Breaking FREE from Emotional Eating!!

1 Peter 5:7 Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.

Here are some simple, faith-based steps to break free from emotional eating:

1. Pause and Pray Before You Eat

2. Identify the Emotion Behind the Craving

-Try keeping a “Feelings Journal” for one week. 

3. Create a “Comfort in Christ” Plan

Here are some healthy ways to comfort yourself instead of turning to food:

• Read a Psalm and let God’s truth soothe your heart
• Step outside for a walk and pray as you move
• Call a friend who points you back to Christ
• Play worship music and breathe deeply

4. Remember: Grace Over Guilt

Heavenly Father, thank You for caring about every part of us — body, mind, and spirit. You see the moments when we turn to food instead of You, and You meet us with love, not shame. Teach us to recognize emotional hunger and to find true satisfaction in Your presence. Help us to build new habits that honor You and bring peace to our hearts. We trust You to renew our minds and transform our relationship with food, one step at a time. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Are you sick of trying diet after diet and NOT losing weight?

Hey there friend, I'm Lindy Schlabach, Christian Fitness & Nutrition Coach. I gained 100 pounds in my late twenties and struggled for years to get it off. Seven years ago, I found a basic system that worked and has helped me lose 90 of those pounds. I’ve been working with women in online fitness and nutrition ever since to break chains of diet culture, embrace their bodies and fueling instead of dieting.

In this podcast, I'll teach you how to:

• • Lose Weight in a Way that honors God without obsessing about the scale
  • Meal Plan and Prep for Your Family
  • Follow a MACRO based plan that allows you to eat the foods you love.
  • Recognize and pray through triggers keeping you stuck.
  • I’ll help you Plan your week and schedule your self-care time.
  • Cultivate a spirit of self-discipline in your workouts you actually enjoy.
  
  It's time to give God your health journey and watch Him make you new, from the inside, OUT.

Join The Biblical Weight Loss Framework: https://www.herweightlossmindset.com/framework

Join my FREE Community: https://bit.ly/JoinTheChristianWeightLossCommunity

Join my Insiders List with weekly tips for weight loss for Christian women: http://herweightlossmindset.com/herweightlossmindsetinsiders

Transcript

Hey, welcome back. I pray you are finding success in your weight loss journey today. So I'm really glad you're here because we're diving into a topic that hits home for so many of us, emotional eating.

So 1 Peter 5.7 says, Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. So where are my emotional eaters at? Or maybe you're a celebratory eater.

Listen, I really want you to tell me that I'm not alone here because I'm sure that you maybe have been there with me.

You know those moments when you're like, you're not really hungry, but food just feels like comfort, or maybe you're bored or you're stressed out. Maybe you're celebrating and go into a, oh, I'm celebrating excuse.

Maybe it's loneliness or frustration. Then before you realize it, the bag of chips is gone. The cookies are gone.

You've eaten the entire row of Oreos. Listen, you're not alone. You are not alone.

But today, I want to help you see emotional eating in a new light. Through a spiritual lens. So we're going to talk about why it happens, how to recognize it, and then what you can do to let God guide your emotions instead of relying on food.

So if you're ready to dive in, let's go. Are you sick of trying diet after diet and not losing weight? Are you tired of doubting your ability to actually lose weight in a healthy way?

Do you wish you could find a laid out for you plan that will help you stay accountable to your goals? Hey friends, I'm Lindy Schlabach, Christian Fitness & Nutrition Coach. I gained 100 pounds in my late 20s and struggled for years to get it off.

So grab your pre-workout and let's chat. I want to invite you to the Biblical Weight Loss Framework and take a Holy Spirit led approach to weight loss God's way. This is not a diet plan.

This is an extensive mind, body, Holy Spirit connection program. It's 90 days of mentorship and group coaching. It's video training.

It's learning how to lean in and tap into the struggles that you personally face in your journey and why you make the decisions around food that you do. It's about releasing shame. It's about releasing the need to control.

It's about releasing the focus on weight in the first place. It's really learning to tap into the Holy Spirit and learning to let God lead your journey.

It's not going to be perfect, but learning to give God this part of your life is going to give you such freedom.

So if you're ready to take control by releasing control to the Holy Spirit, go to the show notes and join us at herweightlossmindset.com/framework. That's herweightlossmindset.com/framework.

You deserve to overcome the struggles around your weight loss goals, so join us. So here's where we're going to start. Emotional eating, it's not about food, right?

Like it's about our feelings. So many of us were never taught how to process our emotions in a healthy way. So when we feel overwhelmed, our brain is looking for comfort.

It's craving comfort. And for many of us, food provides that quick dopamine hit. It's not a willpower issue.

It's a coping issue. But we are Christians. We are leaning on the Lord.

And as believers, we have a powerful truth to lean on. And that truth is that God cares deeply about how we handle our emotions. 1 Peter, we just read it, chapter 5 verse 7, it reminds us to cast all our anxieties on Him.

That means that we don't have to carry the weight of our feelings alone. He doesn't want us to. And we don't have to feed them with food either.

And we shouldn't.

3:51

Steps to Freedom

So I want to break this down with some simple faith-based steps that you can take to break free from emotional eating. Now listen, this is going to take time. These things don't just happen overnight.

So keep practicing. And when you fall down, God's mercy and grace are going to be there to pick you up. Okay, so the first one is we're going to pause and pray before we eat.

So next time you feel that urge to reach for food when you're not really hungry, just pause for 30 seconds and ask yourself, am I physically hungry or emotionally hungry?

Then whisper this quick prayer, something like, Lord, I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now. Help me find comfort in you instead of food.

This simple pause invites God into the moment and gives you strength to make a different choice, a choice that honors God and the call that he has placed on your weight loss journey.

The second thing you can do is identify the emotion behind the craving. So try keeping a feelings journal for one week.

Just focus on one week and every time you want to eat outside of your macro plan or your meal plan, write down what you're feeling. What happened just before the craving hit or what happened earlier that day?

And then ask yourself what you really needed in that moment. So you're probably going to start noticing some patterns. If you want to expand this to two weeks or three weeks or a month, you're really going to start to notice those patterns.

And it could be stress after work or maybe it's loneliness at night or the kids aren't listening or your husband still hasn't fixed the washer and dryer.

Listen, once we start to name the emotion, we recognize it, we can face it, and then we begin to give it to the Lord and ask him to help us heal it.

So the third thing that you can do, and this sounds kind of weird, but just bear with me here for a second. I want you to think about creating a Comfort in Christ plan instead of Comfort in Cookies plan. So we all need comfort.

It's our natural innate human condition. It's part of how God created us. But the goal isn't to remove comfort, it's to redirect it, where we redirect it to the Holy Spirit living in us.

So here are a couple of healthy ways that you can comfort yourself instead of turning to the pantry. So read a Psalm. Go to a Psalm or pick a Proverb and let God's truth soothe your heart.

Maybe you need to step outside for a walk and say a prayer as you walk around your neighborhood. Take your kids on a bike ride, walk your dog down the road. You don't have to go a mile.

You can walk for 10 minutes. Maybe you need to call a friend who points you back to the Lord and reminds you who you are in Him. Maybe you need to play worship music and take a couple of deep breaths.

Go to a quiet place even if it's the bathroom and shut the door. When you practice these new comforts consistently, not perfectly, hear me, but consistently, you will begin to retrain your mind.

You're going to start teaching yourself that peace and relief come from the presence of God, not what's on your plate.

6:57

Grace and Growth

The fourth thing you can do, remember, grace over guilt, progress over perfection, obedience over outcome. Breaking these emotional eating patterns is going to take time.

You might have moments when you slip back into old habits and that's okay, it's normal. God's grace covers the journey. Just drop that down in your Feelings Journal so that you remember it.

He covers your entire journey, not just the destination. Didn't we just talk about this? Finding joy in the journey, not just the destination.

Each time you catch yourself, instead of saying, I suck, I blew it, why do I even try? Try saying, I'm learning, I'm growing in the Lord. Thank you, Father, for continuing to push me to healing these areas of my life.

Now listen, these things are so easy to say, they're easy to write down and think, oh yeah, let me try this. But still, it's about leaning in to the spirit inside of you and seeking God's wisdom, God's discernment, and God's strength.

This is not about you trying to control your situation. It's about letting go of control and surrendering to him.

But I'm telling you, it's gonna be much harder to walk out in daily life if you're not making an intentional practice of prayer and digging into the Word each day. This podcast is not enough. Devotionals are not enough.

You need prayer communion with your Holy Father every single day. You need to get in to the Word, open your Bible every single day. That is the only way that you continue to break chains.

We listen, we take notes, and then we apply what the Lord is showing us through the help of the Holy Spirit. This is what we work on in the Biblical Weight Loss Framework. It's learning to discern the voice within you.

What is the truth? What is the Spirit speaking to you that's the truth? And what are the lies?

So I want you to think about this, and you can write this in your journal too, or just think about it. What emotion tends to trigger your eating most often? Is it stress?

Boredom? Sadness? Celebration?

Loneliness? Maybe it's fear of failure or success. I had a coach say this to me a couple of years ago, and it was in relation to my business, but it applies to your weight loss journey as well.

You can have fear of failure, yes, but you can also have fear of success. So what happens if you actually lose the weight? What happens if you actually learn to lean on God in this area of your life, and he completely changes you from the inside out?

It's new territory. It's uncomfortable. You've been relying on your old stuck patterns and unhealthy mindsets for so long, what's gonna happen when you actually heal your body in this part of your life?

It's okay. It's normal. It's natural.

I have fear of success, which is why I continue to eat myself into old patterns. But learning to recognize it, pray through it, that is the point. That is when the Lord can do the work in us that he needs us to do.

So what's it gonna look like this week to bring that emotion to God first instead of food? Write it in your journal. Make a new plan that's gonna work for you in your Comfort in Christ activity.

And then do that thing the next time that feeling shows up. You can do this. You can learn to identify the emotions behind your cravings.

You can learn to cast those out, give them to the Lord, lay them down at the foot of the cross. Sometimes it might be one time and you move on. Sometimes it's gonna take you a year.

Sometimes it's gonna be laying it down every single day. It's not about doing it on our time or doing it quickly. It's about God's time.

He is teaching you things in every step, in every step of success, in every step of falling. There is a lesson in all of it. Heavenly Father, thank you for caring about every part of us, body, mind, and spirit.

You see the moments when we turn to food instead of you, and you meet us with love, not shame. Forgive us, Lord. Teach us to recognize emotional hunger and to find true satisfaction in your presence alone.

Help us to build new habits that honor you and bring peace to our hearts. We trust you to renew our minds and transform our relationship with food one step at a time. We thank you for continuing to work on us, Lord, and it's in your name we pray.

Amen. So before you go, real quick, I want you to take one step of faith this week. When you feel that emotional craving rise, pause and pray before you reach for food.

God for comfort, Lord, give me what I need, and remind yourself that he is the only true source of peace. I really hope this episode encouraged you, it encouraged me as I shared it with you.

If you have a friend who would be blessed by this, send it to them. Let's walk and grace support in Holy Spirit strength together. What a beautiful promise.

God bless. Hey, sis, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend?

Also, please leave a quick review for the show on Apple Podcast. It lights me up to know this podcast is helping you. Okay, it's time to go make a protein shake and get my sweat on.

No more standing in the kitchen waiting for motivation to appear. I will meet you back here for another episode. God bless.