End Your Emotional Eating [Podcast]
“When you have this fat in your body, you’ve tried everything, it doesn’t come off; you get desperate, you start having very desperate thoughts.” -Tricia Nelson
“Emotional eaters are typically afraid of feelings. When we don’t have food in our belly, we tend to be more sensitive and more aware of what’s going on inside. It can be overwhelming, especially when we don’t feel worthy of feeling good.”
-Tricia Nelson
Let’s talk about emotional eating. You’ve tried everything to get your cravings under control. You manage your blood sugar. You take supplements like Berberine and Ovasitol. You are eating a clean, PCOS-friendly diet, and you’re still struggling with binge eating or compulsive overeating. If you’re really struggling with sugar cravings and having a hard time getting your eating under control, listen as I talk with Tricia Nelson, author of the book Heal Your Hunger. She has fantastic insight about the causes of emotional eating and offers practical strategies for getting it under control.
All PCOS Diva podcasts are available on 
Mentioned in this podcast:
- Heal Your Hunger: 7 Simple Steps to End Emotional Eating Now
- 10 Weeks to Freedom from Emotional Eating program
- Heal Your Hunger Emotional Eating quiz
- Around the Year with Emmet Fox: A Book of Daily Readings
- 100 Days to Brave by Annie Downs
- Insight Timer
Complete Transcript:
Amy Medling: Today, we are going to be talking about emotional eating. If you’ve tried everything to get your cravings under control; if you’ve managed your blood sugar; if you’re taking supplements like berberine, Ovasitol; and if you’re eating a clean diet and you’re still struggling with binge eating, compulsive overeating; if you’re really trying, if you’re really struggling with those sugar cravings and having a hard time getting your eating under control; you are in the right place because today we are talking to Tricia Nelson. She is the author of the book Heal Your Hunger, which I read over the weekend and was just blown away at such an amazing resource. But, Tricia, I wanna welcome you to the program and then I want to tell everybody a little bit about you.
Tricia Nelson: Perfect. Thanks so much for having me here, Amy. It’s really such an honor. I love your work and all the amazing service you provide in the world.
Amy Medling: I think I met you back in 2014, so I’ve known you, and I’ve been aware of the of work that you do, but we finally had the chance to schedule a podcast. I just sat down with your book and I was really blown away. So excited to introduce you to my community and to get right into this podcast. But, let me just tell people a little bit about you and you’re going to talk more about your story in a minute.
But, Tricia Nelson lost 50 pounds by identifying and healing the underlying causes of her emotional eating. Tricia has spent nearly 30 years researching the hidden causes of addictive personality. Tricia is an emotional eating expert and the author of the book, as I mentioned, Heal Your Hunger: 7 Simple Steps to End Emotional Eating Now. She also has a fantastic podcast called the Heal Your Hunger Show.
Amy Medling: Tricia, let’s jump right into your story. It’s very compelling. It’s the first chapter of your book. Would love to hear what brought you to this place as being a coach and helping people with emotional eating.
Tricia Nelson: Thank you so much. Yeah, it started way back when. I was, I mean, literally, Amy, I think back as far as my memory will serve, and I was obsessed with food from the beginning. I mean, food was just such a highlight for me. It was my escape. It was my reward. It was like nothing brought me more excitement than if my family was going out to dinner. I’d get all excited about what I was going to get to eat. I just, I was an eater. I’d come home from school every day and pig out on popcorn and all kinds of carby, sugary things. I didn’t think a whole lot about it, but I did start to gain weight. I was chubby kid, especially in adolescence.
Then, it just got worse from there. By age 21, I was 50 pounds overweight. I tried so many different things, diets, exercise programs, pills, potions, lotions, and therapy. I mean, I even was doing more psychological things like therapy and 12 step programs. Nothing I tried worked for any length of time. I’d get control for a little while, but then I’d bust out and start binging again. I was a binger for sure. I loved to get all my goodies, get them together, and binge. Of course, I didn’t intend on that. We lie to ourselves, like, “Oh, I’m just eating a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” but I just always go overboard.
It was really distressing for me. My weight was … eating’s fine. I didn’t mind the eating, it was the weight part that just drove me nuts. I had a roll on my tummy I would scrunch up, and I try to imagine cutting it off, or some crazy thoughts I would have. I thought about getting some disease where I automatically would lose weight or joining the army where they’d force me to exercise in boot camp because I hated exercise. When you have this fat in your body, you don’t know, you’ve tried everything, it doesn’t come off; you get desperate, you start having very desperate thoughts. That’s what was happening for me.
To fast forward, after being in a long, long search, I found somebody who finally was able to show me that my problem had nothing to do with food, help me go deeper and really deal with the underlying causes. That made all the difference in the world. We began working together to help others for decades. Then, more recently I founded Heal Your Hunger, wrote the book and have a program for helping people overcome emotional eating. I loved sharing about this because I’m free, and I’m so grateful for that, but I really do have a systematic way for people to break free, and it’s just been such a pleasure to share that.
Amy Medling: I think that’s what I liked about your book the most, that it really is a systematic way of helping people. I wish that I had this book in my late teens and early 20s when I was really struggling with binge eating, compulsive eating. I remember feeling like I was such a smart girl, I had control over so many areas of my life, but why could I not stop eating Snickers bars.
Tricia Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy, isn’t it?
Amy Medling: Yeah, it is. I remember going through so many different books and like hiding them in between my mattress because I didn’t want my mother to see I was reading the Geneen Roth books. I knew it had something to do with loving myself more and being kinder to myself, but I just couldn’t put all the pieces together. I had so many traits of, what you call, the anatomy of an emotional eater. I was wondering if you could kind of go through some of those key indicators that you are an emotional eater or a person that’s more prone to that because I think that in the work that I’ve done with women with PCOS, I see a lot of overlapping traits. I talk about some of that in my book, but it was just kind of this aha moment that you’ve sort of put it together for me that I was really a perfect candidate, to begin with.
Tricia Nelson: You qualify?
Amy Medling: Yeah, I qualify.
Tricia Nelson: Absolutely. I mean, first of all, I just want to say for people who are wondering if they’re emotional eater or not, it’s really a spectrum. I believe we’re hardwired to have an emotional connection with food like it’s just … that way we would continue to eat and subsist as a planet and a race, but some people take it too far. I consider it to be really a spectrum. On the low end of the spectrum is emotional eating, people go overboard now and then, no big deal. They work out a little extra at the gym, they cut back, cut out sweets or whatever. The high end is where I was and that’s food addiction. I was really addicted to food and couldn’t stop my binges and couldn’t like pull back and like course correct very easily. If anybody’s wondering, there’s a quiz, I have a quiz on my website where people can actually find out where they are on that spectrum. But, I think we’re all there somewhere.
Amy Medling: I just want to mention, I’ll post the link to that quiz in the show notes-
Tricia Nelson: Oh, good. That’d be perfect.
Amy Medling: … so people can find that quickly.
Tricia Nelson: Thank you so much because I really think people should kind of see where they are on that quiz, I mean on that spectrum. I think that’s really important, so thank you for posting that. Basically, in terms of what drives emotional eating, I mean so much of the time people are looking for that one thing, like what was it in my past that made me do what I do. Was it abuse? Was it some terrible thing a teacher said to me or a boy said to me about my weight? We’re always looking for that one thing, and wouldn’t it be nice if there were that one thing. We’d go to therapy, we’d work on that, and then we’d be free.
But, it doesn’t work that way. What happens is we typically, I mean, I think, emotional eaters do tend to have traumatic things that happen to them as children, but what happens is … not everybody, I mean, overall, I had a good childhood, but I did have sexual abuse in my past, which no question contributed to my using food as a coping tool. But, what happens is we have things that happen and then we do develop these ways of being in the world, these coping mechanisms that save our lives early on. They work as survival tools, but then they backfire on us. This is what becomes, what I say, what I call, the anatomy emotional eater. It’s like a composite of personality type or traits that again, some of these traits worked so well when we were kids, but they really don’t work for us as adults anymore and we don’t need them.
I’ll give you an example, and I’d say it’s the number one trait of emotional eaters and probably people with PCOS. You can better identify that, but it’s really being a people-pleaser. This is a big problem. Why is it a coping skill? Well, as a kid, if we don’t have proper self-esteem, we’re going to be looking for self-esteem outside of us and from being a do-gooder. What can I do to make people happy with me, what project can I raise my hand for, what committee can I chair, how many desserts can I make for the church function? I mean, it’s like we’re good people, but we take it too far by trying to just always garner approval and attention from people by our acts. That way we get a sense of self-esteem, but it’s, it’s from the outside in so it doesn’t last. We have to keep doing it, so it becomes this habit.
The reason why that’s so perilous for an emotional eater is because it has a dark side. While we’re like not only busting our butts and getting exhausted from doing, doing, doing and trying to please, please, please; but the real dark side is that nobody’s ever as pleased as we expect them to be. Then, we ended up pissed off, so we’re kind of like, “I’m doing all this work and nobody’s even noticing, this is not a good deal for me,” so we’re pissed off. Then, we go home, and I have, what I call, the I deserve it binge, where like, “Nobody else was recognizing me. I should recognize me with my ice cream and goodies. Right?” That’s really the problem with people-pleasing is it always backfires, and we always end up hurting ourselves over it because we’re exhausted and then we’re resentful.
That’s a coping tool that we need to adjust. We can’t continue to be people-pleasers and overeaters or overdoers. There’s no question about it. We can’t live that way and expect to eat differently, and this is why 98% of all diets fail because people are trying to change their diet, but they’re not changing how they’re living. But, it’s our living that creates our eating. When we’re stretched out too thin, overeaters, as I said, our schedules are packed. We’re always doing too much. We’re always overcommitting. We don’t have any balance in our life. This has to change. That’s why it’s so silly to think our problem is food and weight. Wait, no, no, no, no, that’s a symptom, that’s like the caboose on the train. We have to look at all the other trains ahead of that outcome because those are things we can do something about.
I’ll give you another example of one of the anatomy. There’s like 24 traits, so obviously I’m not going to go through all the traits of the anatomy.
Amy Medling: One that I do want you to talk about is … One point I was just going to make to the overdoers and the people-pleaser, I find that the one thing that really helps set up women for success in my programs more than anything else is being able to take, have the time to plan and prepare food. Because if we’re racing around, and we don’t have healthy food that’s available, you kind of say, “Oh, you know what? I’m just going to have whatever.”
Tricia Nelson: Quickest fix, whenever we can reach for.
Amy Medling: Then, you feel bad and then those feelings of guilt and shame lead to some more self-punishment.
Tricia Nelson: It just becomes a vicious cycle. There’s no question about it. The thing about preparing foods and making the time for that, making the time to shop for good food, going the extra mile, paying the extra dollar, 5, 10 at Whole Foods, whatever for organic going to the farmer’s market; these things definitely take effort, but they not only are physically good for us, but I believe like mentally, spiritually and emotionally, making that effort like we’re putting out to the universe that we’re worth that effort, like were worth putting that time and attention in. Cutting the vegetables, preparing actually, a yummy salad. I mean we’re building into our consciousness that we are worthy of that. I think we need that message because so much of the time we do put ourselves last, and we are on the run, not really properly taking care of ourselves.
I always say, “Would you have your daughter, your sweet baby daughter skip meals?”
Would you be like, “Look, we’re going to skip meals, we might lose some, you might lose some weight, we’ll eat dinner only”? No, you’d never do that for your sweet daughter, so why are you doing it to yourself? Would you say, “We’re just going to stop at whatever corner store we can stop at so you can get your meal”? No, you take the time for your kids. It’s really important that we do that for ourselves, for sure.
Amy Medling: That’s a great point. Women with PCOS, we’re 60% more likely to have mood-related disorders, and one of those is anxiety. You talk here about the racing mind, that overeaters are overthinkers. I think a lot of us fall into that category, that our minds, as you say here in your book, “Our minds race from one thought to another and never seems to stop. Sometimes we obsess on one thing and then think it to death. We worry.” In my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how women with PCOS are great worriers, and we worry so much. Tell us how eating, overeating ties into overthinker, thinking.
Tricia Nelson: Yeah, such a big connection. We eat so much of the time, we’re reaching for carbs and that serotonin effect just to settle ourselves down, to bring some common peace because I really do think emotional eaters, we tend to be more anxiety-driven and more fearful than your average person. That does drive our eating so much of the time. I would say it’s like the Norton Antivirus running in the back of your computer. It’s like you don’t totally, you’re not always aware of those thoughts, it’s just that rant in the back of our head about all the awful things that could happen or are all the things we’re afraid of. I relate to it. I mean I’ve been such a fearful person. Fear has driven me, and I still get afraid very easily, but it’s more about just sort of managing that and having tools to try to settle that down. But, yeah, it’s really important that we have ways to deal with those, that racing mind, and I do.
I recommend to my clients that they are writing, is a great thing to do for our racing mind. I have a word doc on my computer that literally I call it musings, and I literally just any time I’m in that worry mode. Because it can come upon you so easily. Just something grabs you and then all of a sudden you’re just, I call it, awfulizing. We’re just imagining the worst case scenario. I jot that stuff down, or I bang it out really is what I do on my computer. I just bang out like a paragraph or so of those thoughts because when they’re in our minds, thoughts held in mind produce after their kind. When we hold them in our minds, we don’t share them, we don’t talk about them, we don’t write about them, and, I also say, pray about them; they will take hold of us and run our lives. They’ll direct our actions like we won’t do things we want to do simply because we’re thinking of the worst case scenario of what might happen.
We don’t we say no to things because we’re so worried about what, again, the people-pleasing, what people think of us. Just sort of having a place to put all that worry. When you put it on paper, I say paper, but it’s on my computer, but either way, when you do that; it just gets you out of your head, it gets those thoughts and puts them somewhere. Then, you also get perspective, and you can see, “Oh, wow, gee, I’m actually gonna die if I go to this party tonight? I don’t think so. For some reason, all my friends are going to hate me if I like cancel that appointment or whatever.” We give ourselves such a hard time, so I find that to be super important, the writing.
But also, my number one go-to is meditation. Meditation is such an important tool for settling down our minds. I love it because people always say, “Oh, Tricia, I can’t meditate. My mind is too busy.”
I’m like, “Well, that’s kind of the point. That’s why we meditate.” I always just reassure people like, “What if your mind just went from 100 thousand miles an hour to 50 thousand miles an hour? Would that be an improvement? Let’s just call it that.” People are always looking for the Zen mind where like nothing happens and that’s not realistic. Meditation’s so powerful and sometimes I’ll be thinking the whole time. I meditate for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes before dinner. Those 20 minutes, I might get 18 minutes of thinking, thinking, thinking and then two minutes of just, like I probably exhaust myself, and then two minutes of just peacefulness. I’ll take those two minutes.
So much of the time I find that people don’t put the time into meditate because they judge their meditation, and they think they’re doing it wrong. That’s like the number one reason people don’t do it is they have this expectation of perfection and there’s no such thing. I call it doing the time. I do the time, and I don’t judge it. Whatever happens, happens. But, it does pay off really well in terms of my feeling more calm and peaceful and especially making better choices in the kitchen.
That’s why I always meditate before dinner because, at the end of the day when you’re stressed out, you’ve been driving the kids everywhere, you run, you go into the house, and you run to the kitchen; of course, you’re gonna be nibbling and munching on things snacky because you’re trying to come down from the spin, that spin of the day. If you bypass the kitchen, go straight to your room, and even if you don’t meditate, if you lie down with some quiet music and a candle for 10 minutes; boy, oh, boy, you’re gonna come down from that spin in a much healthier way. Then, you’ve got a fighting chance when you go to the kitchen. Then, it’s not just like reaching for anything. You have more equilibrium, you have your head about you, and you’re not reacting to that stress.
Amy Medling: But, that’s really great advice. I know, I feel like, “Gosh, I don’t have 20 minutes,” but I could take 5 minutes, 10 minutes-
Tricia Nelson: Totally. Totally.
Amy Medling: … to just center myself.
Tricia Nelson: There’s a cool app too, Insight Timer, which I use. Some people like to do guided meditations. Again, you don’t, yeah, five minutes; that’s a huge improvement to what’s going on now. The Insight Timer, it has guided meditations that people can do. It’s Insight, I-N-S-I-G-H-T, and it’s great. I use it just for my little beginning and end of my meditation. It gives me a little gong, which kind of makes it more special and sort of like having a great … If you have a fancy water bottle, it makes you want to drink water more. It’s like when you have a cool app, it sorta makes meditation a little more special.
Amy Medling: Yeah, and I think it takes the fear out of it as well. That’s one of the reasons I like to go to exercise class because I like somebody telling me what to do. It takes all of that effort out of the equation that I have to figure out, and it’s the same with those apps. I love your suggestion about having a file on your computer. I guess I don’t like the idea of writing in a journal. Unless, I do a gratitude journal, but I’m not going to sit and write my feelings in a journal, but I would do that on my computer. I don’t know why I’ve never thought about that.
I think that it’s so important for women to process their feelings. I know that that was one of the reasons that I overate in my young adulthood because I was stuffing those feelings, numbing them out. There’s a great little excerpt from your book that I’d love to read about that.
Tricia Nelson: Great.
Amy Medling: You say, “Emotional eaters are typically afraid of feelings. When we don’t have food in our belly, we tend to be more sensitive and more aware of what’s going on inside. We’re more aware of sadness, loneliness, fear, anger, dread, and other hard to manage feelings, even happy, joyful feelings, which strangely are sometimes harder to face than the dark ones. It can be overwhelming, especially when we don’t feel worthy of feeling good.”
I never really thought about that, but I think you’re … I talk about my book like this deservability aspect of healing PCOS. We have to feel like we are worthy and deserving of health and happiness. I think that’s what you’re getting at here too.
Tricia Nelson: No question. The thing is it’s kind of a funny catch-22. It’s like, do you feel worthy and then you do it or do you do it and then you feel worthy. It’s like the chicken and the egg. It’s both. If you start taking action, even if you don’t believe you’re worthy, you’ll start feeling we’re worthy. It’s kind of like going to an exercise class, right? Nobody wants to, I never want to go to exercise class, but when I’d go, I ended up feeling so good that next day I’m like, “I want to do that. That felt really good.” It’s like if you take the action, like bring the body, the mind will follow. That’s so much of the truth about worthiness, is if you just take the action, if you do actions of self-worth, you will develop self-worth. I think that’s really important. But, it does come down to that again, what do I deserve. I deserve good treatment. If you don’t believe it and you act like it, you will come to believe it.
Amy Medling: Yeah, and I think that that’s how I ended up sort of breaking the cycle for myself. I know everybody has a different path, but I got to the point where those messages in my head were more positive than negative. Gosh, I used to read Cosmo and Glamour and compare myself. I was great at comparing myself to everybody else. When I stopped doing that, I really shifted, as you talk about in your book, your consciousness. You say you get to a point where the actions kind of in your old lower consciousness, actions such as eating that entire jar of peanut butter just don’t fit in with this new level of consciousness anymore, so you no longer feel compelled to do it. In fact, you just can’t do it anymore. You love yourself enough that you don’t want to abuse your body in that way anymore.
Tricia Nelson: Absolutely. It’s so, so important. It’s a progressive thing. You do a little good things, you do a few good things for yourself you start to feel better. Then, doing bad things for yourself don’t feel good anymore. When we just abuse ourselves all the time and don’t take care of ourselves, eh, what’s a little more? But, once you start on that road of healing, it gets more and more uncomfortable to hurt ourselves.
Amy Medling: I think that a lot of women with PCOS are caught in that fear-based, lack-based thinking. We have to shift to a more abundant outlook on life. You talk about this in your book, and you have a great list of ways to sort of raise that consciousness and kind of move into that place of abundance and abundant thinking. I think that a lot of these tactics will really move the needle for a lot of women. I would love for you to share some of them with us.
Tricia Nelson: I’d be so happy. I know how it is when you’re sick and you don’t feel good. It’s so easy to just spiral into that negative mindset. You just sort of feel like, “Gosh, I’ve tried everything. Nothing’s working.” It’s just that kind of self-pity starts to seep in. We feel bad for ourselves and we want other people to know how bad we feel, but it just spirals out of control.
Something that my mentor told me a long time ago about self-pity, which I hate, I even hate that word because it’s like, “I’m not in self-pity.” It’s the last thing I want to claim.
But, he used to say, “Yeah, self-pity is like quicksand. You wiggle your little toe in it and it grabs you and it sucks you all the way to hell.”
Amy Medling: So true. I mean I think of … Yeah, I guess I don’t frame it and self-pity. I sort of frame it as being a victim.
Tricia Nelson: It is very similar.
Amy Medling: Like, “Why me? Why did this have to happen to me.” It really takes the power out of the situation.
Tricia Nelson: Yeah, it’s really incredible. I mean, it happens for emotional eaters too. Like, “Why do I have to deal with this, why do I have to make salads, why do I have to meditate, why do I have to do these things?” It’s sort of like other … We always compare our insides with other people’s outsides. Right? It’s like, “They don’t have to do that. Why do I have to do that?” It’s like we all have something. We all have something to deal with. It’s like all God’s children got problems. That’s how we grow. That’s what refines us into the people we’re meant to be, so I don’t think there’s any way of escaping something. Unfortunately, some people have lots of things and then they have more growth.
Amy Medling: Honestly, Tricia, I feel like that it was those difficult times that lead us to do the work that we do in this world. Right?
Tricia Nelson: No question.
Amy Medling: I don’t regret it at all.
Tricia Nelson: No question. I totally agree. There’s a saying that I love, which is, “If you sat in a circle, like around a table with a whole bunch of other people who have problems, and you all put your problems in the middle of the table; nobody would take somebody else’s problems back. Everybody would grab their own.” It’s like they’re uniquely ours. God’s given us the right tools to deal with them.
But, back to your question about consciousness. It’s really, really … There’s so many simple things we can do to up-level and get out of that self-victimizing thinking. They’re simple little things, and the more we do them, the better. One of the things I love, and I do this every day, is read spiritual literature. It doesn’t have to be spiritual. I don’t mean religious necessarily either. I just mean something that’s uplifting, motivational and just about the goodness of life. There’s amazing things out there. If somebody leans religious, I’m sure there’re magazines and things that that can inspire them, but there’s so many cool things out there that just have inspirational stories, overcoming stories, and things that I just find so helpful.
It’s like we have to treat our mind. Our minds need to be treated because they do veer negative. I think all human brains veer negative. It’s just so easy, and so we have to work. I have to work to keep my mind positive. Starting the day with some spiritual reading and something that just gives me a positive message. I liked little daily readers because I don’t want to like, just I’m busy. I need some quick inspiration, but I think that’s super helpful.
Amy Medling: Tell me what you’re reading now.
Tricia Nelson: Okay, so the things I love, my all-time favorite book is from Emmet Fox. He’s a metaphysician, so he talks about sort of the metaphysical ideas and the Bible, but he’s really good about … His book is called Around the Year with Emmet Fox. He’s passed now, but at one time, he had the largest congregation in the US in New York City back in the 20s of last century. But anyways, he just sort of teaches positive ideas about God. I find that a lot of people have negative ideas about God. I mean, sometimes religion can deliver some harsh ideas that maybe are misinterpreted, so he just sort of like packs a punch every day.
I also love the Daily Word. There’s an organization called Unity School of Christianity. Again, it’s more metaphysical rather than religious, but they have a little reader called the Daily Word, which has a positive … It’s a little pocket thing you can order or you can get daily messages by email. But, it’s just a really positive message that I love.
There are other daily readers, and I read some positive messages about money, talking about lack mentality. Every day, I read affirmations about how abundant the world is and how much money is available. I mean, I always love to say, “God’s got lots of money, and wants it for me.” Because we can get into negative thinking about money and finances as well, so I read some positive messages about this. Anything that can remind me that there’s abundance.
Amy Medling: I’m reading right now in the mornings, I’m almost done with it. It’s a daily reader, like you were suggesting, by Annie Downs. It’s called 100 Days to Brave.
Tricia Nelson: Nice.
Amy Medling: Courage is one of those things that sort of elevate you out of your emotional eating that you talk about in your books, so I think that that would be a good resource if somebody’s looking for something.
Tricia Nelson: I love that. Who is the author again?
Amy Medling: Annie Downs.
Tricia Nelson: Yeah, there’s so many incredible books out there that are so positive, but it’s like what are we feeding our minds? It’s like what do we feed our bodies. We know we need nutritional food in order to have our bodies work properly, and I need nutritional fodder for my head in order for my head to work properly.
A few other things from my consciousness prescription are things that are just like staying away from gossip. It’s super easy to get negative. I’ve gossiped with the best of them. It feels so good in a moment to talk about somebody else or point out somebody else’s faults, but I really try not to do that anymore because it backfires on me, like it ends up bringing me down in consciousness. Again, it’s that quick hit, sort of like eating chocolate. Feels good in the moment, but not so much later. Gossiping is one of those things.
News is another thing. I really stay away from news, and I am unfortunately very ill-informed these days, but I also am happier, so I don’t get involved in the news much. I have one program a week that I watch that sort of gives me the news of the week, and I feel like that’s … I want to be an informed citizen, but I really don’t want the negativity in my life. I don’t need to watch the 9, 10 or 11 o’clock news that tells me all the people who are murdered in my city. Just nothing useful comes from that.
Amy Medling: Yeah, and I think social media too is. If you’re using social media for the news, that can be kind of toxic as well.
Tricia Nelson: So much so. Just focusing, what we think about grows, so what are we focusing on? That’s just really, really important to always come back to because we can lapse. We can be doing good for a while and then lapse, so that’s super important. Like you talked about, the gratitude list, that is so, so important to just focus on the good things that are happening. There’s so many good things that are happening in the world and so many things in our lives that we can focus on that are good. We tend to … I do a weekly call with my program. People jump on our weekly calls from all around the world. I always say, “Let’s focus. I want to hear from you about two things that are going well,” because everybody wants to jump on and tell me what they’re not doing right. It’s like, “No, let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on what went well.” I think that is so, so important. That gratitude is absolutely amazing.
Then, the other thing I will just say is that, when you mentioned social media, that is such a trap sometimes for that self-pity, is to look at how great everybody else’s lives are. Of course, everybody’s posting their best photos on Facebook, and it’s so easy to get into that mentality of, “Wow, everybody’s got so many good things going on, but me. Everybody looks so good but me.” Just watch your thoughts. If you’re on Facebook, I mean I love Facebook, but if you’re on there, think about, be conscious.
Again, this is back to the consciousness. Be conscious of what you’re thinking. If you’re spiraling negative, maybe take a little break from Facebook or just focus on … I also find if I’m getting into that thinking, if I start commenting on people’s, liking posts and commenting on posts; it brings me out of it because then I’m contributing, I’m celebrating people, and that creates good juju inside of me.
Amy Medling: Ooh, I like that. That’s a good tip.
Tricia Nelson: Helps a lot.
Amy Medling: We talked about … We really honestly just scratched the surface of what’s in your book. There’s just so much to help with healing. You mentioned a program. I’m kind of curious about that. If people are interested in diving deeper into this issue, how can they work with you?
Tricia Nelson: Yeah, I have a program that is so powerful, and people really seem to get a lot of benefit from it. It’s called 10 Weeks to Freedom From Emotional Eating. It is a 10, people have 12 weeks to go through the program, but there are modules every week that teach people my system, gives them homework assignments and a lot of ways to engage. I have a private Facebook group for that as well. Then, we get on a call every week, as I mentioned. People around the globe who know what it’s like to be powerless over a cookie, there’s nothing like it. Community is so important, by the way, for emotional eaters, just as it is with PCOS. It’s like you got to be with your tribe.
People don’t always understand like why we would eat things when we know better. That’s sort of like, that’s the quintessential question. I have all this health information. I may even be a health coach. Why am I destroying myself when I know better? That’s really the gap that I help people with is how to follow through on what they know. When you’re in community with other people who have that strange gap, it’s so heartwarming. That’s a really important part of the program as well. But it does it, it teaches people my system, they implement it, they get results from it. The weight loss is … I don’t focus on weight loss, but it’s definitely a byproduct of people practicing.
Amy Medling: Oh, that’s exactly what I say. It’s a byproduct to get in your body, mind, spirit back into balance. I love that approach.
Tricia Nelson: Totally.
Amy Medling: We will be sure to post a link to that program in the show notes as well.
Tricia Nelson: Great. Thank you.
Amy Medling: Tricia, I’m so glad. It’s taken me too long to have you on the show, and I’m so glad that you came on. I feel like there’s just so much we could still talk about. You’ll have to come back and visit with us again soon.
Tricia Nelson: I would love to. It’d be such a pleasure. Again, thank you for all the people that you serve in the world. Your book is amazing and you are amazing, so thank you.
Amy Medling: Well, thank you. I’m so glad you came on, and thank you, everyone, for listening. I look forward to being with you again very soon. Bye. Bye.
