Brooke Castillo, like many, has faced challenges with emotional eating and weight. Her journey led her to discover that overeating was a symptom of deeper emotional issues. Ultimately, Brooke achieved a 70-pound weight loss and developed a business coaching others to address their emotional problems, both related to food and beyond.
The Root of Overeating: Emotions and Self-Awareness
Brooke emphasizes that overeating is often a way to avoid oneself and one's feelings. She advises asking, "Why do I overeat in the first place?" The ability to pay attention to one's emotional state is crucial. Brooke believes that if you can be at peace with your feelings, you can experience them instead of using food to suppress them.
Weight loss, according to Brooke, can be a journey of self-discovery. As people begin to lose weight, they often become more attuned to their hunger cues, which in turn allows them to connect with other aspects of their lives and emotions.
The "Sacred Moment" and Breaking the Cycle
Brooke introduces the concept of the "sacred moment," the instant when you decide to eat despite not being truly hungry. This moment of decision, or rather the failure to stop oneself from eating, is critical. Instead of trying to solve the problem overnight, Brooke suggests focusing on not criticizing yourself after a bad eating incident. Gradually, you can become more aware of the feelings that trigger these episodes.
Once you learn to feel and process emotions instead of avoiding them, the need to use food as a coping mechanism diminishes. However, Brooke cautions that "thinness doesn't solve everything." Even at a healthy weight, people still face life's challenges and stresses.
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Managing Emotions: Reacting vs. Feeling
Overreacting or suppressing emotions are common responses when we struggle to express or feel them. Brooke finds neither reaction helpful. Instead, she advocates for feeling emotions, allowing them to enter your body and experiencing them fully. For instance, feeling anger doesn't require lashing out; it simply requires feeling the emotion itself.
External Comments and Self-Responsibility
Brooke teaches her clients to assess the applicability of others' comments. For instance, a comment like "I don't like your blue hair" should not elicit emotion unless you actually have blue hair. Most people are well-intentioned, so we can listen to their advice while recognizing that it is their perspective, not necessarily our own. Defensiveness often stems from a lack of self-assurance.
Brooke believes that self-responsibility is a crucial lesson to impart to children, particularly the understanding that you are responsible for your own feelings. No one can "hurt your feelings" because you are the one in control of your emotional responses. Even with support from others during a weight loss journey, Brooke emphasizes that "you're on your own no matter what." Therefore, who better to embark on this journey with than yourself?
Brooke believes that you have enough support within you to do whatever you want to do in life. You have to be your own biggest cheerleader! It’s not really the job of other people to support you, Brooke adds, that is your own job. It’s also your job to let others have their own opinions, and recognize that you don’t have to agree to them.
The Overeating Workshop: A Deep Dive into Hunger, Hormones, and Desire
Brooke offers a two-day overeating workshop designed to help individuals question and address the underlying reasons for overeating. She emphasizes that if you never experienced hunger or desired food for non-physical reasons, you would never have to worry about overeating or your weight. Eating only when physically hungry is the key to achieving your ideal weight.
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The workshop delves into the science of hunger, exploring how hormones impact our hunger and fullness cues. Understanding how hormones are affected by what and when you eat can help you recalibrate your hunger and achieve greater satisfaction for longer. Brooke teaches participants about key hormones and helps them design a personalized eating plan.
The workshop also addresses the issue of desire, explaining how our brains are conditioned to crave foods that lead to weight gain. Brooke teaches the brain science behind this phenomenon and provides strategies for deprogramming the brain from desiring unhealthy foods. Desire, she explains, is a conditioned response that can be modified through a simple mental process.
The Hormonal Connection: Sugar, Flour, and Insulin
Brooke emphasizes the role of hormones in hunger, explaining that ghrelin triggers the sensation of hunger, while leptin signals fullness. Both are regulated by insulin. Concentrated foods, particularly sugar and flour, disrupt these hormonal signals.
She cites a definition of obesity as the excessive consumption of flour and sugar, suggesting that the absence of these substances might eliminate obesity altogether. The shift towards low-fat foods, which often contain increased amounts of sugar and flour, has contributed to the obesity epidemic.
Excessive sugar and flour consumption can lead to insulin resistance, disrupting the hunger scale and causing constant hunger. Unlike consuming 500 calories of coke, which doesn't provide a feeling of fullness and may even increase hunger later, understanding the impact of sugar on insulin is crucial for recalibrating hunger cues.
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Dopamine and the Reward System
Desire, according to Brooke, is created in the mind. We are wired to seek things that promote our survival, such as warmth, rest, sex, and food. These actions trigger the release of dopamine in the brain, creating a sense of reward.
Consuming concentrated sugar and flour triggers an unnatural dopamine reaction, leading the brain to perceive these foods as highly desirable. This can result in cravings and withdrawal symptoms when these foods are restricted. Understanding how dopamine works as a reward and motivator is essential for managing weight.
The Secret Sauce: Reintroducing Fat and Honoring Your Body's Wisdom
Brooke reveals two key secrets to weight loss: recognizing the havoc that sugar and flour wreak on the body and understanding the importance of consuming healthy fats. The low-fat movement of the 1980s conditioned many to avoid fats, which actually play a crucial role in regulating hunger and promoting satiety.
She contrasts the effects of eating a doughnut with eating eggs, cheese, bacon, and cream. The former provides a brief spike in blood sugar followed by a crash, leading to cravings and increased desire for more sugar and flour. The latter, rich in healthy fats, provides sustained energy and helps to regulate hunger.
Weight and Self-Relationship
Brooke emphasizes that weight and eating habits reflect our relationship with ourselves, revealing how connected we are to our emotions and how willing we are to feel them. The weight loss journey can be an opportunity to explore our commitment to ourselves and whether we keep our word to ourselves.
Many people begin overeating at a young age, and their emotional maturity may remain at that level. If we learned to cope with emotions by eating as children, our coping mechanisms may still be those of a child. Brooke stresses the importance of developing healthy coping mechanisms and honoring commitments to ourselves.
Protocols vs. Diets
Brooke advocates for creating protocols rather than following diets. A protocol is a pre-planned approach to eating that is designed to support long-term well-being. By making decisions ahead of time with the prefrontal cortex, we can create a plan that aligns with our goals and allows us to manage cravings without resorting to willpower in the moment.
Planning what you're going to eat and honoring that plan can create a sense of freedom and control, similar to how a well-structured calendar can alleviate work-related stress.
Tools for Effective Weight Loss
Brooke has researched the most effective tools for weight loss, including introducing more fat into the diet, eliminating snacking, and using intermittent fasting protocols. She teaches clients how to become fat-adapted, which allows them to utilize their body fat for fuel during fasting periods, reducing hunger and promoting weight loss.
The Stop Overeating Masterclass: A Next-Level Approach
Brooke's Stop Overeating Masterclass is designed to take emotional eating and weight loss coaching to the next level, incorporating more aggressive protocols and addressing hormonal issues.
The masterclass focuses on understanding hunger and its impact on weight loss. Eating more than the body requires leads to fat storage. The key question is why we eat when we're not hungry.
Brooke divides the problem into two sides: the "math" side (eat less, exercise more) and the "drama" side (the reasons why we don't). The "math" side involves understanding physical hunger and fullness cues, while the "drama" side explores the emotional reasons for eating.
Physical vs. Emotional Hunger
Physical hunger is a sensation in the body that travels to the brain, while emotion starts in the brain and travels to the body. Tuning into physical hunger is essential. Brooke recommends allowing yourself to get hungry by not eating for 10-16 hours. This allows you to experience the different signs of hunger and determine your position on the hunger scale.
It is vital to have a plan for when you reach a point of extreme hunger (negative five on the hunger scale) with prepared food available to avoid binging.
The Drama of Emotional Hunger
We often eat for reasons unrelated to physical hunger, such as habit, happiness, or social cues. Exploring these reasons is crucial for stopping weight gain. To lose weight, we must eat only what our body requires for fuel, allowing us to utilize both nutrients and fat storage.
Emotions cannot be solved with food. It's important to be able to feel an emotion all the way through. Brooke teaches her clients how to be present in their bodies and experience emotions without reacting by overeating.
Experiencing Hunger and Emotion
Brooke emphasizes the importance of being able to feel physically hungry and emotionally stressed without eating. This involves understanding what's happening in the body physically and recognizing that hunger and emotions are temporary sensations that can be managed.
Avoiding emotions leads to an out-of-body experience. The more we fill ourselves up with food, the more we dull our experience of both positive and negative emotions. Allowing ourselves to experience emotions fully allows us to stay present and accept them rather than reacting by overeating.
Intensified Emotions and the Practice of Presence
If you're hungry and angry, your anger will be intensified. This is an opportunity to practice being present in your body without reacting. Meditation retreats, which often involve fasting, can provide an opportunity to experience hunger and emotion in a controlled environment.
Once you understand hunger, you'll know when it's genuinely time to eat and what kind of food your body is craving. This allows you to differentiate between genuine hunger and hormonal cravings for processed foods or sugar.
Action Steps: Exploring Hunger and Drama
Brooke suggests starting with a 10-hour period of not eating and then gradually increasing the duration until you reach a negative five on the hunger scale. Pay close attention to the drama and emotions that arise during this process.
The goal is to explore your experience of hunger, separate out physical hunger from emotional hunger, and allow your body to utilize its fat stores for fuel.
The Bonus Podcast: Losing Eight Pounds in June
Brooke offers a special bonus podcast dedicated to weight loss, focusing on losing eight pounds in June. She emphasizes the importance of planning what you're going to eat, considering your future self, and evaluating what's going on in your brain.
The key to achieving any dream, including weight loss, is the ability to feel and process emotions. The weight loss journey teaches us how to be in our bodies, process vibration, and hold space for any emotion that may arise.
Body Image and Self-Care
Brooke encourages listeners to connect with their bodies in a way that makes them feel beautiful and energetic, regardless of their current body size. We must treat our bodies with reverence right now.
Overeating is often a symptom of trying to escape from stress and discomfort. Staying present with our emotions allows us to control our self-care and avoid abandoning ourselves.
Overcoming the Fear of Uncomfortableness
The fear of being uncomfortable is what often costs us our dreams. By learning how to stay present with our emotions and be willing to be uncomfortable, we can achieve our weight loss goals and live life at the highest level. Weight loss is my jam. It's what I originally started my coaching business with. And even though I have all of the content there in Scholars, let's do it live. So anyone who wants to lose eight pounds in June, join Scholars. They will be recorded. If you can't attend them live, there'll be a page where you can ask me personally any question that you wanna ask me about your own weight loss. I'm gonna share my own mind journals. I'm gonna share what I do each day, all the questions that you have about me, and I'm gonna help you figure out the answers to your questions about you. You can go to thelifecoachschool.com/eightpounds down, all spelled out in letters, or you can go to lifecoachschool.com/join, and just join Scholars, and there'll be a video inside there. All right, my friends, I'll see you in Scholars.