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Escaping Overeating and Emotional Eating with Dr. McCreery

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Empowered Nutrition Podcast, we sit down with Dr. Melissa McCreery, a PhD clinical psychologist, to explore the complex relationship between food, mindset, and health. Dr. McCreery shares her expertise on emotional eating, perfectionism, and the psychological factors that contribute to overeating. We dive into how hidden emotional needs, or “hidden hungers,” can drive unhealthy eating patterns, and how addressing both the emotional and physiological aspects of food can lead to lasting change. Dr. McCreery also discusses the importance of shifting from a mindset of restriction to one of self-compassion and curiosity when it comes to food and weight management. This episode offers valuable insights for anyone looking to break free from negative cycles around food and create a healthier, more balanced relationship with eating.

Episode Highlights

  • The Problem with “Cheat Days”: Why constructing a relationship with food that involves cheating can lead to a cycle of guilt and overeating.
  • Hidden Hungers: Emotional eating often acts as a coping mechanism for unmet emotional or psychological needs. Understanding these hidden hungers is key to breaking unhealthy food patterns.
  • The Role of Physiology: Metabolic factors like insulin resistance and gut health can play a significant role in appetite regulation, complicating the emotional eating cycle.
  • Weight Loss Medications: A discussion on GLP-1 medications, their benefits in the short term, and the importance of addressing the underlying psychological and emotional issues for long-term success.
  • Shifting Your Mindset: Moving from a place of “I have to” to “I want to” when it comes to making healthier choices, and how this mindset shift can lead to lasting change.
  • The Power of Compassion: Recognizing that making lasting change requires understanding and compassion for yourself, especially when facing challenges around food.

Resources Mentioned

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Subtitles:

Hi, and welcome back to the Empowered Nutrition Podcast. I really am thrilled to share this episode with you from Dr. Melissa McCreary, who is a psychologist focused on emotional eating and overeating. I think almost anybody on the planet would, will relate to this content because it touches on the very root things in our society that I think are, are drivers of people’s challenges around dieting, nutrition, and their, their health. And we got into some really interesting discussions around like, how does all the, the psychology of this play with the actual physiology of this? How do we feel about GLP ones? How do we feel about the fact that it is very common for this to be an issue with busy women and yet busy women? You can’t give them some additional busy work that is a lot of effort ’cause that just makes it worse.
So it was such a great discussion. So let me introduce her to you and let you get on with it. Dr. McCreary is an emotional eating expert, author and host of the Too Much on Her Plate podcast and the creator of Your Missing Peace, the program that supports smart, busy women in creating freedom from overeating and peace with food. She has helped thousands break cycles with overwhelm, overload and overeating without feeling deprived and without depending on ridiculous amounts of willpower. Participants in her signature program lose their cravings and their overeating habits. Dr. McCree’s approach to helping working mothers, busy professionals and stressed out business owners emphasizes leveraging your unique strengths ditching diet mentality and using the power of psychology. Her perspective has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CNN Health, weight Watchers Magazine, good Housekeeping, working Mother Fitness, women’s Health, real symbol and self. Please don’t miss this episode if you’re a human on this earth who eats, enjoy this talk. And of course, as always at the end, we’ll link in the show notes where to connect with Dr. McCreary. And I hope you do if you found this helpful. Thank you.
Hi, Dr. McCreary, welcome to the Empower Nutrition Podcast. Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to this conversation.
Same. I already have a bunch of things written down that I wanna ask you, and I can’t wait to talk about this topic. I’m very excited. But before I just start peppering you with questions, I’m curious about this niche that you’re in. There’s obviously within psychology, a lot of potential focus areas, so, but you’re very, you know, focused it looks like on overeating and emotional eating. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you came to focus on that.
I would love to. Sure. So my background, as you said, I’m a clinical psychologist and I have spent my entire career, which is now multiple decades working with women around food and weight and eating and overeating, and really every way you could get that all tangled up. And for years I was in practice as a psychotherapist doing traditional psychotherapy. Yeah. Which, which was helpful and I liked, I liked doing that. But what I saw in doing this work is over and over and over again how, how women have just been fed this lie by the wellness industry, by the weight loss industry, by so much traditional treatment and what they’ve been taught, what we have been taught, because we’re all carrying this, this around is this belief that our eating is something that we have to manage. And that if you struggle with overeating or emotional eating or your weight or any of these things, it is always, it is something that success means that you get control over it.
Yeah. And so I would talk to these smart, amazing women who are doing just awesome stuff and the rest of their lives who, who just were so talented and they would slump back in their chair and they would say to me, but you know, I know I’m always gonna struggle with this, or I know this is always gonna be an issue for me, or I know I’m just gonna have to be really disciplined. I need to be, and then the shame and the guilt that they Yes. Are carrying that for like, not having won this battle. Right. And, and then seeing it from other professionals that we’re teaching management of your relationship with food, which is something we have for the rest of our, you know, for our entire lives. It, I just got mad because what I do with my clients is help people get to the root cause, get to the reasons that food has the power in their lives.
And what I know and what my clients know is that you can be free from this stuff. You don’t have to wake up every morning thinking, is it gonna be a good day or a bad day? Or, you know, I’m gonna be good today. Right. Or today I’m gonna be strong. Right. I’m gonna show up with the discipline. Like yeah, life is too short to have this stuff taking up all this space in your brain. And so, yeah, I got mad. I just, I I, I’ve have always, it’s always been important for me to help people see what is possible. And freedom is not on people’s radar. Freedom from overeating, freedom from emotional eating. And so I’ve been online, I’ve been online since Wow. The, the late 2000 tens. I’ve been full-time online working with women all over the world since 2014. Yeah. Cre helping women create freedom from overeating ’cause life is short. Yeah,
Exactly. Because it’s, it, it’s, it resonates with me of just getting mad about the messaging women are given that this is like kind of a morality issue. It’s, and if you’re, it’s not only that you should be able to, like you said, manage, that’s the perfect word for it. And if you don’t, can’t manage it, then you’re there for like, you’re not good enough, you’re not a good person. You don’t, you’re not strong like that. There’s just like this really, aside from the actual like health implications of, of it, there’s these such, I feel like very profound impacts on just the way they feel about themselves and then the knock on effects on their relationships and their confidence.
And it creates, so there’s, it creates the hamster wheel. I mean, there is this myth that we are taught that if you aren’t seeing the results that you wanna see with your eating, your nutrition, your health, your weight, it’s because you are not trying hard enough. Right? Right. And so the myth is you didn’t try hard enough. What you need to do is pull yourself together and go back in there and try harder next time. And if you create a visual of this in your head and you include the piece that the diet, culture and diet industry isn’t telling you, which is how they’re making millions of dollars, which is that this thing they’re telling you to keep trying harder at doesn’t work. What it the visual really is that, that we have learned and we believe this lie. That means we are supposed to get on this hamster wheel and just run faster and faster and faster and faster. And somehow we will get somewhere if we do that. And like you said, it’s a recipe for burnout. It’s a recipe for just eroding our confidence for guilt, for shame, which has, which not only feels really, really crappy, but that all has incredible consequences to health. And oh, by the way, running on a hamster wheel where you never get somewhere that leaves you tired and burned out is a perfect recipe for wandering over to the refrigerator and saying, you know what? I, I just need something to eat because
Vision cycle, this
Sucks. Right?
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I’m, I I think it’s interesting about what you’re saying around like getting to the root cause because Yeah, I am completely agree with you. The science is clear when they research people who lose weight, let’s say a lot of what we’re talking about, I don’t think most people realize how bad the actual data shows that that works. It, it is really abysmal. It’s like at the two year point, you have virtually almost no chance of having kept off any significant amount of weight loss. Like at most maybe five pounds among people that have lost a significant amount of weight to let’s, well, most, let’s keep in mind that most of this research was done. We’re talking about people who are doing this unmedicated, let’s not think about the world of like GLP ones, but the, the, their success at keeping off weight is, is extremely low. So like what does that tell you? It tells you that, like you said, the, the, the root cause there’s some of root cause here that’s driving at this that’s not addressed by any kind of like dieting, exercising calorie deficit, which is a word, but gotta get away from that. It’s crazy that it still persists despite the evidence that it doesn’t work.
Well. And I think the other piece that, that you’re talking about here is points to why it is so important to the, the psychology of change and the psychology of eating and overeating and the psychol just psychology, how our brains work is so important when you are looking to make lasting changes with your health and with your eating. Because we have all this, all these conditioned thoughts in our brain that we don’t even know they’re there. They are so familiar to us. We think they are facts. We are so conditioned by looking at all these before and after pictures. And, you know, if I’m not seeing results in 10 days, which should be really dramatic somehow right. That, that I’m not working again, the hamster wheel. I’m not working hard enough, or I need to be doing more, or I need to switch plans or I need to, so we’ve got all this conditioning about fast results that are built on this foundation of food, what to eat, when to eat, what to track, what to eliminate, what to, yeah. And all of that becomes worthless or close to worthless if you’re not looking at the reason you are reaching for food in the first place. The reason that you have your cravings, the reason that you’re like wandering into the kitchen feeling hungry, but you know, you’re not physically hungry. Right. Or the reason that you’re binging every night after everybody has gone to bed and feels, and it feels so outta control. It, it’s so important to look at this. And, and the other piece of this is that when you take care of the reasons
That’s, that’s freedom. Like, when you take care of the reason you don’t have to control yourself around the ice cream, the ice cream has lost its power. Yeah. And that’s, that’s just just a wonderful thing to step into. And it’s also something that when you haven’t experienced it, it feels completely like a fairytale. Impossible. Yeah. Yeah.
You’re alluding to something that I think is really controversial and I just like to get in, I think we should just say the quiet things all the time, but in a respectful way, obviously. But I think the quiet thing here is like, okay, this is such a struggle for so many people that I understand why there’s a movement to just say, you know what, let’s just not care what we eat. Let’s not care about our weight. Let’s not care about anything. We’re gonna convince ourselves that it’s fine to eat whatever you feel like eating and, and gain as much weight as you gain. And like, it’s just all fine. I understand why that exists, because people are trapped in such pain with this. And contrary to what a lot of people might think about them, they’re actually working harder than almost anybody else. Typically, when I work with someone that struggles with their weight and with overeating, they’ve, they’re more disciplined and hardworking and organized around their food than than the thin people. So they’re working really hard at it.
Yeah. And I think it, I think it is a complicated issue. And, and this is a place where I see a a lot of people trying to figure out how to have a conversation or even when they join my program, it’s this idea that, okay, wait a minute. I know diet culture has sold me a bill of goods. I know diets don’t work. I know that trying to restrict myself and do all these, these unpleasant things has not worked for me. So what’s next? Right? Yeah. And there is, there is, it is. And, and, and also I think another piece is I’ve been fed these goals, I’ve been told since I was five years old that I should be focusing on the scale or I should lose weight, or I should. And, and we know it’s way more complicated than that. Health and weight are not the same thing. Right. Right. There’s, there’s, we could talk about this for an entire season of podcast episodes, but, and so often people will say to me, well, is it okay to want to lose weight? I think I want to lose weight.
Right. But or also want to even be like, yeah. Where you don’t, where you restrict your food. But yeah, because like, because recovering from overeating is kind of increasing control of food and like, is that okay? Because that does kind of go against this whole anti-D diet thing and you’re like, I believe in anti-D dieting, but yet I’m also wanting to do better with my diet. It’s a little bit tricky there.
I think it’s really tricky. And I think this is why, well, I know this is why my program does not start with, okay, here’s a food. It doesn’t include a food plan at all. It starts with taking your power back. Because the truth is, I believe we all get to want whatever we want. And sometimes it’s important to untangle why we are wanting that thing. Because sometimes when we look at it, we don’t really want it. We think we’re supposed to want it. And for some people it feels really great to throw out the whole, you know, no, I’m not interested in losing weight. And for them, for, for the these, for some people, body positivity really means that is off the table. Right? Yeah. And for some people it’s, it’s different than that. It’s like, well, wait, I would like to, I, I don’t feel comfortable horseback riding anymore, or I used to do this thing and I, and it doesn’t feel as comfortable. And I, and I think changing my weight would help that. Yeah. Or I feel more comfortable in a body that is, is a different size, but it’s doing it on your terms and figuring out what that feels like. And a lot of women don’t even know. Right. Oh
Yeah. ’cause you’ve been conditioned your whole life to, like you said, go for given you’ve been spoonfed these external goals and re reasons. Yeah.
Yeah. The, my program starts with a detox, but it’s a mental detox. Right. It’s not a green smoothie. It’s because Yeah, of course everybody, everybody listening to this podcast, if you are a woman who has lived in this society, you could probably write a book on what you should do or what you think would work for you or what you’ve tried or what, like you have more nutrition and wellness and health in quotation mark information in your brain than you ever wanted to have. But, but we get given the stuff and told make it work instead of, wait a minute, who are you and what is the relationship with food that you want to have? And that will work for you to, to your point about, well, I can just eat whatever I want. Great. I eat whatever I want. I eat what I want. I, I what I want includes some parameters around how I wanna feel the rest of the day and what kind of energy that food gives me. And we have a lot of stories in our head about what freedom is, what freedom with food is. Yeah. It gets complicated in there. Right. Our brains are complicated places.
Yeah. We’re not just puppies that like, only think about the bowl of food in front of us. It’s okay. Like, and we should think about what we really want. It’s okay to include beyond just, do I wanna eat that food or not. It’s what do you want around that food? How, like you said, do, how do you wanna feel while you’re eating it after you eat it? How do you want your health to look downstream? And does that add to the promoting that health outcome or not promoting that health, health outcome, but like what you said is so powerful around, it’s not necessarily that you have to be okay with weight loss or you can’t be okay with weight loss or how you go about any of it. It’s more of just getting back ownership over
Yeah. Whole thing. You get to be the boss. You get to be the boss. What do you want and why do you want it? And what do you want it to look like and feel like? Because that’s the other thing. And that is my, my program is six months long and part of that is about creating forever results. Long-term results. Part of that is because we’re not just creating a result. You have, you, you have your relationship with food from the day you’re born to the, you know, to the day you die. And the path that you, if you, if you have this goal you’re trying to achieve, whether it’s a nutrition goal or weight goal or a size goal or whatever, when you get there, it’s gonna feel like the path you took to get there. Yeah. And, and why not just create a path that you love that feels good, that works for you, that is yours, that incorporates your tastes, your strengths, your preferences, your schedule, and, and, and ride that thing. Start living, start having that relationship now. And that takes time. It’s not something you do in 10 days figuring it out, making adjustments. But we’re not taught that. We’re taught to do a bunch of really hard things to get some kind of result that somebody else told us we should have, and then kind of be bewildered about what to do next if we ever achieve it. Right. Right.
Yeah.
Tell me about the detox that you start with. Is it that they get off social media or is it that they maybe journal or, or do they self-identify what are maybe like, triggering things? Or is it something totally different than that?
It’s a, a big part of the program is the thing that makes change the hardest is what we believe about ourselves and what we believe about change and what we believe about the thing that we are trying to change. And part of what makes this so hard is that very few of us take a step back and say, oh, what am I thinking about this? Oh, huh. This is interesting. I am telling myself all day long, this is gonna be so hard. This is gonna be really hard. Am I ready to do this? Or I’m gonna have to, oh, a big one. I’m gonna have to give up everything I love. Mm. If I wanna change my eating right, I’m gonna have to,
How many times have we heard that?
Or I won’t be able to enjoy going out to eat anymore or it won’t last. ’cause nothing ever lasts for me, or so, so a huge part of the work I do with, with women in my program, in addition to the habits and the food and all that kind of stuff, is we need to look at what, how, what kind of thoughts and beliefs you’re feeding yourself. And we need to start on latching some of these things that you’ve been telling yourself are facts. Some of them are about you and what you think is possible for change. Some of them are about food. Food is my food is the best part of my day. Food is my comfort, food is my freedom. Yeah. All sorts. There’s a whole family of those. Some of them are about all the rules about food and fitness and nutrition and that you’ve been judging yourself by that. You’ve just like, you’ve got this whole library in your head and half of them conflict with each other at this.
Exactly. Absolutely. And
So, so the detox really starts with like, let’s look at all this stuff. Literally let us dump it out on a page. What do you, what do you believe? And, and you know, people, you can start by just simply what are all the food rules that you have to write ’em down, set a timer and keep writing. And for, for three minutes or five minutes until that timer is over, you will be amazed at all the stuff you write down. Don’t judge it. And then take a look at what you wrote down. And let’s start by crossing off anything that you absolutely know is never going to work for you. I mean, think about what you have tried over the years that you knew, right? Yeah.
And
It, it, you knew it. So yeah. And then, and then we start, okay, so let’s just let go of some of this baggage and let’s start creating your own policies and rules. And based on, this is what helps me feel good, this is what works for me. This is the kind of food I love. I’m sure you see this. I, I work with people all the time who will come up with these, okay, this is the way of eating that works for me. Oh. But you know, I travel two weeks outta the month. And so then Yeah. Well, okay, wait a minute. We need a plan for that.
Yes, yes. It’s that diet thinking of like on switch off switch
All or nothing. Yeah. Yeah,
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You, it’s your relationship with food. So what do you want it to look like and be like? But, but really I think the piece that gets left out a lot, and this is where psychology and mindset and even high performance training, which is a part of what I do can, can come in, is what do you want it to feel like? Right. Do you want it to be easy or do you want your food to be beautiful or do you want to feel really relaxed about it? Or do you love to cook? Do you hate to cook? Do you, like, who are you? It’s part of your relationship with food.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe your way approach to food should accommodate the person you are.
Radical idea, isn’t it?
Crazy talk. And
The other piece of that is, why, why has food taken on this, this priority doesn’t feel good for you.
Yeah.
Because if, if you’re listening to my podcast or if you’re listening to this podcast, there’s something, you know, this, something isn’t working for you. And so what, what are the reasons? What are the, the hidden hungers or what I talk about that are you’re using, what are the things you’re hungry for that are not food, that food is kind of a bandaid for, or is helping distract you from? Because that’s really important to take a look at too and start responding to.
Yeah. I don’t know if this question is too big, so just change it. Okay. It is. But I, I really wanna ask you, you know, with all this work you’ve done, what is the true origin of this? Like what are the actual root causes? Is it, some of the things we’ve alluded to would be like maybe conditioning from early life from society around dieting or maybe high stress or maybe other hidden hunger things like maybe you’ve had past trauma or you’re just unhappy about something in your life. I don’t even know if those are root causes, but, but what do you think?
I think there are two ways to address that. I work a lot with, with busy high achieving women. Yeah. And what I have found is that there are five primary hidden hungers that, again, these are things that we, that we need, that we want, that we’re hungry for, that we’re using food to replace or to just kind of make it Okay. ’cause we’re not getting the five that show up all the time. They get tangled up that create their own hamster wheel. And it’s really important to look at those. And you, you know, you’ve got this exquisite background in, in nutrition and we like, there’s all this biological stuff that goes on with Yeah. Our relationship with food too. And I’m not ignoring any of that. I think that’s all really important. Incredibly important. But, but I think the key thing, ’cause the root cause could be many things, right? Right. You could have hormone imbalance, you could have an autoimmune disorder, you could have stress that is unmanageable. You could be chronically exhausted. So having a way, having some basic practices of being able to listen to yourself, not the experts, not the checklist, not the food plans. Remember you’re the one who’s lived inside your body your whole life, but being able to like, pay attention to yourself, that’s how you get to the root cause. ’cause people often say, well, can I do your program? ’cause I have, I have thyroid issues that I’m trying to manage, or I have, you know, PCOS or I have, of course you can. Right. Because part of it
Of all that.
Yeah. Because we’re, you’re gonna get more, you’re gonna get better and better at listening to yourself and being able to discern what’s working for your body, what isn’t working for your body and what you need. At the same time managing your thoughts and your beliefs. And these hidden hungers, which we don’t have to be all mysterious about them. They, they get, they get triggered by, I mean, think about the things that are just a recipe for overeating in your life. So hidden hunger, the, the five main hidden hungers are triggered by things like stress, by being too busy, by not having enough time for yourself, by being exhausted, by being too hard on yourself, which is huge. And emotions, which again, emotional eating is, we always think about that. Right. Well, I just need to get better at dealing with emotions maybe. Or we have all had a day where some emotion came up that we know perfectly well how to deal with, except that we are tired, we are frustrated, we didn’t have time for lunch. And so we’re hangry. We are already overwhelmed and feeling too busy. Right. Our bandwidth is all used up. And so we know perfectly well what a great response would be, but chocolate looks a lot better. Yeah. Right. And
You were listing off the five hidden hungers. I was exactly thinking, yeah. A lot of the women I work with have all five of those things.
Thank you for saying that. ’cause and that is why, so I created this quiz because most people can self-identify. Yep. Got that. Got that. Yeah. Got that. Right. And what happens is, initially this kind of overwhelm, like, oh crap, I have all of them. Well now I really wanna go eat something. And so I created this quiz. You can go to my website, you can take it for free. It’s absolutely free. What it will tell you isn’t Oh, ding ding, ding. You have all five hidden hungers. It will tell you what your primary hidden hunger is. Yeah. And your primary hidden hunger is the place to make a change. So you’ll get the result and then you’ll get some free resources of here’s, here’s the next steps. Hmm. Right. Do this. And they, I guarantee you, some of these steps, most of these steps, if not all of these steps are so small that you, and they’re not what your diet brain is used to hearing that they will make you roll your eyes because your brain will say, well, that’s not enough, or I should do more.
Or No, it’s exactly the thing. It it is exactly. Doing something different that isn’t what your brain, diet brain has been conditioned to tell you to do is going to feel wrong and insignificant and like it’s not going to work. That’s more psychology. That is how your brain is gonna approach this. Sure. But what is amazing is how it does start to change things. Because when you feed your hidden hungers, food loses its power. That is exactly how you start to take your power back. And so what happens instead of you, as you learn how to start taking care of those hidden hungers and you get focused on that, the food stuff starts to shift on its own. And so, for example, what will happen in what is not unusual at all to happen in my program is somebody will come into the program and they come into the program because their afternoons and their evenings feel like an eating disaster.
They feel like they don’t have any control. Maybe they’re binging every night or they’re just eating from the minute they walk in the door. Right. It’s that end of day eating that just nothing works. And all the old approaches have been, okay, I’m not gonna do it today. Right. I’m gonna be strong, I’m gonna be rigid, I’m gonna have willpower. What happens when people come into the program, and it doesn’t always play out exactly like this, but it is not unusual, is that people start doing these, these, oh, well you guess what? I had a hidden hunger for rest, or I had a hidden hunger. I’m not getting enough self care and me time, we’re start starting to feed these things. And then on a coaching call, someday somebody will be like, I just realized I was binging every single evening and I haven’t done, I haven’t done that in two weeks or three weeks or Yeah. It’s been months. It, it fades away. And I, I just want people to listen to that because the difference between, I haven’t done it in three weeks and I’ve been working really hard and I’ve been checking off everything on my calendar and oh man, where did it go? It’s gone. Right.
Is
That, is that is freedom from overeating. That is not what they’re teaching you. You know, it’s probably not what you learned in all those, you know how to change your eating classes and webinars and magazine articles and you know, podcast episodes. But it’s an amazing thing when it happens.
What I like about what you said is one of the things, there’s a lot of things, but one of ’em is it seems to be that there is a, a way to address this conflict that I think is ever present in this population in the sense of like, they already have overfilled plates. And so if the solution is to do more and work harder around something, they usually just don’t have the bandwidth to like add. And so it’s, and or, and like, you also can’t say to them, look, you need to get the stress outta your life. Because a lot of times the stress is like,
Go work on that. Go work on that stress.
Yeah. It’s like for most women, it it, like, for the middle part of their life, it’s like, I’ve got a full-time job and I’ve got children. Yeah. Like,
If I could get rid of the stress, I would’ve done it. I’m smart. Right. No,
Alone is extremely stressful and you can’t really, you know, if you need the job to make ends meet, and it goes without saying, you’re not gonna get rid of your children. Like already you’re, you’re in extremely stressful situation for at least two decades with that.
This is, I love this because this is one of the another reason why this whole hidden hungers concept is so important because it doesn’t take, most people realize I’m stress eating. Right. Or at least it gets explained to you and you realize, oh, okay. Yeah. I’m stress eating and the the sim Oh yeah. Okay. So then just knock the stress out. Right. How help, what kind of helpful advice is that? Or you’re emotional eating, you’re not really hungry, so knock it off. Not helpful at all. Yeah. However, one of the huge, so often stress eating isn’t caused by stress. You know, you have the stress, you know, you’re stress eating. One of the, the hidden hunger that is the most confusing to people when they get the result is a hidden hunger for compassion. Hmm. It’s, and that can show up when you’re the person who’s like, well, you shouldn’t be stressed or you should be managing this better, or you should be able to be in three places at once, or what’s wrong with you?
Or you should be able to function without sleep. Or like all the things we tell ourselves all day long. So if you are somebody who mindlessly eats or eats on autopilot, or is somebody who eats to numb, you know, like you wanna just like go blank at the end of the day, you wanna just kinda, that is it, it those are pretty likely signs that you’ve got some hidden hunger for compassion going on. Interesting. And in that moment when you’re really stressed and you need to be in three places at once and the kids are yelling what’s for dinner and you can’t do anything about it, it’s so e the lack of compassion is, you know, suck it up buttercup. Let’s just keep going. Yeah. Sometimes compassion is as simple as taking a breath and just saying what you’d say to your friend. Like, this is really hard today sucked. You know, I don’t know what to do here. Or I’m tired, I wish I could go to bed and I can’t. And man, this is hard. I’m doing hard stuff sometimes compassion is just seeing yourself Yeah. Instead of powering through and like, you know, saying nasty things to yourself, which we usually do. Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely. I think social media too adds to a lot of this. And I mean obviously this was all around before social media, but I feel like it’s, you know, you’re, you’re constantly seeing this fictitious woman that is perfect.
She’s superwoman, right? She
Has eight children and you know, she is doing great with her sourdough. It’s like, it really does make it harder to really have that compassion if you trend that way because you, you, you know, you have all these examples that are not real, but still your, your deep brain doesn’t totally get that. It’s like you’re just, it’s like a subliminal messaging that like, oh, perfection. Like every women are doing it.
Yeah. It’s so insidious. And I really, I really do think one of the reason, one of the reasons I love running my program, and I think one of the reasons that we get the results that we are is that there is a coaching component there. There’s support because we don’t see our own blind spots. Hmm. I I don’t see the unhelpful things that I tell myself all day long and I guarantee I do it and you do it and everybody does it because we’re human beings. Yeah. But having somebody help you say like, wait a minute, back to hidden hunger for compassion. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is catch yourself telling yourself how stupid you are and be like, okay, wow, that was really mean. I don’t deserve that. Right. Yeah. Right,
Right.
Whoa, hold the phone here. Right. Yeah. Because our brains just go on autopilot and the more, the other part of it is the more we, we repeat the stuff that isn’t helpful, the more solid it gets. Right. The more, the stronger those pathways get. And so yeah. Having a way to interrupt that stuff, having a way to say, okay, wait a minute, compassion is often, it, it’s not beating yourself up ’cause you just ate all the cookies. It’s like, wait a minute, okay, something, what, what is going on here? ’cause there’s a reason, and it’s not that I’m stupid or lazy or I don’t have discipline. I just spent all day proving that those things are not true. Right. There’s a reason and we can figure this out. Yeah. That’s, that’s compassion. Yeah. Instead of beating yourself up and going to bed angry and then waking up mad at yourself. And that whole, I mean, I don’t even have to describe that because everybody knows that relates
To it. Yeah.
Yeah.
Another thing that caught me when I was looking at your, your content is that you did a post that was talking about perfectionism and how that can promote this. And I, I thought that was interesting. Like from a, maybe it’s ’cause I was fresh off a phone call about someone that has an eating disorder and we know that people who have more perfectionist personalities do have higher incidents of disordered dating. But you know, that kind of, I’m curious how, how you would say that perfectionism feeds into this and like how that’s working. ’cause it’s not as, it’s not as obvious. Like I think people can kind of understand like, okay, you’re kind of perfectionist, you’re gonna hyper control your diet. That can lead into like restrictive eating. But what about overeating and emotional eating?
Oh, well, okay. There’s a whole module on perfectionism inside. Okay. We’re missing peace program because it’s huge. Perfectionism is the whole reason we have this ongoing cycle of starting over on Monday or starting over on the first of the month or starting over on the 1st of January. Right. Because you eat something, it’s all ruined now. You blew it. Yeah. And so now you have to start over and there are whole plans that are, that are have that built in. Right. If you don’t get it perfect, you gotta start your 30 days all over again or whatever. Right. There’s that, there’s also this belief, the belief that if you get it right, you will be perfect. Right. Or that there’s some kind of perfect eating. I mean, again, yeah.
That’s even a thing.
And then it leads to the whole cheat day thing, which I feel like I’ve been talking about that a lot lately. But like, why do you wanna a relationship with food that you would wanna cheat on, that you would need to cheat on? Why do you wanna construct something that, you know, it’s like a pressure cooker. Like, okay, every every six days I’m gonna have to like woo blow up. Like talk about over control. Yeah. Right. And as somebody in my group said, and I’ve told this story a couple times now, but she’s like, I would never get in a relationship with a person that I knew I’d have to cheat
On every Saturday.
That’s
Cheating day. That
Would, that would be a red flag for me if I had to build in cheat dates to tolerate this person. Right. Yeah. It’s the same thing. So, oh, perfectionism shows up in so many ways and I, I often, I like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was some kind of tool where you could measure all the, all the overeating and all the stuff that goes with it that happens after that moment when we decide we weren’t perfect enough.
A cascade of like, thoughts.
I blew it so I got it. I might as well just finish it. I blew it. I’m gonna have to start over, so I’ll just, you know, eat the rest of the brownies. I blew it. So tomorrow’s ruined. Anyway, when I ask people to guesstimate, this is not scientific at all, but just like, you know, I’ll be talking to somebody who’s upset about weight they have gained, for instance, and, and we’ll talk about this. Okay. So if we could just guesstimate how much of this weight do you think happened after that moment? And they’re like, oh man, 70%, I wouldn’t have 70% of this. You know, I, or how much of your overeating happens after that moment where you decided I wasn’t perfect enough? So
It’s, I might as well just
Stop. It’s ruined. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s really interesting. It’s,
It’s so interesting. There’s so many things, but one thing I keep, I feel like I have to ask you this is when there I, I feel like there is the vis, maybe the premise is here, there is a vicious cycle that I think happens where like chicken or the egg at, at some point we have these like root causes and hidden hungers that you’re talking about that are around our like mindset and our thinking. There’s also, let’s just say, let’s talk about someone who has problems with overeating and emotional eating and they’re overweight and they have insulin resistance. Yeah. Metabolic syndrome. There are also like physiological things that are happening there where they have dysregulated appetite control, dysregulate, hunger signaling and satiety. There’s also things about the microbiome that we know contribute to that with like metabolic endotoxemia, intestinal permeability and systemic inflammation. Like throws off all the neurotransmitters and hormones around appetite and satiety. And so chicken or the egg, I think that one can almost always will like lead to the other.
And so I feel like when we sit, when we say we can kind of joke about, it’s like, okay, you have this person who is going on this super strict diet they found on TikTok and there’s a cheat day. And like, how silly is that? But really, I think we both know that like, this person is desperate. Yeah. They have tried it. So many things. They’ve worked so hard. They are concerned about their health, both mental health and physical health because it’s not going well. Yeah. And they don’t have, you know, they’re out, they’re out of great ideas. And so obviously there’s a, a whole new world of opportunity now in, in the world of weight loss medications that obviously could, like you said, be a whole season probably of episodes, but I’m sure you’re probably seeing people that are using GLP one medications and Yeah. There’s those and cons for me with that in terms of what we’re talking about. But what do you think?
Well, I think that what you described, first of all, I think is really important to stop and respect because people feel cornered. Yeah. They feel scared, they feel panicked. They’re maybe they have a diagnosis or they’ve gone to their doctor and they’re like, well, we’ll just check this again in six weeks. Right. But so they’re have
That under control. Yeah.
They feel judged and there is so much judgment. Or if you, if you have, somebody hasn’t told you this, I just wanna make really clear, there’s a lot of judgment. There’s a lot of, oh, you know, if you just get your weight under control, which isn’t
Even stigma in healthcare.
Yeah. Oh yeah. There’s such a lack of training in healthcare around what we are talking about today. It’s just, so I think what, what, what is really important, and back to psychology and mindset is f figuring out how to move from I have to, or I should or I need to, which are all trapped scarcity kind of reactions that are very valid that you are fed, that tend to backfire and they don’t last. Moving from I have to, to, okay, what do you want? I want to, and I’m, I’m thinking of people I’ve worked with with, with either diabetic or pre-diabetic issues, insulin resistance, who like came in really scared and like monitoring all this stuff and, and feel feeling ex completely restricted. And how am I ever gonna find freedom because I have to, I have to do this and I have to do this and I have to do this figuring out, wait a minute, actually, you know, it sucks that I have this stuff.
I have to deal with that. That’s, we can all agree on that, but here’s what I want. Hmm. I want my energy to feel a certain way. Hmm. I want it to be even, I want to my future to look like this. I want, and this sounds so simple, it’s, it’s a, it’s a process to do it. But when you think about anything else in your life where if you, if you can come up with an example where you’ve been something you did because you wanted to, something, we have all done really hard things because we wanted to. Right. Yeah. Insane things. Like I have run marathons that is insane. Right. If somebody said, Melissa, you have to go do this. Yeah. I crazily decided I wanted to do this, I wanted to train, I wanted to finish. Right. Yeah. It’s just totally different. And so I think the key is figuring out, okay, what do you want and why do you want it? And okay, how do we then, how do we move forward? Yeah. Because every single person listening to this podcast has done something incredibly difficult or hard or even miserable. But you did it because you wanted it, or you wanted what was on the other side, or it was worth it to you. And and that’s different from doing something ’cause somebody scared you.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s so good. And I, I think it, it’s, it’s so uncommon for people to get connected with that deeper want when they’re making decisions about their nutritional approach or their medication usage and things like that. It’s, they, I think they think they’re in touch with their wants, but I’ve absolutely seen what you’re talking about where it’s like they’ll express that they want, let’s say, ’cause we’re drawing this, let’s say they want to lose weight and they want, but it’s like they’re going through mud. They, they just can’t seem to like get the, get it together. Even though they’re successful and driven in other parts of their life. They can’t do the thing that society’s telling ’em to do to like eat the right way. But then they’ll, they’ll pop up one day with some other goal or wish and they’ll be fully driven on it. And I, I think it is that, it, it’s, it’s hard for us when we’re from childhood in the checkout line at the grocery store, seeing magazines with unrealistic and unhealthy goals for women. It’s hard for us to suss that out of like, what’s my actual true desire? And then connect that back to then, like, what does that mean about what I do right now? And it, it might not be the thing that I’m thinking is like the best thing.
Well, and also to suss out why, okay, why is this hard for me? Why am I resisting it? Yeah. Why is this not working? What am I, is it, is there a way we could set this up so it would work better for me? Is there a way I’m thinking about it that’s not helpful. Is there a way, and it, the hidden hungers feed into this, y’all, you’re smart people if you’re using food to take care of something, even if it, okay, it’s not a nutritional hunger. If you’re using food to take care of something and somebody, you go to your doctor, whatever, and they’re like, well, just stop doing that. Just, you know, take that food away. It’s, it’s taking away a coping mechanism. You’re, you’re not stupid. You’re using the food for a reason. So
We figured out a way to get through life.
If you’re, if you’re not able to make the changes, it’s, it’s going back to, okay, so what’s going on with hidden hungers? Yeah. What’s going, what is going on? And how can we, how can we take care of you? How do you take care of you so that you don’t need the food in the same way? Right. I mean, we always need food, but it, it’s, it’s again that it’s compassion. Like, wait a minute, there’s something going on here. Because the go, the default is always, I didn’t try hard enough. I failed. I was, I, I-I-I-I-I should have. And that just puts you into a self-defeating cycle and more guilt, more blame, more lack of confidence. Yeah, yeah,
Yeah. Totally. It’s like, okay, is there emotional eating? Is there overeating? That’s a red flag that there’s some unmet need. There’s some, this is a coping mechanism for something. And so unless that is like restored and addressed, there’s gonna continue to be some type of coping mechanism. And actually I don’t, you know, we’re not gonna get nobody talk about GLP ones, but what I have seen, I’m to be clear, I’m, I’m for them, for many people for, for a season. I don’t think it’s most people that need to be on it for life, but for a season to get outta this vicious cycle. Yeah. I think they can be great. But what I’ll see sometimes is like, okay, I’m on GLP one now. I’m not hungry. I am nauseous. I I am not into food, but I’ve noticed that I’m having a lot more alcohol. Yeah. Or I’ve noticed that like candy, I’m eating a lot more candy because candy doesn’t trigger the nausea. Like at like, food. Food. Yeah.
And that season
Happens.
Yes. The season part is, is a little like, okay, so what do you do after the season is over? I just, I always think about somebody that I knew who had this was many, many years ago was like the quintessential gastric bypass success story.
Okay.
And I had gastric bypass surgery, was super successful, did all the things, lost all the weight, was a leader in their community. Did not live, I wasn’t, I don’t think I was working virtually. I never met this person. I heard of this person Yeah. And was a leader in their community. Ran the support groups. Everybody looked up to this person eight years later, had a very, had a regime. This is what she did. I did talk to her eventually, eight years later. Eight years success, keeping the weight off, all that stuff. She had some stuff go sideways in her life, like completely unexpectedly. And you know what, she was also really tired of. She had like three things that she ate. She was, she was right. Yeah. And she never dealt with any of the stuff,
The stuff
And the stuff.
It’ll, it’s still there. Yeah. Yeah.
She’s never dealt with it. She was, and I, I work with people like this all the time. You guys are super strong. You have, you tell yourself you’re not disciplined. You are so much more disciplined than you think you are. You have so much more willpower than you think. You’re just asking an impossible task of yourself. And it took this woman eight and a half years and she just had had enough, she couldn’t do it anymore. She
Relapse and regained it.
She, the way it came back, her eating, it just fell apart. And, and think about this because what she also lost was her whole identity. I’m the super strong one. I’m the one who got it perfect. Right. I’m the one which was all just a house of cards. And that’s what I worry about. I think there’s some great potential in, in medication and pharmacology, but it’s the, okay, what do we do after the season? Yes. And some people are not thinking about this as a season. Right. Let’s be honest. Exactly.
And most people, I think are not, don’t have this on their mind at all. That it’s not addressing the root issue. And if the
Yeah, you can do both at once. You can, you can, you can absolutely do both at once. And I think you should Is my, yeah. That’s my bias. Yeah.
I’m with you.
We have talked about a whole lot of stuff. Oh my gosh.
We have, I know. And Dr. McCree, I’m sure so many people would love to hear more about working with you. I know you have a program that people can check out. You have, like you said, a wonderful free quiz that I, I’m gonna take it. I’m excited and your website is wonderful. So maybe tell people a little bit about the best ways to connect with you.
Absolutely. Okay. So easy to remember. Too much on her plate is where you find me. So too much on her plate.com is my website. If you go to too much on her plate.com/quiz, you can take the quiz there. There’s some other free resources and there’s lots of stuff there. Podcast is too much on her plate.
Instagram is too much on plate,
Much on her plate. Facebook is too much on her plate, so great. Just remember it’s her and not your too much on her plate, but those
Are the ies.
Yeah. I would love to have you check out the podcast if it sounds, if this sounds like it’s the, you know, the direction you wanna go in. It sounds helpful. There are resources.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I can’t think of any, but almost everybody I think can use your content and your approach and probably needs you, but obviously you can’t work with the whole world. So thank you for having a podcast and online resources as well. So we’ll link up everything in the show notes and I’m sure people will be reaching out. And thank you so much for being so generous with your time.
Erin, this has been such a fun conversation and like, like we’ve covered the gambit. Right. It’s been fun. I know.
Two podcasters. We knock it out. Thank you again, Dr. McCreary, and we’ll see you next time. Take care. Okay.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the Empower Nutrition podcast. We love offering insight to help you optimize your wellness. If you enjoy this episode, feel free to leave us a rating on whichever platform you stream from and consider subscribing. Also, you can learn more about our practice at www dot Empower nutrition Health and that link is also in your show notes. Take care and talk to you soon.

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