Ep 3 The Emotional Hunger Scale for Weight Loss

Thinner Peace in Menopause, Weight Loss and Beyond, Episode 2

Dr. Michael Butler: Welcome to Thinner Peace in Menopause, the mindful management of your mind and body with Dr. Deb. I’m Dr. Michael Butler. I’ve been her husband for almost four decades and her friend for longer than that. I know Debbie, and I think she thinks funny. Don’t tell her I said that. But she thinks within, and she knows that losing weight comes from within. And now, Dr. Deb.

Dr. Deb Butler: Hi, everyone. This is episode three. And today we’re going to talk about emotional hunger, finally. And what we’ve discussed over the last couple episodes was all about the physical sensations in your body and to just be able to pay attention to those and to become very aware of what your hunger feels like, what it feels like when you’re hungry, and what it feels like when you’re satisfied.

And probably what you’ve noticed is that satisfaction can be very, very different for every individual person. And that’s why we use the scale of negative 10 to plus 10, which means that hunger can go anywhere from zero to a plus 10. So what I discussed with you was the whole idea of stopping at a plus two. So I was wondering how it went for you, and you can’t talk back to me. So I’m going to tell you what some of the reactions are from some of my clients when they first do this when they first start with the hunger scale, and maybe you’ll be able to relate to it. And then I can talk to you about how to let that help you because, really, we’re not judging what we’re seeing right now. All we’re doing is seeing what we feel and saying, “Aren’t we just totally interesting people?” That’s all we’re doing right now. But in reality, what I’m really teaching you to do is to become your own body whisperer. That means paying attention to all the small things that go in your body and pay attention to the small things so they don’t turn into big things.

And I think when it comes to hunger, the big things is being overweight and being uncomfortable. And when you’re paying attention to the little things, I think you have a body that is fit and is at a natural weight. I just think that’s the side effects of being the body whisperer. That’s why I think it’s so important. I also think it’s important that when you become a body whisperer, you also become very in tune to the whisper of emotions that go through your body also.

So today we’re going to talk about the emotional hunger scale, and it’s similar in terms of how you’re going to imagine it in your head, that it goes from a negative 10 to a plus 10. The difference will be that what you will be focusing on is emotions in your body instead of the physical sensations of hunger, and to be able to differentiate that will be huge for you. I promise you that.

So before we get into that, I do want to go over a little bit about the physical hunger scale from last week and tell you some of the reactions that I’ve gotten from clients in the past and see if you can relate to some of that because I will tell you that it’s pretty typical in the beginning not to even be sure of what your numbers are. I applaud you for starting, and so does your body. So what many of my clients notice in the beginning-and I do want to say something about the clients that I work with because I’m imagining that you who are listening to me right now are very similar to them-most of them are highly intelligent women. They’re very successful in many different areas of their life, but they’re very frustrated about their weight and their bodies. And they’ve been this way most of their lives.

This is where it has to stop. This is where I want to help you feel confident in all areas of your life, because all of that really comes from the same place. For me at 50, it was such a wonderful awakening and such freedom to feel confident in my body and to feel confident about what my signals are.

So here’s what some of my clients said in the beginning of this physical hunger scale. Many of them noticed that they wait way too long to eat, and then they eat too much. And so their hunger scale might look like starting to eat at a negative five and then stopping at a plus six. Very, very typical, and for me, that’s really what I did most of the time. And I’m not repeating why I’m repeating myself, but I was a Weight Watcher girl. And the point system was the big deal, and I saved points and didn’t have very many meals. I just saved my point so I could eat a lot. I wanted to be really hungry, and I wanted to be really full. So negative five, negative six to a plus six was my sweet point. And I could lose weight that way. That’s why I’m trying to teach this to you. Because if I wasn’t using the point system, I had no idea what was going on in my body. And the awakening for me and now for you is that knowing what’s going on in your body is where all your confidence should come from, not from some outside source.

Another thing that my clients noticed is that they didn’t like paying attention to their hunger scale at night. And I know you might be like that where you feel like you want to eat at night when you’re not hungry. So we’re going to talk about that in future episodes, but for now, all I want you to do is to notice what you do on a regular basis. And some people tell me that they think they know what they do. But it’s not until they really look at it every single day that they become aware.

Another thing that many of them do is they find that it’s easier to pay attention to their hunger signals during the day. And like I said before, and they don’t like to pay attention to it at night. They also notice that the whispers are very hard to differentiate. And I know that that’s a little bit of an issue because we’re not used to listening to whispers. And that’s why I’m training you to be a body whisperer. So I think it’s good to be aware of that it’s hard to differentiate.

Oh, let me add a couple other things that my clients have noticed because I think it’s a little bit funny, but it also says a lot about our own awareness about paying attention to ourselves. They actually forget to check in, like they’ll eat and forget to check in. And then they’ll say, “Well, I can’t remember that meal.” And what I find so fascinating and why I told you a little bit about the background of my clients is they’re all really smart. So it’s interesting that they can remember a lot of things, but when it comes to a meal, they can’t remember anything that happened.

And so I say they kind of lose their memories around eating. And really, to me, what that means is you just stop paying attention to yourself. So it’s like you just check out and I know you would never do that to your best friend. You wouldn’t just check out when they need you. But with yourself, it’s so easy to do it, and you’re almost trained not to pay attention to yourself. This is all about paying attention. If any of this sounds familiar to you, no worries because this is just the beginning of getting to know yourself. So yay for you.

Alright, let’s talk about emotions. Now. The emotional hunger scale, of course, is about emotions. But here’s some things I want you to know about emotions. Emotions are a vibration that live in your body, and they travel from your mind to your body. So first, your mind has to think something, then it creates an emotional vibration that travels to your body. So basically, all emotions start in the mind. And like I said last time about our physical sensations like hunger, it starts in the body, and it travels to the mind. So they’re the exact opposite in terms of their pathways. But many times, without awareness, they can feel very similar in the body, especially if they’re screaming. They’re loud numbers, strong numbers. That’s why I want you to be able to differentiate this.

So let me give you an example of an emotion and how it works. The emotion anger-your mind thinks something about a situation. For instance, your husband comes home late, and he doesn’t call. You think he should have called. That thought that you think he should have called creates this emotion called anger. And that emotional vibration will travel from your mind from the thought that he should have called and traveled to your body where it can be felt. And for everybody where that is is different.

So I… let me talk for myself so you can kind of get an idea of what I’m talking about. For me, when I get angry and I think a thought, what happens is my stomach tightens, and my face feels flushed. Especially like at a negative eight, this is highly exaggerated. So I mean, I could feel like I have a fever and my stomach feels so tight that I feel like I got punched, but that’s a negative eight. So if I were raving, my emotional hunger, or my emotion at that time, I would rate it at a negative eight.

But anger can also be felt at less of an exaggerated feeling. So you could also feel anger at a negative two. And a negative two for me, my face might be flushed just a little bit, and there’ll be a little grip in my stomach but not very much. So that’s more of a whisper, you could say, of anger, very different from the whisper of anger and the screaming of anger. But either way, that feeling that I feel in my body is a vibration, and all the food in the world cannot make that vibration go away for good, right? But it is an uncomfortable feeling.

The interesting thing about emotions, and because they travel from the mind to the body, that sometimes the body will feel these strong vibrations, but then the mind will come in, say, with your husband and say to you, “Oh, you’re just overreacting.” So that’s just the mind talking. And we’re going to get a lot more into thinking and what the mind does in later episodes.

But for now, we’re talking about the feeling, vibration that you can feel in your body, and that you’re learning how to rate that feeling. That’s all we’re doing right now. But I want you to be thinking about how it starts in your mind first because we’re going to be doing a lot of work with the mind in future episodes. And so it’s really important now that you just know that pathway.

Let me ask you a question. If all emotions that end up somewhere in the body, and they always require some attention from you, what do you think might happen if you felt anger in your stomach like I explained about myself and you ignored it? Do you think that a piece of cake might help?

I know that when we’re talking very objectively, and we’re very intelligent about it right now, you would say to me, of course not, right? Because it’s an emotion and food really can’t help an emotion feel better. But it’s interesting that in the moment of not being aware, it does feel like hunger. And it does feel like you need something. And the interesting thing about eating is that it numbs off vibration. So if you don’t like the feeling of anger, and you don’t want to deal with that, then you have also maybe taught yourself over time that numbing of vibration is a way of not feeling it. And eating has been the pathway of choice. That could possibly be what happens to you-certainly happened to me and many of my clients that come in to see me. That’s usually what they’re doing, is they’re numbing a vibration in their body instead of dealing with it. They don’t want to feel it. And there’s no doubt about it that when you eat something, a strong vibration in your body numbs out. You could say you’re numbing it and I don’t think that’s a big surprise.

But I love the idea of thinking of it as a vibration. I think that we have trained ourselves over time to confuse emotional hunger with physical hunger. And we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re hungry when we’re really emotionally hungry. And we’re well-equipped of feeding our emotional hunger, but we’re not well-equipped of feeding just our physical hunger.

And that’s really what this is all about, is understanding the difference-that emotions can’t be fed with food, and physical sensations like hunger are the only thing that can be fed with food. And that if we did just those two things, we would be at our natural weight. And I really think that the only thing that gets in the way of that is our fear of feeling and emotion. We’re afraid of an emotion. We’re afraid that it’s going to kill us. We’re afraid that it’s going to hurt too bad. And yet we walk around overeating and overnumbing our emotions all the time and hope that we’ll feel better, and we never feel better. So maybe it’s time to think about the idea of, “Maybe it’s time to feel it.” And if an emotion can’t kill you-and I’m here to tell you it cannot kill you-then maybe it’s time to feel it.

So the beauty of what we’re doing is just doing what our bodies have always naturally done. And probably least for me, probably by the age of 12 years old, is when I started training my mind and body in a new and very, well, awful way where I started ignoring it. I started ignoring the emotions. I started ignoring the physical hunger. And everything got so confused between my mind and body that I started training it to believe that food is the answer to all my emotions. And as we know, whatever the brain thinks on a regular basis-and it does on a regular basis-then it’s wired that way. And pretty soon it feels like that’s the new natural. That’s probably where you are right now. It feels like the most natural thing to do. And what I’m telling you seems really hard. But the beauty is, is that it’s the exact opposite. You’ve just been training yourself to do something that is not natural to your body.

And what we’re talking about here is the most natural thing to your body. All it’s going to take is a little bit of practice, which is what we’re going to do for this week. We’re going to practice. We’re going to practice this mind-body connection every time we sit down to eat. That’s what I’ve been saying for the last three weeks, right? We’re going to let food and eating teach us more about ourselves. And I think by now you’re starting to see and learn a little bit about yourself.

And of course, in the next episode, we’re going to talk about what to do with what you see and what you’re not going to do. You’re not gonna start beating yourself up. You’re not going to start punishing yourself. I know you. I know what you want to do. And this is something else you’ve trained yourself to do that you’re going to stop doing too because the most natural thing for you to do is to be kind to yourself. Yes, for sure. You see babies? Oh my gosh, my grandson? He is so thrilled with himself on a regular basis that it just astounds me how much he loves himself and how funny he thinks he is. And when I show him videos of himself, he just laughs, and he just stares at himself, and he just thinks he’s the best thing that ever walked this earth. So this is innate, all this stuff that we’re talking about. This old stuff is just stuff that we taught ourselves over time. And it’s stuff that we’re going to, for all practical purposes, unlearn.

So this is what we’re practicing this week. When you sit down to eat, it’s getting a little bit more complicated, isn’t it? Because the first week, all we wanted you to sit down and eat and ask yourself, are you hungry? Are you full? Then the second week, what I wanted you to do when you sit down to eat is ask yourself, how hungry am I from a negative 10 to a plus 10? And then how full am I from a negative 10 to a plus 10, goal being a negative two to start eating the very whisper and to stop eating and the plus two, also a very whisper.

Okay, so now with the emotions, when you sit down to eat, you’re going to ask yourself how hungry you are and how full you are with the goal of eating in the negative two and stopping at a plus two. And then you’re going to ask yourself, where am I emotionally. You’re going to sit for a second and feel what’s going on in your body and even listen to what’s going on in your mind a little bit. And I want you to write or think about what that number is for your emotional hunger scale.

So if you sit down to eat breakfast, and you’re in a big hurry, that’s an emotion, right? You feel rushed. What does that feel like? How rushed do you feel? From a negative 10 to a plus 10. So a negative 10 is the very worst emotion that you can feel, it’s strong, and a plus 10 is the very best emotion that you can feel. And I didn’t talk that much about the positive emotion so I probably will talk about it just a little bit here. That positive emotion feels very, well, feels different for everybody, but for me, oh my gosh, when I am in the plus numbers or a plus eight, I feel so light and so airy that I almost feel like I could just be skipping. That’s how light it feels. And it’s very clear to me that that’s a very different feeling from, say, the negative feeling of anger. That hurts.

So this is you becoming aware of those emotions and being able to label a number on them. From negative 10 to a plus 10, where are you in your emotions? So for every meal, from here on out, you’re going to have an emotional hunger number, and you’re going to have a physical hunger number. That’s it. You’re just going to be aware of where you are every single time to eat. It’s checking in with yourself on a regular basis every time you sit down to eat.

So by next week, you probably will be noticing a pattern with your emotional hunger and your physical hunger. And we’ll discuss what it is that you’re noticing. But it always starts with awareness and or mindfulness-becoming aware of what’s going on inside of your body.

All of your answers to life’s most intimate questions live there. You can call it your own inner GPS. And not only does your physical hunger live there, but so does your emotional hunger. All the answers really do lie inside your body. And what’s the side effects of all of this when you pay attention? Well, I think it’s losing weight. I think it’s feeling good in your life. And I love it.

So I don’t know. Are you getting excited a little bit thinking that it’s possible that you can do this? Because I think you can, and I’m keeping it simple. I just want you to notice. I don’t want a lot of judgment from you. Even though I know that that’s what you’re going to want to do. I just want you to see it and be compassionate with yourself when you see what you see. You can do this, and I’m excited for you. And this is all about your inner GPS and learning to trust yourself. So until next week, pay attention to yourself, be mindful, and be kind.

Dr. Michael: If you’re ready to take your eating issues to another higher, more improved level, well, it’s time to talk to my wife, Dr. Deborah. She’s helped hundreds and thousands of people. Just visit drdebbutler.com/workwithme. You’ll get a free consultation with Dr. Deb and find out if coaching and talking to my wife is a solution to your struggles.