Episode 294: 3 Changes I Made to Regulate My Appetite
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Hunger is a normal and natural response of the body, and we shouldn’t pathologize it. However, if we experience excessive hunger or have a tendency to eat a lot at night, it may be a sign that something needs to be addressed.
Today, Erin unpacks some of the science and psychology of appetite regulation, and shares 3 major changes she made to her diet and lifestyle in order to find balance and satiety. Listen to learn more about the importance of protein-rich meals, eating three full meals a day, and the emotional and mental aspects of appetite regulation.
In this episode:
Erin’s recent nighttime hunger [1:16]
Why hunger is a good thing [3:53]
Three changes to regulate appetite [13:44]
Physical and emotional aspects of appetite regulation [30:47]
Connection between stress and blood sugar [33:15]
Binge eating and joy: what’s the connection? [37:39]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Collective
Carb Compatibility Project™ (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Your Hormone Revival™ (Only available within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Body Intentions Breakthrough (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
The Boundaries Course (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Energetics of Expansion Business Course
Ned Natural Remedies (get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Learn more about Metabolic Health and Functional Nutrition
Related episodes:
233: Protein Intake & Building Muscle Mass
135: Intermittent Fasting - Who it's For, Who it's Not For
288: Metabolism, Hormones & Weight Loss with Dr. Jade Teta
282: Building Muscle for Overall Health with Dr Gabrielle Lyon
265: Muscle Mass, Nutrition, & Training for Longevity with Liz Wolfe
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is The Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture, and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be, either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello, beautiful babies. We're back. And today I'm going to share with you three changes that I made recently to regulate my appetite.
Erin Holt [00:01:24]:
Because I was in a real phase where I was just super, super hungry at night. It didn't matter what I ate for dinner or how much. Come evening, I would just be so ravenous, like wanted to eat anything. It's like that nighttime eating. You're not sitting down to eat, like a bowl of salad in grilled chicken breast. It's like, whatever is not nailed down in the house, that's what you want to eat. Now, some of it was habitual, so I'm going to talk about that. But some of it was like straight up hunger.
Erin Holt [00:01:57]:
Like, I was genuinely hungry. Now, we do not pathologize hunger around here. Hunger is a very normal, natural response of your body. And so what I tend to do when I go through phases of feeling more hungry is I just ride the waves. There are different times in my menstrual cycle where I get extremely hungry, specifically around ovulation. That's a big one for me. There is a shift in our metabolism around that time, so it's not uncommon to feel a bit more hungry during ovulation. But that usually lasts a couple of days, and then it's kind of whoop, back to baseline.
Erin Holt [00:02:31]:
This what I'm talking about. Lasted for months. So today I'm going to talk about the three major changes that really helped me regulate my appetite. Before we get into it, I want to remind everybody about the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective. This is a brand new offering that we just rolled out this month. It's an education portal and a holistic health community. It's an annual subscription where you get access to pretty much all of our courses. Energetics of Expansion, the Carb Compatibility Project, Your Hormone Revival, Body Intentions Breakthrough, Boundaries Course.
Erin Holt [00:03:04]:
Plus, you get live classes each and every month on nutrition, on intuitive functional medicine, mind body medicine. It's a vibe. You also get access to a community of like minded individuals that are all kind of working through similar stuff. The best part about it is it's super affordable. It's only $149 a month - less than the cost of my husband's CrossFit, which is what I love to say, much to his chagrin. So you can join that anytime and get access to all of our upcoming live classes and also our courses. I'll mention the Carb Compatibility Project quite a bit. We usually run a class every single January.
Erin Holt [00:03:43]:
So I know a lot of folks in the Collective are going to be starting up the CCP. So you can join the Collective, get access to that program, and it's going to be good. So before we get into the meat and potatoes of the three actual changes I make, I want to really emphasize that healthy appetite is a sign of good health. So, like I said, we're not pathologizing hunger. Okay, hard stop. There's nothing wrong with hunger. Want to make that really clear. My issue was that I had no appetite in the morning, and then I was ravenous at night. And food restriction is just simply not something that I do.
Erin Holt [00:04:20]:
It's not something that we do here at The Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. If you're new here, first of all, hi. Hello. Welcome. Thanks for being here. Hope you enjoy the show. But the reason that I got into nutrition and dietetics in the first place is because I struggled with eating disorders for over ten years. And generally speaking, you don't heal restrictive eating patterns through more restriction.
Erin Holt [00:04:42]:
Right? The ticket in is not usually the same ticket out. When I started my nutrition practice, and then the more that I worked with people, I realized, gosh, most women are actually dramatically undereating, not overeating. It's kind of a common misconception. And when you undereat, that leads to a lot of common symptoms that many of us experience, like brain fog, anxiety, low energy, low mood, poor sleep, low exercise, endurance. But also, like, a lot of bigger picture stuff, like thyroid dysfunction, hormonal imbalance, period irregularities, blood sugar dysregulation, metabolism wonkiness. And honestly, one of the simplest, most basic foundational things to do to get a woman's body to start functioning better is to eat more. And we also work with men in our practice, and so we actually can see this sometimes, too. I'm thinking of one particular client who trains really, really hard, like CrossFit style workouts.
Erin Holt [00:05:44]:
On top of that, a lot of running. So he was training like an athlete, and then we needed to get him eating like an athlete, too. We needed to get him prioritizing his nutrition in the same way he was prioritizing his fitness. So men can absolutely do this, too. And sometimes this is intentional undereating, and sometimes it's just unintentional undereating. Like, oh, gosh, I'm so busy that I just kind of forgot. So I say all of this to preface and to set the context for today's discussion. We all know that it's not uncommon for people to attempt a new health routine or a new eating routine at the start of the new year.
Erin Holt [00:06:21]:
And personally, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. You can listen to last week's episode for more on that. But because of the way many of us have been indoctrinated, we believe that lean leanness, thinness is the ideal. And the way to achieve that physical ideal is through restriction. So, so many of us have been indoctrinated with this ideology, this belief system. So what we can do is have a tendency to start the year off attempting diet extremes. For example, a big thing that we can see at the start of the year is intermittent fasting interest. Intermittent fasting attempts.
Erin Holt [00:07:10]:
We get a lot of questions about intermittent fasting. I did a whole episode, episode 135 on intermittent fasting. Who It's For, Who It's Not For. What I will tell you right out of the gate, in case this is something you're interested in trialing for the start of the new year - it's true that intermittent fasting can be really beneficial and really therapeutic, and there's a lot of wonderful research behind it. It is also true that intermittent fasting can be detrimental to your health. So welcome to nutrition, where two truths can coexist at once. Two seemingly opposing truths can coexist.
Erin Holt [00:07:47]:
So if you try it and it works for you, great. If it doesn't, hey, you're not broken. You're probably just a woman. Intermittent fasting usually is not super ideal for menstruating women long term. That is just something that we've seen. We kind of specialize in women's health here at The Funk'tional Nutritionist, and we just see that over and over and over again. For the most part, it's not really a great vibe for women. So we'll leave it at that for now.
Erin Holt [00:08:16]:
Head to episode 135 if you want a deep dive on that. But that's why I wanted to start the year off here. All right. In a gentle reminder, just in case you need it, health and also weight loss. It's not a quick fix, it's not a juice cleanse. It's not a crash diet. It's really more of a devotional practice. And I talked about this last week, especially when you're looking for long term, sustainable results.
Erin Holt [00:08:45]:
If you bring frantic, chaotic and frenetic energy to a goal, don't be surprised when you get frantic, chaotic, frenetic results. All right? Just a good kind of like rule to live by. So it's also relevant to note here that my sleep and my exercise really didn't change at all during this time. When we're trying to figure out, like, hey, where are we getting success? What's working, what's contributing to our results? We always want to try to control for variables, because if you start six different things all at the same time, you're not really sure what exactly is working. So I do want to say that, because when we're talking about appetite regulation, there are different levers to pull. So meal timing, macros, so macronutrients, carbs, protein, fat, blood sugar regulation, our emotional state, all of these things are different levers we can move around. All of them impact our appetite.
Erin Holt [00:09:47]:
Sleep is a big one. Such an unsung hero. So overlooked, especially when it comes to appetite. Sleep deprivation can result in people consuming more calories during the following day. So what we typically see, and there's research to back this up, that if you are underslept, even by a couple of hours, your appetite can and most likely will increase the following day. So if appetite regulation is something that you feel you need help with, make sure you're sleeping. That's kind of like the place to start. So is exercise intensity.
Erin Holt [00:10:23]:
That's another big lever, a big contributor to hunger. Dr. Jade Teta talks about this pretty frequently in his work. I had him on the show in episode 288. He talked about metabolism, hormones, and weight loss. And that would be a great one to kind of dip your toe into. So just understand that increased intensity of exercise can definitely drive up our hunger. It makes sense.
Erin Holt [00:10:51]:
The body's always just trying to bring itself back to homeostasis. So if you're doing things that really expend a lot of calories, chances are your appetite is going to increase in order to compensate for that. So just keep that in mind. Now, if you need help figuring out these levers or understanding these levers and figuring out which ones you need to pull on, that's what we help you do in the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective. I would probably have you start with the Carb Compatibility Project. That's a four week nutrition plan that helps you regulate your blood sugar, your metabolism, your hunger, your satiety, your energy, all that good stuff.
Erin Holt [00:13:18]:
Okay. Let me tell you what I did to help to regulate my appetite. The very first change that I made was, well, you know, that's not fair to say.
Erin Holt [00:13:48]:
I made all of these changes all at once. But this is the big three needle movers for me. This is number one. I ate a full, protein rich meal every single morning, early and earlier than was comfortable for me. So I was in this pattern of starting my work day early, and it just kept bumping up. It was earlier and earlier. Like, I would wake up sometimes at, like, 5:30, sometimes at 6, sometimes at 6:30. I'd go downstairs, I'd have my coffee, and I would go right up into my office, and boom, my workday was started.
Erin Holt [00:14:26]:
I was also under a lot of stress during this period, a lot of work stress. I was just putting a lot of pressure on myself. I just felt like I was kind of on a hamster wheel. It was, like, compulsive, and I felt like I was in a pressure cooker. And so being under that stress impacted my morning hunger in that I didn't have an appetite. So not eating in the morning really set me up for a lot more hunger later in the day. And there was such a big connection between stress and blood sugar regulation. There's a big connection between blood sugar regulation and appetite.
Erin Holt [00:15:04]:
So all of these things were at play for me in the mornings, so it kind of meant that I was waiting until later in the day to start eating. And I tend to work out in the morning, so I was doing a lot more fasted workouts. Not intentionally, but it just happened. It was just in this pattern, I would rush from coffee to work to work out, and that pattern just wasn't working for me. And you guys, I teach this stuff. I know this stuff. But sometimes we just get in our way a little bit. I usually am pretty good on the nutrition tip of not getting in my own way, but I was definitely stuck in a pattern.
Erin Holt [00:15:42]:
That's why I was like, oh, I got to do a show about this. Because if I'm in this pattern, chances are other people kind of are in a similar pattern. And what we need to do sometimes is create a pattern interrupt for ourselves, kind of like stick a stake in the wheelspoke and just say, whoop. Okay, it is time to start, to start doing something different. We recognize the pattern, and then we make different choices. So the different choice that I made was to start front loading protein and get at least 30 grams of protein in the morning. And I wasn't doing this through protein powders, although I do use protein powders.
Erin Holt [00:16:19]:
I was doing this with, like, a full, actual sit down meal that I chewed. And like I said, I didn't have an appetite, so I kind of had to work my way towards this. So I started boiling just a bunch of hard boiled eggs so I could have that. I didn't have an excuse. Like, they were in the fridge. I put some salt on them, and I started with that just to get something into my pie hole. But once I kind of, like, greased the wheels and got myself ready, I sat down and had, like, a full blown meal.
Erin Holt [00:16:49]:
I'm going to share with you my go to meal during this time, my go to breakfast. And there's no secret sauce to this. I was just really into it, and I enjoyed it. I just created a new habit, and it was this meal. I ate two pieces of Base Culture bread. So Base Culture bread, I just get it at Whole Foods. It's in the freezer section. It's expensive.
Erin Holt [00:17:12]:
I think it's actually. I don't know. I think it's, like, $12 for a loaf of bread. But it's super nutrient dense. It's a lot of nuts and seeds, so it's really caloric dense. There's a fair amount of fat in it. It's 10 grams of fat per slice. There's 4 grams of protein per slice, and then there's 140 calories per slice.
Erin Holt [00:17:34]:
So, boom. Nutrient dense. So I had that. I toasted it up, and then I would cook three eggs in ghee. I would fry them up. Love me a fried egg. And then I would do tomato slices, which is weird, because I don't usually like tomatoes, but it just worked on this. I would do tomato slices and sprouts.
Erin Holt [00:17:56]:
So we'd get sprouts at the local farm, Vernon Family Farm. And that was, like, just my go to. Once in a while, I would put avocado on it, but that was, like, pretty much it. So this was, like, about 600 calories, about 40 grams of fat, which is a decent amount of fat for one meal, and then about 30 grams of protein. I tend to do really well with high fat, high protein. Not everybody does, but this works for me. But I would suggest aiming for about 30 grams. And the data that we have does suggest that protein intake at breakfast can be better for the maintenance of skeletal muscle mass, especially in healthy older women.
Erin Holt [00:18:45]:
Now, I've been working with a personal trainer for the past three months-ish. The primary driver is to reduce injury. I was like, I just kept tweaking my shoulder, and I wanted somebody's eyes on my body so I was moving my body correctly, you know, in a way that didn't cause pain and injury. But also my goal is to put on muscle mass. I have talked about this a lot over the past year. There's a lot of episodes where we talk about the benefits of muscle. We also talk about protein. So episode 233, episode 282, I got to sit down and talk to Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.
Erin Holt [00:19:21]:
She talked about building muscle mass. 265. Talked with Liz Wolfe about muscle mass and training for longevity. 288. That's the episode with Dr. Jade Teta that I referenced. We'll link those all up in the show notes.
Erin Holt [00:19:34]:
So if you want to kind of do a deep dive on muscle mass and protein intake, head there. But 30 grams of protein. Dr. Gabrielle Lyons shares that this is the threshold per meal that helps to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. So if it is a goal of yours to put on and maintain muscle mass and you're doing exercise and movement, that is with that goal in mind, aiming for 30 grams of protein per meal is a really solid bet. Like, at least. At least 30 grams of protein per meal, but also making sure you're getting that in the morning, too, starting your day off with 30 grams of protein with an actual meal. Now, if you think about the standard American diet, it's not really in alignment with that.
Erin Holt [00:20:28]:
Our eating pattern is one that we tend to have higher carbohydrates and lower protein in the morning. That doesn't really set us up for blood sugar regulation, but it also doesn't set us up for great muscle synthesis and muscle mass either. So if we can kind of rearrange our eating schedule and prioritize getting a good protein rich meal first thing in the morning, front loading that protein, that can be really, really helpful. Now everybody wants to talk about what's evidence based and how many people want to get so nitty gritty and so prescriptive. How many grams of protein do I need? That's the best that I can do for you. Shoot for 30 grams. We get more into this in the CCP, the Carb Compatibility Project. But what I'm also trying to encourage people is like, you be the evidence. You be the evidence.
Erin Holt [00:21:17]:
When people say, how many exact protein grams I need, why don't you try some things and see how you do and see how you feel? Stop leaning on external data points if you have a habit of doing that, and maybe you let this year be the year that you use your own body as a compass. And yes, this absolutely takes practice. And this is what I referred to as where the science meets the sacred. We want to allow the sacred wisdom of the body to coalesce with the information that we have, because we've got some really great information. I just shared some with you, like, hey, eat a breakfast first thing in the morning, shoot for 30 grams of protein. And then we want to actually do that. We want to embody that. We want to run that through our own filters, we want to try it, and we want to have the ability to touch base with our inner wisdom, to see how our body responds to that and let that be our jump off point.
Erin Holt [00:22:11]:
So whenever I build out nutrition frameworks, like the Carb Compatibility, for example, I'm always allowing you to use the framework in that way, to use the framework to give you a baseline, to give you a starting point, to give you some structure. But the ultimate goal is for you to access your own inner knowing. That is like the hope and the dream. Now, I recognize that this is easier said than done, especially if you have had an adversarial relationship with your body in the past. And so that's why in the new health paradigm that we're building in the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective, we do recognize that we are involved in a lifelong relationship with our body. And it is our goal to make this relationship the best that it can be. And that takes practice. All right? That takes practice.
Erin Holt [00:22:58]:
It's not always an overnight success story. Sometimes we have to kind of chip away at that. So anyways, try that strategy out and see how you do with it. Eat breakfast first thing in the morning, front load that protein. Like, eat a meal, see how you do. The second thing that I did is I ate three full meals that required chewing. So I wasn't leaning on smoothies as one of my meals, which is what I had been doing. I was in a pattern because I was like, busy, busy, busy, stress, stress, stress, work, work.
Erin Holt [00:23:33]:
Sitting at my desk. I work from home, by the way, which is like, that's always been really great for me. And lately I'm like, is it, though? Because that just means you can work round the clock and there's nobody really there to like, there's no checks and balances with that. So anyway, I was leaning on smoothies pretty heavily. Now, I want to go on record to say, I absolutely love smoothies. I think they are such a great way to get in a lot of really deep nutrition. I leverage them often for myself, for my family, my kiddo, we have a lot of really wonderful recipes in all of my nutrition programs for smoothies.
Erin Holt [00:24:12]:
Love them. And also, I personally needed an appetite reset, so I stopped leaning on smoothies as primary meals for a little while. They just weren't filling me up. So I could put in like, 600 calories into a smoothie, and an hour later, I would still be hungry. So no matter how much protein powder I added to it, no matter how much fat I added to it, it wasn't satiating me. So sometimes I'll still sneak in a smoothie as a snack. But that's really the big shift. I took the time to sit down and eat three actual meals a day.
Erin Holt [00:24:51]:
So this was good for my satiation, this was good for my appetite, this was also good for my mental health and also really good for digestion. So I think it served me in a lot of different ways. Now, for lunch, there was no real secret sauce to that either. I did a lot of the CCP style lunches. So I would do salads, I would do leftover dinner, like leftover soups, kind of like whatever I had in the fridge. I do try to prioritize protein at lunch and dinner. That's something that I just kind of have always done. But what I will say, and I was really interested to experience this myself, what I will say is that my macro ratio, so the ratio of carbs to protein to fat for lunch and dinner didn't really influence my appetite as making the other two changes, which is to front load protein, eat a big breakfast, and make sure I was actually eating three meals a day.
Erin Holt [00:25:53]:
So what I mean by that, I could eat pasta and veggies with no added protein for dinner and still feel satiated at night. That's not something that I typically do, but once in a blue moon, if you just don't have any protein defrosted in times like pasta it is. Pasta it is. Actually, we did this. I have been really into orzo. There's that Jovial pasta, which I adore. They have a cassava orzo, which I really like. And I used to just love orzo back in the day.
Erin Holt [00:26:24]:
My mom used to make it for us kind of a lot. So I do this orzo and veggie dish. If you're doing the CCP or you've done the CCP, the veggie loaded pasta recipe from CCP, I basically just do that with orzo. So essentially what I do is I make an artichoke spinach dip, and I have my own recipe I use canned artichoke hearts, caramelized onions, if you take the time to actually caramelize them, because it makes all the difference in the world. I use spinach, dairy free feta. You don't have to do dairy free. I'm just dairy free.
Erin Holt [00:27:03]:
Chosen Foods mayo and cashews and some lemon juice. And I kind of use that as the sauce. And then I add lots of veggies and mix it all in with the orzo. So it's just like. It's like such a comfort food for me. It feels so just like dumping, even though it's really good for you, but it's like, pasta and veggies in a sauce is just like my comfort food. So, anyway, the point is, it wasn't so much like I was like, oh, I need to hit all of these protein grams. That isn't what made the biggest difference in my personal satiation.
Erin Holt [00:27:45]:
Although prioritizing protein can be very important for satiation, but really sort of redistributing my meal timing and making sure I was eating that big meal in the morning had a big influence, and then just making sure I was eating meals rather than drinking one of my meals. That made a difference.
Erin Holt [00:30:08]:
And then the third change that I made, not specific to food, it was more working on the emotional and mental side of things, which is important. If you have a tendency to eat a lot at night, if you feel super hungry, if you feel insatiable, if you've sort of labeled it as binge eating, or if you do binge eat at night, we always want to hit it from both angles. We want to address it from the physical body, but we also want to address it from the mental and emotional bodies as well. So I'll explain to you what I mean by physical body. These are the strategies I'm about to map out for you. But this is exactly what we do in the Carb Compatibility Project. So if you need more clear direction and actual program to follow, definitely join the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective and do the CCP.
Erin Holt [00:31:11]:
But make sure you're getting enough overall calories. That is so big. People are like, oh, I'm binging eating at night. And I'm like, well, are you binge eating or are you just hungry at night? Because people will restrict all day, either intentionally or unintentionally, and then they feel like they're out of control at night, and they label it binge eating. When in actuality, hunger is just a really normal and natural response to undereating. It's what your body does if it's underfed. And so many of us are just accustomed to dieting into restriction that a normal amount of food seems like too much. So what you might actually need to work on is increasing your meal size throughout the day and see if that influences your nighttime appetite.
Erin Holt [00:32:00]:
The second thing is make sure that you are regulating your blood sugar, which is the central theme of the Carb Compatibility Project. Big one is don't skip meals. One of my mentors taught me this, and I have seen this play out. It's just so true for myself and for other bodies. But if we can't regulate our blood sugar, or if our blood sugar drops in the morning because we're not eating, we're like cranking caffeine, we're stressed out, we're not eating. It can be really hard to kind of regroup and reorganize later on in the day. So we want to make it our priority to regulate our blood sugar from the get go when we wake up in the morning. Otherwise, that can definitely lead to hunger dysregulation.
Erin Holt [00:32:45]:
The third thing from a physical body perspective is to increase satiation in your meals by moving around your macros. So this is protein, fat, carbs, and you just might ned to move these around like levers. So you might need to increase your protein. We've already talked about that you actually might need to increase your fat. That can increase satiety. If you are undereating carbohydrates, sometimes just adding carbohydrates to your meal can increase satiety. So those are all different levers that you can kind of play around with. So that's kind of like baseline.
Erin Holt [00:33:15]:
Make sure that if you feel super hungry at night, make sure you're hitting the foundational stuff for the physical body. But also stress. Stress is a big one. There is, like I said, an interplay between stress and blood sugar. There's an interplay between stress and hunger. And I just want to speak into this. Eating binge eating and just eating in general can make us feel really good. Neurotransmitters are involved.
Erin Holt [00:33:42]:
It can make us actually feel good. And emotional eating at night can bring us, like, a feeling of joy sometimes. For some of us, food is really our only source of joy. We, especially as women, can have almost like a corrupt relationship with our joy, with our pleasure, with feeling good. I mean, I've definitely talked about this on the show before. I had a coach who wanted me to prioritize doing things that felt good. And my initial instinctual reaction was to be like, but who am I to feel good? Like, that is not ideal. So that's, like, some things that I have had to work through.
Erin Holt [00:34:31]:
But we can feel, like our joy, our pleasure, even our dreams, like our hopes, dreams and desires don't really matter. And I will say as a mom once you become a mom, sort of like the cultural norm of momming. Our mom culture, we play second fiddle to everyone and everything else in your life. So our joy, our dreams really go on the back burner. And this is something that I'm going to speak into in January's workshop. I'll be teaching it on Thursday, January 25th, Where the Science Meets the Sacred. And that will be, if you're in the Collective, that will be exclusive to anybody in the Collective. So if you want to join that, make sure you join the Collective.
Erin Holt [00:35:17]:
But at the time of this, let's call it appetite dysregulation, I was going through some really interesting things with my relationship to myself. The healer, who I work with every single week, kept referring to it as the underworld. I was doing some deep dives, some excavation work, some core wound type stuff, basically since April of this year, coincidentally or not coincidentally, I don't know, that is when my stepfather, the man who raised me, passed away. And that really kicked off some things, some opportunities for healing, let's say. So I was going through it. I already shared with you that I was in a period of pressure and stress with work and career stuff. And eating at night provided a level of physical comfort for me. I think it's also worth noting, not irrelevant, that my wine consumption dramatically increased during this time, too.
Erin Holt [00:36:25]:
So, yeah, I was like numbing a little bit. I was leaning on food as a way to feel good, because I wasn't reaching for other things in my life to feel good. I didn't feel great, and that was my outlet. And then I was doing a little bit of numbing with the old wineski. But ultimately, my goal for myself is to have a life and live a life that I don't need to numb out or escape from. Live a life that feels good to me, so I don't have to reach for external things to feel good. I can just live my life and feel good. And so that was a little bit of like a wake up call for me.
Erin Holt [00:37:05]:
So I needed to tend to my energy body, I needed to tend to my emotional body. And since then, I've been making some pretty radical changes. That was part of me taking a month off of the podcast in December. But I also increased joy in my life. I did more things that brought me joy, and that would be a good thing for you. Dear listener, if nighttime eating is a thing and you've already checked all of the boxes for the physical body stuff, do you have joy in your life? What does that look like? Do you have fun? Do you have pleasure? Do you allow yourself to dream? Do you feel like your life is like a pressure cooker of a situation? Do you have more pressure or more pleasure? That's a good question to ask yourself. And how does that feel to you? We have to get really radically honest with ourselves. We have to do, like, some investigative research into our own lives when we're feeling a little off, when we're not feeling like ourselves, the goal is to bring ourselves back to ourselves.
Erin Holt [00:38:13]:
I want you to feel like yourself. I want you to feel fully alive, fully expressed. How do we get you there? So we tend to label emotional eating and binge eating and big appetite as bad. But, gosh, it really helped me shine a light on some of the things in my life that needed a readjustment. What can be super helpful is if nighttime eating is habitual for you, you can swap out that habit, those behaviors with other things. This is something else that I did. I implemented a lot of the Body Intentions Breakthrough practices. For the sake of time, I won't get into the nitty gritty, but we can get into the nitty gritty on some upcoming shows if you'd like. But I started meditating more at night, like longer stretches.
Erin Holt [00:39:01]:
The style of meditation that I practice helps me feel good. Like, I actually feel physically good in my body and emotionally feel good. So that means I am less reliant on food to have to do that for me. So rather than sitting on the couch watching tv and eating my Siete chips, I had a real moment with Siete chips. Wine and Siete chips. I meditated and I leveraged my mind to feel good, which is always a move and a vibe for me. So Body Intentions Breakthrough might be something. You can use it for weight loss.
Erin Holt [00:39:43]:
It's a course that will lead you through brain based weight loss, if that is a goal. But you can also use it for other health goals as well. It's a $444 course, but that is one of the courses you get access to in the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective for $149 a month. So check it out. You can combine, you can do a little combo platter of the Carb Compatibility Project and Body Intentions Breakthrough. And tada. Now you're hitting it from different angles. You've got the physical body on lock.
Erin Holt [00:40:15]:
We start to get into the mental, the emotional body as well. All right, that's all I have for you today. If you try some of these things and they help you, let me know. Hit us up in the DMs. Would love to hear from you. Hope you have a great week. Catch you next Tuesday. Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast.
Erin Holt [00:40:39]:
If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
