235 – Food as Fuel

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Elizabeth: What if the reason that you’ve struggled with food for all these years isn’t because you’re weak or broken or undisciplined, but because you were taught that the only right way to eat is like a robot. Food is just fuel. They say, they say it like it’s a fact, like pleasure is the problem. But let me ask you this.

Have you ever been to a party without food? Food is emotional. It’s how we celebrate. It’s how we connect, how we comfort, and know. That doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to spiral every time there’s a tray of brownies. In today’s episode, I’m gonna tell you why the real issue isn’t emotional eating. It’s unconscious emotional eating, and I’ll show you what changes when you stop trying to eat.

Perfectly and start learning how to trust yourself around food. Again, if you’ve ever wondered, [00:01:00] why can’t I just eat like a normal person? This one is for you. Let’s get going.

Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don’t have to fight with.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so super excited that you are here with me today because this is a hot topic. Food is just fuel. You hear it all the time from health influencers, right? Like I used to parrot that phrase when I was a trainer.

Starting out, it’s the kind of thing that health people say with a straight face. Like if you could just flip a switch in your brain that you’d stop wanting brownies and start craving steamed broccoli instead. And honestly, the idea is kind of seductive, right? It’s simple, it’s clean, it’s rational. [00:02:00] Just fuel the body.

Move on with your day, like you shouldn’t use food for any other reason than for good health. But if that were actually true, then why do we celebrate birthdays with cake? Why do we bring casseroles to grieving neighbors? Why do we remember exactly what we were eating the night we got engaged or what our grandma made for Sunday dinners?

Because food isn’t just fuel, it’s emotion, it’s comfort. It’s tradition and joy and being alive, and yet if you are anything like most of my clients, there’s this little voice in the back of your head that still whispers. You shouldn’t need that. You should be above all that. You should eat perfectly.

You should stop craving carbs when you’re [00:03:00] stressed or sweetss when you’re sad, and when you don’t, when you eat the cookie or the entire sleeve of them, that same little voice says, see, you can’t be trusted, but I wanna offer a different voice today. You are not wrong for wanting food to feel good and you’re not broken because sometimes it’s hard to stop. So let’s talk about that. The problem with food is fuel isn’t that it’s entirely wrong, it’s that it’s wildly incomplete. Same thing as every food decision either brings you closer to your goals or further away. Sure. Food gives us energy, but the idea that we should eat only for that reason, that’s not coming from health.

That’s actually coming from diet culture. It’s this [00:04:00] subtle message that your body is a machine, and that your job is to input the cleanest, lowest calorie, most efficient fuel possible. No joy, no fun, just discipline. Okay, and that sounds noble in theory, but in practice it turns food into a moral issue.

Good versus bad, clean versus dirty. Success versus failure. I can’t tell you how many times I brought my own food to parties back when I was trying so hard to be quote unquote good. I’d show up with my baggy of carrot sticks and maybe some hummus, and yes, carrots and hummus are delicious. I love them.

But that’s not what the party was about. The party was about connection, laughter, eating queso with your fingers and pretending that you didn’t, and there I was on the outside [00:05:00] looking in smiling, but not really being there. I thought I was being virtuous. What I didn’t realize is that I was trading a sense of belonging for the illusion of control.

It’s easy to say, just don’t eat emotionally. But here’s the thing. Most of us were taught to eat emotionally. If you got a good grade, let’s celebrate with ice cream. If you fell down and skinned your knee, here’s a cookie. Are you sad, hungry, happy bored. Guess what? You’re still hungry.

I grew up watching my mom use food to manage her stress, and I learned to do the same. Not because we were weak or lazy, but because food works, it soothes, it distracts, it helped us to cope. So if you’ve used food [00:06:00] in that way too, I want you to hear this clearly. You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re doing what you were taught. The real problem isn’t that you eat emotionally, it’s that no one ever taught you to do it in another way. that’s what we’re going to start exploring. Here’s the tension most of my clients live in, and maybe you do too. You wanna feel good in your body.

You want energy, you want clothes to fit better. You want to feel in control instead of like food is controlling you. But you also want to eat food that tastes good. You wanna have a croissant on vacation without spiraling. You wanna go out to dinner and order what you want, not what you think you should.

You want to eat like a normal person, someone who isn’t constantly negotiating bites or calculating what they’ve earned through exercise. And on top of that, food isn’t [00:07:00] just about you. It’s how we bond. It’s how we show love. You bring banana bread to your new neighbor. You bake cookies with your grandkids.

You say, I see you with soup. You say, I love you with lasagna. So no, you don’t want food to just be fuel, and that’s not a character flaw. That’s being human. What is a problem though is when emotional eating becomes the only tool in the toolbox. When you’re not actually hungry, but you’re lonely, bored, or angry, tired, overwhelmed, and food becomes your automatic answer, and that’s not indulgence.

It’s just habit. And if no one ever taught you to pause and ask, wait a minute. What am I really hungry for? Then of course, you’re [00:08:00] going to reach for food that doesn’t prove that there’s something wrong with you. It just means the connection between emotions and behavior is happening without your awareness.

See, emotional eating isn’t always bad. I still do it sometimes a cozy bowl of soup on a rainy day, a piece of birthday cake with friends, like those moments matter. They feed more than just your stomach. The goal isn’t to erase emotional eating. It’s to bring it out of the shadows.

When you are conscious of it, when you are choosing it, you get to feel in control again. You can enjoy the food and feel good about the choice. You can comfort yourself with food sometimes without it becoming your only strategy. This is a skill. [00:09:00] It’s not about willpower, it’s about awareness. And when you learn how to do that, everything starts to change.

Emotional eating is not a character flaw. It’s a skill that you learned, which means it’s also a skill that you can unlearn or at least reshape it into something more supportive. I didn’t always believe that back when I was a personal trainer, I said what every other health expert was saying, food is fuel.

I repeated it like a mantra, thinking that if I said it enough times, if I actually believed it hard enough, maybe I would stop wanting cookies. Maybe I’d become the kind of person. Who actually craved steamed vegetables and didn’t think about food all the time. But behind the scenes, when I went home, I was swinging wildly [00:10:00] between control and chaos.

I’d be quote unquote good all week, and then I’d find myself. Face first in the pantry on a Saturday night. I thought I had a discipline problem. What I really had was an identity crisis. I wanted to be the woman who didn’t need food for comfort, but I was still human. What changed everything for me wasn’t more rules.

It was giving myself permission. Permission to enjoy tasty food, permission to have dessert every day if I wanted it permission to stop pretending that I didn’t care about taste, texture, comfort, or joy. And the wild thing is the more I gave myself that permission, the less chaotic food became, because when a treat isn’t forbidden.

It [00:11:00] loses its power. I could have a brownie on a Tuesday and not need to eat four more in secret. I didn’t need to wait for a cheat day. I wasn’t white knuckling my way through the week. But here’s the other side of it. At the same time I was learning to honor my present wants.

I also built a relationship with my future self. Not the imaginary, perfect version of me, but the real woman that I was becoming. The one who wanted to feel good tomorrow morning, the one who wanted to sleep well, to move with ease, to have energy, and to feel proud of herself. So now when I’m making choices around food, it’s not a battle, it’s a conversation.

What would feel good right now? What would feel good later? How can I give myself both? [00:12:00] That’s what moderation really is. Not restriction, not chaos. Just trust. And trust gets built. One choice at a time. Imagine walking into a party and actually looking forward to the food without fear of losing control.

You see the chips, the cheese plate, the brownies, and instead of spiraling into mental negotiation, should I, how much will this ruin everything? You just decide like, what looks good, what tastes good? You eat what looks good, you stop. When you’re satisfied and then you go back to laughing with your friends, fully present, not silently berating yourself for messing up.

Imagine having a fridge full of food and not feeling haunted by it, not needing to finish something just because it’s there, [00:13:00] not avoiding your favorite foods because you don’t trust yourself with them. Imagine noticing the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger, and knowing exactly what to do about both, maybe not perfectly, but consistently, and with kindness.

That’s what’s possible when you stop trying to fix emotional eating by shutting it down and instead learn how to listen to it because emotional eating isn’t your enemy. It’s just a message, and when you know how to interpret it, it stops being something that you fight against and it starts becoming something that you work with.

You are not broken. You don’t need more discipline. You just need better tools. This doesn’t have to be the thing that weighs you down anymore. You can [00:14:00] have peace with food and you can trust yourself, and you can start today. Now, if this resonates with you, if you are tired of swinging between control and chaos, if you are ready to stop white knuckling your way through every meal, I want to invite you to something that could change everything.

I am hosting a free class called How to Stop Overeating Without Going On a Diet. In this class, I am gonna teach you how to eat without rules, without food lists, without shame. Just real tools that actually work in your real life. We’ll talk about why overeating isn’t just a willpower problem and how you can start making peace with food without giving up pleasure.

I’ll show you what to focus on instead of calorie counts or macros and how to build a way of [00:15:00] eating that feels natural, not forced. If you’ve ever thought I should have figured this out by now, please know that you are not behind, and that could be a lie. You’ve just been sold solutions that were never meant to last, and so I wanna invite you to come learn a new way because you deserve a life where food brings peace and not pressure.

So. I wanna invite you to sign up now. Go to elizabeth sherman.com/stop-overeating. That link will also be in the show notes and I will be there waiting for you. That’s all I have for you today. Have an amazing day, and I will talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Now before you go, if today’s episode hit a little too close for home, or if you’ve ever wondered why did I eat that, I have something for you. It’s called The 82 [00:16:00] Reasons You Overeat that have nothing to do with food Now, it’s not a guilt trip, and it’s definitely not another diet plan. It’s a free guide that will help you to finally understand why you keep eating, even though you swore you wouldn’t.

Here’s a secret. It’s not about willpower, it’s about everything else. You can grab your copy right now at elizabethsherman.com/82-reasons. Seriously, go download it. You’ll feel seen, and it might just be the start of something different.