Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous. It's Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. I'm so happy to be here with you. And today we are talking about something that's ubiquitous, and I've actually been thinking about this topic a little while, and I'm so happy to bring this to you now. Okay, so when people start working with me and we start in on the hunger scale, which is my favorite tool, they start noticing places where they may have been overeating. This, of course, is fantastic, since overeating is what leads to weight gain and difficulty losing weight. Overeating is defined as any consumption over what your body needs.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:41]:
And the hunger scale helps us identify that. And when we examine these instances, these times of overeating, when I'm working with clients, we're looking for one thing, and that's the thoughts that allowed or encouraged the overeating. And there are many typical ones. Just a couple episodes back, we talked about nine of them, and that's in episode 114. And we'll hook that up in the show notes. But the one that is almost universal, that almost everyone has to tackle at some point is a version of, I can't waste food. It's hard to waste food. I hate wasting food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:22]:
Some version of wasting food. Of course, when I'm saying that in my brain, I have air quotes around waste, but most people don't. You may by the end of this. So we're going to tackle the wasting food idea today, and it's getting its very own episode because there's so much here and so many people experience this one one way or another. So these thoughts, I can't waste food, prevent weight loss. Especially the idea that by not eating it right there and then we are wasting it. And you can see that, right? Because if we're eating more than our body needs, we're going to be storing fat, not losing weight. So I started to think of it this way because it came up certainly in my mind, but also, like I said with many clients, the extra food that our body doesn't need either goes into the garbage can or our body becomes the garbage can.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:26]:
And of course, our body is not a garbage can. So that sort of visual, in my mind, it's either an actual garbage can or my body becomes a garbage can. That is like the shorthand for me that, like a reminder that I don't want to treat my body as a garbage can. But we do treat it as a garbage can. If we chew up and swallow the food we don't need. And when we eat More than our body needs. Our bodies store it as fat and it's fat that we don't need or want. And then we spend time and energy and money and heartache trying to get rid of the fat.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:12]:
And in the meantime, we're hating our bodies. We're frustrated, we're confused, we're hopeless, we're helpless. That to me is the waste, the waste of time and energy and brain space. And even more than that, it's a cycle that has us damaging the relationship we have with ourselves and our bodies. That's really the biggest problem in all this is when we get into the hating and, and the frustration and treating ourselves poorly, both by overfilling our bodies and then hating on our bodies afterwards. Oh, just talking about it, it's so painful. I have absolutely been there. It's a terrible, terrible cycle to be in.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:56]:
And following this thought, how we're gonna talk about it today is a way to break that cycle, to start to break that cycle. Losing weight, the weight loss for fertility way will break all those cycles. And that's how we get permanent weight loss. But today we're going to use this one example to show you one of the paths. Because our body is not a garbage can. It's a miracle of functioning processes that keep us moving and dreaming and loving and breathing. And it needs fuel to do all those things. The right amount of fuel, not too little, which is very important.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:35]:
That's traditional dieting. Like put too little in there and then we don't want to put too much. That's the overeating. We want to be like Goldilocks. We want just the right amount of fuel. Luckily, our body comes equipped with a mechanism to tell us what that is. It tells us through our hunger and satisfaction cues, which is mediated by hormones and light and time and habits and food type. And they all work together to tell us when we've had enough.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:05]:
But we have to listen. We have to be able to hear it. And that's where the hunger scale comes in. Most of us lose that pretty quickly as kids. We all have it, but it gets socialized out of us really very quickly. Part of it is from this thought about wasting food that was put upon us. We're going to get to that with the hunger scale. We eat when we're just hungry and we stop when we're satisfied, not full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:34]:
And I have lots of episodes on the hunger scale. You can start with episode two, which explains it. But then I go into spotlighting a bunch of them in episodes further on, eating more than our body needs. And again, we tell that when we're satisfied, not full is a habit that may have started with the thought I don't want to waste food or I can't waste food or I hate wasting food. And it's totally understandable. That thought was implanted in us at a very early age. It goes hand in hand with the clean plate club, which is another episode I dive deep into. And that's episode 11.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:13]:
You can check that out for more. But it was basically from anxiety from our caregivers about our health or survival. You know, like parents or caregivers are very worried if children don't eat. They get very worried about it, even though in a place where there's plenty of food, kids have this innate ability because it is in our factory settings about when eating, when we're hungry stop and when we're satisfied. But because we have so much socialization, caregivers usually have so much socialization, they impose that socialization on the kids and their hunger. And there's anxiety about, oh my gosh, you're not eating enough. Which of course, how can they tell? I mean it's oh, but believe me, it is hardwired in there. That we want our kids to eat right, to survive is what's hardwired.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:06]:
And we've connected the eating with it. And what we've done is we've connected an amount of eating often. And that's part of the problem. When we think we need a lot of food, we think the kids need a lot of food. When we understand how much food we need, it's easier to understand how much food we food kids need. But a lot of our caregivers did not have that information. And so of course they can be worried that way. And so they're sort of force feeding, you know, having us eat more even if we're not hungry anymore.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:39]:
And then also whatever scarcity was going on, either real or implanted in their minds by their caregivers. So that's where depression era stuff is passed down through the generations. And there may have been real scarcity. It's totally understandable where this comes from. Waste can create anxiety in some people for some very good reasons and some not so very good reasons, but there are reasons for the thought. And because thoughts create feelings which create actions. Remember, that's our cognitive behavioral theory. Thoughts create feelings which create actions.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:20]:
We have a feeling action combo when we think the thought I hate wasting food. And usually the feeling is guilt. And guilt is so uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable. So we try to get rid of it. And the quickest, simplest way the brain has come up with is to eat the rest of the food. And then we don't have to feel guilty because we don't have anything on our plate. And that was enforced by our caregivers, by society, by loved ones. That's food pushers.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:54]:
That's all the rest of that stuff. Seeing it disappear into your mouth made them feel better as a kid. So our caregivers felt better when we cleaned our plate, even if we weren't listening to our internal cues. And we wanted to please our protectors. Our lives depended on it, frankly. And so you could see how that comes in. But it becomes a habit we take with us into adulthood if we never stop to examine it or notice it. And that's what we're doing here right now.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:30]:
We're bringing this to light so we can notice it. But what we do when we're having this emotional guilt, this emotional discomfort, is we trade the emotional guilt for physical discomfort, being overly full. So we don't want to feel guilt anymore. So we eat the rest of the food. And now we're physically uncomfortable. And of course, not only that. We start, we gain weight, and it doesn't work anymore, right? Especially if we want to lose weight and maintain a new weight. We can't keep overfilling our bodies when we don't want to waste food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:15]:
Again, I have these in quotes all over the place, like in my brain. It's just like we ignore the body's signals and finish anyway, right? We're just ignoring. And what ends up being more important is the way we're thinking rather than the way we're feeling. Not because our body needed more fuel, that's not why we finish. But because we felt uncomfortable, we felt that guilt, the emotional discomfort, when we thought we were wasting food, which really is just having extra food on our plate. It's the neutral circumstance of food on the plate after we're done eating, after we have satisfied the current hunger and the current need of our body. And when we feel better because we finished our plate, we no longer see food on the plate. So we no longer feel emotionally uncomfortable, and instead our body is uncomfortable.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:15]:
We choose to have our physical body in pain rather than our emotions. Isn't that interesting? We don't know how to deal with guilt, with emotional discomfort without food. So we do know how to deal with it. We finish the plate. But that's maladaptive. That has us not losing weight or gaining weight. It's so fascinating. Part of the way we help our brain break this habit is by flipping this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:51]:
We want to start honoring our body, listening to it more than we are used to listening to it. And when we have a conflict, we want to believe the body over the brain, not the other way around. We really want to learn how to stop eating when our body has had enough. And then what do we do with the emotional discomfort of the guilt? We recognize it for what it is. It's the consequences of a habitual thought. That's what the discomfort is. It comes from the thought, I'm wasting food. So we acknowledge this and we choose to think differently, noticing the sentence in our brain and then questioning it, am I wasting food? Do I not want to waste food? Thinking about it, we can see it, acknowledge it, and then choose to think differently.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:49]:
Because now that we've got a hold of that thought, like, oh, I don't know if I want to think this anymore. We can think things like, I'm not a garbage can. That one to me is so effective. We could also think, I'm no longer hungry. And I honor that. I have other ways to deal with extra food besides eating it. Now I am changing how I think about food. These new thoughts, these different thoughts create different feelings.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:17]:
And they're not uncomfortable ones. They might be and feel empowering or sensible or clear or true, sort of. You could even feel neutral, which is so much better than guilt, because guilt is so uncomfortable. These ones are not uncomfortable. And that's how we transform uncomfortable feelings so it doesn't have to be finishing the plate. It's through noticing, acknowledging, and choosing differently. That is the way we work with the thoughts. And the great thing is when we do that, we no longer have the uncomfortable feeling, so we don't have to overeat.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:58]:
It becomes very easy not to overeat because we're not dealing with an uncomfortable feeling. Step two is now we can decide what we want to do with the extra food. Right. So we're working on changing the habit of that sentence coming up in our head, I'm wasting food. We're noticing it, we're acknowledging it, and we're telling it that we're no longer obeying that sentence that we don't particularly care for, believe, whatever, and that we're going to be honoring our body. Amazing. Now we can watch when that thought comes and we can be aware and we're going to acknowledge it and then choose a different thought about it, like, oh, I'm working on something new. This is different.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:46]:
And so once we've Neutralized the uncomfortable emotional feeling. This next step is that we can decide what we want to do with the extra food. Because as we're using the hunger scale and we're learning to do this, we may have extra food on our plate, and we can make a reasonable plan and execute it. When we're feeling guilty, it's hard to make a reasonable decision. Often we'll just want to get rid of it as fast as possible. And chewing and swallowing seems to do that. We want to uncouple that idea, and we can do that easier if we have a neutral place to start from rather than guilt. There are other ways to deal with the food besides chewing it and swallowing it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:32]:
We can save it for tomorrow, and when we do that, we're saving money, time, food. It works out really well. Some of us don't like leftovers, so that may not work for everyone, but that is often a very good option. We can give it away. We can turn it into another dish, or we can throw it away. It really is okay to throw away some food and then. And here. But here's a way that would help with that next time.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:04]:
We can learn from that. So if we ended up throwing it away and we don't like that so much, we can make a plan for next time. We. We can make or buy less. We could split the order with someone that we're eating with. We can take some home and enjoy it again another day. We can also, and this is subtle, but to me, an important way to start thinking about it. We can also see it as the amount of food that was offered as part of the experience that we signed up for.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:38]:
So going to someone's home who's invited you to dinner, whether they're your relatives or friends, they may just give you a portion, and it may feel really good to them to be very generous with the portions. That is not a mandate that you have to finish what's on your plate. You can eat what you want and what your body is comfortable with and then leave the rest. And we can think about it as just part of being in this environment. These people like doing it this way, and I love them, or I enjoy this. And so I'm willing to eat my food this way and have maybe some slightly uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable interactions, like telling them it was delicious, but I'm done. Or we could ask for the recipe, you know, that sort of thing. And then in a restaurant, especially, like, let's say you're on vacation and you don't bring home food, like, if we're at a restaurant near our home, we can often bring home the food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:42]:
That could work out really well. But if you're on a vacation, it. It's the ex. You're. You're buying the experience whether you eat all the food or not. You've paid for the ambiance and the timing and the lighting and the recipes and the cooking and the service and all the rest of that stuff. You get your money's worth by being there. And sometimes we can feel like we're wasting because we've paid for it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:12]:
But the payment was for the whole experience, not just the six ounces of, you know, fish in front of you. I really love freeing up the thinking around that, and that could take a little time. I'm always here to help you. So to wrap this up, this is the I hate wasting food episode. And it's such a great example of a thought that prevents weight loss. We are at the mercy of that thought if we're not examining it, because the thought leads to a feeling which leads to an action. And right now, it's very tightly coupled with eating everything on our plate. We want to loosen that a little.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:03]:
It's practically universal, and we can understand where it came from. And it may have been useful at a different time, and it's not really useful for us now. We are trading emotional discomfort, the guilt, for physical discomfort, and we no longer want to do that, especially if we want to lose weight and maintain a new weight. We transform guilt. Since it's caused by a thought, it's a possibility. We can transform it and we think of it differently in two ways. One is honoring the body and its hunger cues. That's where the hunger scale comes in.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:43]:
And two, recognizing that guilt is coming from a thought. And we can change those thoughts. We no longer have to subscribe to them. And the answer to not wasting food isn't to overeat it. It's to make or buy less. Save it for another meal, or see the amount offered as part of the whole experience. That's the recap. I would love to know how you feel about this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:14]:
I am on Instagram @stephaniefeinmd or LinkedIn. Same thing @stephaniefeinmd. And I love talking to you there. So let me know what you think. And if you have this thought and if it feels really hard or impossible to loosen it a little bit, then I want you to call me. I want you to DM me, I want you to contact me.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:39]:
And you can do that by going to the website. Stephaniefeinmd.com or weight lossforfertility.com and there's a button that says lose weight with me. You just click that and we will be connected. I would love to help you with this. There is so much freedom on the other side. It's really there and I can show it to you. And you lose weight and you keep it off. And that's always what we're looking for.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:03]:
I am sending you so much love. Until next week.
