Ep 76- Why You Overeat When You Need a Break

July 24, 2025

Do you find yourself reaching for snacks when you’re overwhelmed, exhausted, or just need a moment of peace? In this episode, we're talking about one of the most overlooked reasons people emotionally eat: using food as a substitute for rest.

Whether you're a busy mom, overworked professional, or just constantly running on empty, this episode will help you understand:

• Why you overeat when you’re tired

• How childhood beliefs, patriarchy, and capitalism shape our views on rest

• What to do when you feel guilty taking breaks

• How honoring your need for rest can actually make you more productive and stop overeating

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, confident eaters. Today we are talking about why you go to food, why you overeat, when you should be taking a break? When you should be resting your body or mind? And why you're using food instead?

This is one of the most common habits that I see with moms, especially where they are so overwhelmed, overworked, burned out, that the only way they are giving themself a break throughout the day is when they go get a snack, is when they go to the cabinets, pull out their kids fruit snacks, and give themself that five minute break to just sit and eat.

 But honestly, this is a problem with all women and a lot of men too. And we'll talk about why that is.

So what eating instead of resting looks like, is if you come home from work and think you have to do it all, cook dinner, make lunches, do the laundry, and there's no time for you. So you start eating bits of your dinner as you're making it just to get little pleasure. If you are pushing through at work for yet another hour without taking a break and just feeling so much overwhelm that you don't wanna step away from work. So you quickly grab a snack from the kitchen to bring to your desk only to realize that the bag of chips was gone before you even tasted it. If you have kids, maybe after you put the kids to bed or you just finish your to-do list for the day, yet you still feel this pressure to do more, more, more.

So you don't allow yourself to sit down, you don't allow yourself a break and just do nothing. Instead, you tell yourself there's more to do which Little Life Coach Tip, there's always gonna be more to do no matter what. The to-do list will always grow until you decide done. But you grab a snack to try to power through your night only to end up turning into a full binge and then being forced to do nothing for the rest of the night because you have to lay on the couch you're so full from everything you  have eaten. These are all examples of when your body and your mind are asking for rest, but since you don't give yourself rest, it forces you to take a break with food.

One of the biggest reasons we do this, and we use food for rest and as a break, is because eating is looked at as a more socially acceptable form of a break. It can sometimes feel like, because we need food to survive, which we do, it is okay to take a break eating, but if we were to go for a walk, do a quick meditation, get up and stretch our body, that can oftentimes be viewed as optional. So we go to food to try to avoid other people or even ourselves from thinking that we're being unproductive or lazy because taking a break with food can almost feel productive.

The truth is though, eating is only productive if we are hungry because that's the only time we need food. If we are not hungry,  we don't have a true need for food, so then eating becomes unproductive and actually takes away from our productivity.

So in order to stop going to food instead of resting, we first have to look under the hood at our brains and what we believe about rest. What were you taught growing up about what rest is about, what resting means about when you should rest and when you shouldn't rest?

Did you have a parent who always was at work and thought that if you take a break, you're not trying hard, you're not giving it  You're all. Did you have lounging summers watching TV and your parents called you lazy and told you to get up and do something with your life? All of these little teeny bits of information are teaching us as kids what we now believe rest means, and a lot of our beliefs around rest, especially as women, stem from the patriarchy.

Where women are supposed to do the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, and on top of all that, in the last 50 years, maybe not even that much, we're also supposed to work a full-time job on top of that. And so of course we feel overwhelmed. Of course. We feel like, oh my gosh, I never get a break. Because we've learned from society that women are supposed to be the ones doing it all.

But I also think this can go for men too, where men are supposed to be the people who are working all the time, who are making all the money. Patriarchy hurts men just as much as it hurts women. And so there can be a lot of pressure on men too, to always be doing more, to make more money, to provide more. To work harder for their families and that can prevent them from taking a break too and resting. But I do think that a lot of times it's more socially acceptable for a man to sit on the couch and rest than it is for a woman and a lot of times we have that ingrained in her heads as well.

On a larger scale this fear of rest also comes from capitalism. The way our society is structured is that we need to trade our time for money and we always need more money. We always need to do more, and that rest is bad.

Capitalism values exploiting workers to continue to make the highest profit margins. It is not a very humanistic way to view work and to view us as human beings. We are just animals at the end of the day, and animals need rest. We are living beings. We are not machines, but that's how capitalism treats us.

It's just cogs in the machine. It's important to look at the societal structures and these places where we first started to learn that rest is bad or that rest is lazy because it will help give us some awareness that this isn't something that is just an inherent truth of the world. It is a thought. It is a belief that was taught to us, which means it can be unlearned.

So taking a moment to think back to when you were growing up and ask yourself, what was I taught about rest? How does that show up in my life now? Then what do I want to believe about rest instead? Because I can tell you, society gives us a lot of effed up beliefs that we choose not to believe. Okay? I use this around our body image and our weight a lot too, where yes, society might have taught us that in order to be worthy, we need to be a size zero. And as women, we're supposed to be constantly trying to lose weight and hate ourselves sins. But just because society might have given us those beliefs, that does not mean we have to believe them. We have a choice in our beliefs. We get to decide what thoughts we want to give airtime to and attention to, and volume to, and we can decide instead, all of those beliefs that we were taught about resting, being bad and lazy and making us a worthless human being in the society. We can dial down the volume on that. We can choose to turn off the TV of those thoughts. And it does take work to do that, but we'll talk about how we can start to unlearn those beliefs right now. And this is also what I do in depth when we're coaching. Coaching, is essentially getting help for changing your thoughts and your beliefs, which changes absolutely everything in your life because you're changing it from the inside out.

What can help you find out what to think instead of rest is lazy, rest is bad, is looking at the truth of what happens when you don't rest, when you don't give yourself breaks at work, when you don't sit down and allow yourself to just zone out for a second on your phone or stare at the wall or watch TV or read a book, whatever you wanna do.  If you don't give yourself time to move your body to stretch, to care for yourself, to do your hair in the morning, put on a nice outfit, you will see a negative impact in your life. And it's important to point out to your brain what that is. So the most obvious one is you're probably overeating more. Because you're so tired. Your brain just wants to sit down, do nothing for a little bit, decompress, but you tell yourself, no, that's not allowed. And so what do you do? You say, well, eating is okay to take a break with, so let me just have some food. Let me just get something. Just need a little to get by today.

When you don't rest, you're not as focused at work, you're not as productive. It takes you longer to get things done because you're not energized and able to concentrate. When you don't rest, you're probably not as good of a parent as you want to be because you're impatient. Maybe you yell at your kids more. Maybe you're not the type of partner  you wanna be. You don't show up to your relationship with presence and with care and with patients there. And all of that costs you so much more time in the long run. It takes a lot of time to overeat. Now I know the actual putting food in your mouth sometimes only takes a couple seconds, but then you're feeling guilty about it. Then you're beating yourself up over it. Then you're Googling, how do I stop over eating? Or How to lose weight. Then you're having to listen to more podcasts, and you're having to get more coaching, spend even more money on it. So  it is a very costly habit to have both in money moneywise and in timewise.

I just had a client send me a message today saying that she was doing her budgeting for the month and she saved over $200 on food because she stopped overeating. So because she's giving herself time to rest and she's not overeating, she's now saving money as well as time. So we can help you in so many different ways to give yourself this little bits of rest.

I personally love to give myself little breaks throughout the day. It's so good to move our bodies stand up every hour, especially if you work a desk job like I do. But I get my work done like literally five times as fast when I am rested and when I have given myself a break. So I get the work done in an hour that might've taken me four hours had I not rested. My quality of work is so much higher.

One of my thoughts that I have every day is that for me, walking is the most productive thing I do each and every day. Because when I walk, I get my best ideas. I'm able to think of awesome podcast topics like this one. I'm able to get new ideas for my clients. I'm able to get rid of overwhelm and feel so much more clear about my day ahead. So walking is something that I might not think of as a productive activity and something that is just like a break, but it actually makes me the most productive I've ever met.

So I'd be curious if there's something like that in your life that you could think about how is doing this thing making me actually the most productive? How is rest productive? Because when we rest and we get the result we want, that means it's producing something that we want. So it is productive.

When we rest, we are so much healthier and happier too. And isn't that the whole point of life anyways? Like who cares if the laundry gets done? If every day we are miserably overeating, we have to go to the doctor for diabetes because we couldn't have taken the 10 minutes to take care of ourselves that day. To sit down to take a few deep breaths. To meditate, to use my audio to stop a binge that is in the show notes. The point of life is not to complete, to-do list every second and be productive.

The point of life is to have fun and enjoy it. And yes, sometimes we have to do things that are productive and on our to-do list in order to have that fun life. But we have to decide when there's an end. If we do not make the conscious decision that I am going to choose to pause on the to-do list today and go rest. We are going to keep doing it forever and ever, and then we will turn ourselves into this overworked machine.

Some of my other favorite thoughts that I love to use around rest is I'm allowed to take a break. Literally like when you go sit down on the couch, you're closing your eyes, you're telling your kids, mommy's gonna go take a break for a second. Telling yourself, I am allowed to take a break. I deserve to take care of myself, and this is me taking care of myself.

I matter. My needs are important. The most important thing in my life is me feeling my best. That is one of my favorite thoughts. Because when I feel my best, everything else in my life goes better. I am healthier, I'm happier, I make more money. I am kinder to my friends. I show up better in my relationships. My career is improved 'cause I'm actually focused.

Now, if you are still kind of getting stuck on, you know, how do I know if I'm just being lazy and just like doing nothing all day versus I'm taking a break. I would go to listen to episode eight on procrastination eating. I'll also put that in the show notes and that talks about the difference between when am I taking a break and when am I procrastinating? So that can help you make the distinguishment between them.

So a little homework I want you to do today is I want you to make a self-care menu of the little things you can do for yourself that take different amounts of time. So this might look like my appetizer is five minutes for stretching. My main course is going to the gym for an hour. My dessert is taking 20 minutes to take a nap. So you see how I have little examples of ways you can take care of yourself and rest that take different amounts of time? Because some days we might truly have an hour and we wanna go to that fun workout class, but some days we might only have five minutes, maybe even one minute to take three deep breaths.

And I have a worksheet in the show notes to help you create that self-care menu for yourself. We've got a lot in the show notes today, guys, so make sure you're checking those out because I have a lot of awesome resources in there.

And my final thing I wanna leave you with today is that if you cannot rest in that moment, tell yourself when you will rest. So if you are at work and you're like, I just need a break, I just want a little food to get by, instead of eating, remind yourself that rest is coming in soon, that in three hours for now, I will give myself rest because if you don't have that, if you don't know when you're going to rest, then yeah, you might go to food because you feel like you have to give yourself that rest right now.

So plan out your rest titans be intentional with it and show your brain that it's coming in soon. This is also a strategy I love to do with any sort of food that we might decide to lovingly say no to in this moment. So, you know, for example, like right now I'm recording this podcast at 8 53 in the morning. If my brain told me go eat a cookie right now, I would probably lovingly tell myself, you can have a cookie in a couple of hours at lunch. I'm not gonna tell myself, no cookie, just like you're not gonna tell yourself I'm never gonna get any rest, but you're just telling yourself when you will have it, and then it makes it more concrete in your brain.

Okay, confident eaters, go get some rest this week and know that rest does not have to be hours long. It can be little moments. Tell yourself that these little moments are enough. Don't tell yourself, oh my gosh, I never have enough time for me. I never get the rest in. If you do, maybe right now in your life, all you have is an hour a day, but show yourself how that hour a day can be the most restful, enjoyable, peaceful spot like vacation for your brain that you can make it.

And when that guilt might come up, remember that guilt is not coming from you, it's coming from society. It's coming from beliefs outside of you, and you deserve rest. You deserve pleasure, and the most pleasurable thing to do is to taking care of ourselves.