It’s 10pm and you just got a text from your ex.
The anxiety, frustration and sadness all fill your body. You go full zombie mode and find yourself in your kitchen. You’re standing in front of the freezer, eating ice cream, and before you know it the carton is gone. You barely even remember eating it 😅
So now you hate your ex and yourself. Wonderful 🙃
Sound familiar?
Okay. Let’s break down what actually just happened, because I promise it’s not what you think.
Here’s what we’re covering: why you eat when you don’t even want to, how to figure out what you’re actually feeling, and how to stay on track with your goals even when shit hits the fan.
And listen, if you don’t have a toxic ex who texts you every once in a while, first of all… lucky you 😂 That is genuinely hard to come by. But this still applies to you. Just swap in whatever is actually going on in your life. The mechanism is identical.
First, the facts
Not the story and all the dramatics we tell ourselves. The facts. Only the stuff a security camera would have picked up:
A text message came in
Ate ice cream
That’s it. That’s the entire list.
Everything else that happened tonight, all of it, happened inside your head.
Now the thoughts
Here’s what was likely running underneath:
He shouldn’t be texting me
I wish he would leave me alone
He’s so annoying
I never know what he wants
I wish we were still together
I miss him
Maybe those aren’t your exact thoughts. Doesn’t matter, plug in your own.
Think back to the last time you ate something unconsciously. Something you didn’t even really want.
What were you thinking right before?
Write it down before you keep reading 📝
Then comes the feeling
Every thought hands you a feeling. Here’s how those ones tend to land:
He shouldn’t be texting me → stressed, annoyed
He’s so annoying → annoyed
I never know what he wants → frustrated, confused
I wish we were still together → sad, longing
And how do most of us handle an uncomfortable feeling at 10pm on a Tuesday?
We buffer. Which is just a fancy way of saying we find something to do so we don't have to feel it. And some of us buffer by going to the freezer 🍦
The hard part here was never the ice cream. It’s noticing the feeling before you’re already elbow deep in the carton.
Here’s the part I want you to hear
I am never going to tell you not to eat something.
I have a bachelor’s in nutrition science and a master’s as a Physician Assistant, and I still believe your relationship with food matters more than any single thing you put in your mouth. Especially for women. We have had enough of the world telling us what we can and cannot eat.
So please, please, never shame yourself over a food (I know, much easier said than done).
If you head to the fridge when you’re sad, tired, frustrated, bored… that is not something to judge.
I’m pointing it out so we can get curious. Curious about the why.
And the why is almost always a feeling you didn’t want to sit in.
Why the awareness matters
If you don’t want to end up at the freezer every time your ex texts, you have to know why you’re going there in the first place. This is especially important if you have health goals and want to be aware of what you are eating (i.e. if you want to lose weight, gain muscle, lower your cholesterol, etc.).
You cannot change a pattern you can’t see. That’s why we start here 🧠
So think back to the last time food got away from you:
What were you thinking?
What were you feeling?
What did you do?
And be nice to yourself about it
Like I said earlier, we are NOT here to beat ourselves up about it. We are getting curious, learning about ourselves, and staying kind through the whole process.
And real talk: it can be hard to catch emotional eating in the moment.
You are probably going to do it again and only clock it two hours later, in bed, mid scroll. That is not failure. That is literally the practice. Becoming aware of it at some point (even if it’s hours later) is how we eventually catch it early.
We’re not here to shame ourselves, remember? 🤍
Okay, want to actually try it?
Reading about awareness is lovely. Doing it is the part that changes your life.
So here is the exact exercise I run on myself and with clients- grab a pen and paper. 📝
Step 1. Do a thought download.
Think of a time you ate something you didn’t want or plan to eat. Write down everything that happened. What you did, what you thought about it, how you felt. Doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect, just get it all out on paper. We call this a thought download.
Step 2. Pull out the facts.
Facts are the things that could be proven in a court of law. The things nobody could argue with. Circle the facts from your thought download.
Step 3. Pull out the thoughts.
Thoughts are opinions. They can’t be proven. They will absolutely feel like the truth, and here’s the kicker- they aren’t.
Step 4. Give every thought a feeling.
Go through them one at a time. Read each thought out loud, then write down how it makes you feel. Out loud matters- it is much harder to skim past something when you have to hear yourself say it.
Now look at what you’ve got in front of you. Every thought is producing a feeling.
And your feelings are the reason you do or do not do anything. That’s it. That is the whole engine.
Which is genuinely good news. You don’t get to control what happens to you. But the thought is yours. And the thought is where the whole thing starts 🧠
So back to the toxic ex and the ice cream. The reason I ate that carton was not that he texted me. It was that I felt anxious and frustrated, and I did not want to sit in it. So… instead of feeling those emotions, I avoided them by eating.
The text was just a text. The thought about the text created a feeling, and my action was to walk my ass to the freezer instead of allowing and processing my feelings.
That is what awareness actually looks like. Way less mystical but way more useful.
Your turn
Tell me in the comments: when do you catch yourself eating when you didn’t mean to?
For me now, it’s usually boredom or anxiety. And I don’t judge it, it’s just useful to know 😅
And that’s exactly the point. Now when I have a goal, or I’m trying to eat a certain way, I already know that a bored Brooke is a Brooke who ends up in the kitchen. So I can plan for her instead of getting blindsided by her 🤍
Coming up next: what to actually do when the feeling shows up and you want to eat your way out of it.