people learn more about it? Where do they go?
Marc David:
You can go to psychologyofeating.com. We have a page to go to. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to drop a link into the show notes. So we’ll have a link for that, I presume, where people can go right to our page that lets you know about the emotional eating breakthrough. And you could learn all about it and hear me talk and write and chat more so you can make a decision that works for you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Great. I think the link is Learn.Psychologyoyeating.com, right?
Marc David:
That’s our website, yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, that’s great. So very excited about this course and how you can help people to shift in ways that are often in the way of them choosing to live a life that’s fully aligned with who they are, what they want, and what matters. And I think so many people just struggle with this aspect of eating, and they don’t know how to connect the dots. They don’t know it’s something’s not right. And it’s not just about eating more broccoli, it’s something else going on here that’s in their way. And I think that’s such a powerful gift. You’ve given the world through your books and through your Institute for Psychology meeting and through this amazing new course that I’d encourage everybody to sign up for the emotional eating breakthrough. It’s a bargain, and I thank you so much for creating it and giving it as a gift to the world, Mark.
Marc David:
Mark, thanks for your generous words. Thanks for the kind words and always so good to hang out and talk with you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s so great. So if you love this podcast, share with your friends and family on social media, leave a comment. We’d love to learn how you’ve dealt with your own issues around emotional eating, and we’ll see you next week on The Doctor’s Pharmacy.
Closing:
Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
