Ep 81- Feeling Fat

August 28, 2025

What do we really mean when we say “I feel fat”? This thought often comes up after overeating, trying on clothes, or just feeling uncomfortable in our own skin. But this often leads to insecurity and hopelessness which can contribute to more overeating.

I cover…

• Common triggers that lead to feeling fat

• Why you feel insecure after overeating

• Ways to shift your language around your body

• How to stop feeling fat

Transcript:

Hey, confident eaters, what is up? We are talking today about this experience of saying, I feel fat. How many times have you said this before? I'm overeating and I feel fat today. I was trying on new clothes and I feel fat. I am just running around my day-to-day life and just something about it. I just feel fat.

First, let's talk about what we mean when we say this. You may know that fat is not a feeling when we're saying I feel fat. We're supposed to be describing an emotion, but we're actually describing a physical sensation in our body.

Or a specific emotional state. Like for example, if someone was to say, I feel tall today, they'd be describing maybe this experience of feeling insecure or this experience of being different than everyone else in their body.

So the reason why we don't want to use fat as our emotion saying, I feel fat today, and why it's not really a valid thought is we wanna consider where that thought leads us. So when you think that you might be describing this emotion of I feel insecure, I feel unworthy. I feel hopeless. I feel like I've let myself down.

And when we are having those emotions, think about how you show up to your life. For me, whenever I felt this way. I would oftentimes just wanna sit around all day. I'd wanna cancel any plans I had. If I was going on a date that week or something. I wouldn't wanna see the person, and I would just want to lay in my pajamas, eating more snacks and watching Netflix all day and scrolling TikTok.

That is what I did when I was feeling fat, and it's important to recognize what you're doing from this emotion, because that's how we know it's helpful or not. That's how we know this thought is either serving us or not. If we said, I'm feeling fat today, and then we said loving kind words to ourself, which I mean, that in itself is not really a loving, kind thing to say.

But if we're describing that experience and then we're like, you know what? You've got this Amber, let's go get in a nice walk. Let's prep a delicious, nourishing meal for you today. Let's go get supported with friends and family. Then maybe it would be helpful. But that's usually not the case for most of us.

Most of us just sit around and eat more, which creates the result of feeling Fatter.

So that's why it's so important to be aware of this thought and to change it because of the results it's continuing to give you in your life. And this is with any thought, any mindset thing is if it's giving you a negative result, it always starts with our thought that we're having. So why do we feel this way?

Why do we say we're feeling fat? For a lot of us, tends to happen, this feeling after we overeat, we feel insecure in our bodies because we just did something we didn't want to do. We're feeling the guilt of it, the shame of it. Maybe you're feeling the physical sensations of being overly full, bloated, puffy.

The next day you might actually look puffier because  your body is having to process all of that extra sugar or salt, whatever you binged on.

We can also feel this way when we have certain bodily experiences. So I had a client once who talked about she was feeling this way and really insecure and hopeless when her back rolls were touching. She felt that and she felt hopeless. Maybe you are exercising, you start to feel out of breath, or you try to do something that you use would be able to do and now you can't do it. And so you feel disappointed, and you might translate that into, I feel fat because my body has gained weight. Maybe you had an experience where it was hard to fit in the airplane seat, or the seatbelt didn't fit right, or you were trying on clothes and you weren't the same size that you used to be.

All of these experiences can trigger us to think, I'm feeling fat, I'm feeling insecure, I'm feeling unworthy. I feel like I've done something wrong and something is going wrong in my body here.

And ultimately we live in a world that constantly bombards us with messages about what we should look like, right? Whether that's magazine covers, which, I mean, I don't even see that many magazines anymore, but I think it's more like Instagram. Just everything we're shown in every form of media influencers.

We're told over and over again that in order to be loved, accepted, happy, live our dream life, we need to have a certain body type. And it is exhausting. It's emotionally draining to have to think about this all day long and to have the social pressure. And when we don't match up to those expectations, we feel like we're less than, we feel ashamed of our bodies, like we're too much, we're not enough at the same time.

But really the problem here is not feeling fat. It is the shame and fear we attach to that feeling, right? Because if someone said, I feel tall, that wouldn't be a problem unless they started feeling really insecure about it and changing their actions and the way they live their life based on that feeling.

So it's what you're making feeling fat mean about you as a person. That is the thing we want to change is to remove this meaning about it and saying, today I'm feeling insecure, and that's okay. And then diving into that a bit more.

So first, let's address the language we use about our bodies. If we keep calling ourselves fat over and over we are reinforcing this negative idea that something is bad or wrong, and we're also kind of creating this as our identity. Like, I feel fat. I am fat that is making it who we are, and that makes it hard to change.

Instead of saying, I am feeling insecure because of X, Y, and Z, because I got in a fight with my boyfriend and he said this thing because I got fired at my job. Because someone was talking about their new diet and I felt insecure when I hadn't lost the weight that I wanted to. That is a more clarifying experience for us than just saying, I feel fat, and I guess I am fat.

So instead, try saying something like, I feel uncomfortable in my body today. And notice how that feels when you remove the judgment and shame from it. And from there you can start to ask yourself, what is really going on here? Am I feeling stressed or anxious? Have I not been taking care of myself in the way that I deserve to be taken care of? Have I been overeating a lot recently?

And look at what is the positive intention of feeling this way? When I say I'm feeling fat or insecure? What is that trying to help me accomplish? Is that trying to show me that I've been eating in a way I don't wanna be eating? Is that trying to show me that this experience I had with this person didn't feel good to me and I need to set a boundary there?

Is it coming up? Because it's kind of like a wake up call of, wow, this has really gotten a lot more out of control than I might have imagined it has. My body image, my relationship with food, how I am choosing to feed my body. You can use it for something positive if you see how it's trying to help you, because all emotions are just like little flags, little signals, letting us know what's going on internally in our thoughts, in our experiences, and a lot of times it can be really good indicators of something that needs to shift.

Now I am gonna share the hard truth with you here. When you stop binge eating, you'll feel less fat, okay. Because so many times when I was feeling insecure in my body, it was right after I overate. And I want you to see if this has been your experience too, where the times I felt the most low, the most worthless when I was beating myself up and taking it out on my body, I was making my body the punching bag.

It was because I had just benched. And let's just think about what happens when we binge, we're communicating to our body and it signals that it doesn't matter that we don't care about it, that what it has to say isn't important. So of course we feel bad and have a negative body image after that. Not to mention we are feeling the side effects physically of being overly full and feeling bloated, puffy, low energy, fatigue. All of those things are making it so we don't feel good about ourself. So,  So if you stop binge eating, even if you do not lose a single pound, you'll feel better about your body because you start treating it with respect and you're feeling lighter. You're feeling more energized again, even if you don't lose a single pound. This doesn't even have to do with weight loss.

This is just because you start showing yourself that you are important to you. Think about if you had a relationship in your life where that person constantly was disrespecting you, talking meanly to you, punishing you, giving you love, and then taking it away, you wouldn't think very highly of that person. You wouldn't respect them very much. And that's the same thing that's happening with ourself. When we are constantly giving our body more food than it needs, or then restricting and then telling it no more food. You don't deserve food. We're sending these unconscious messages and signals to our body every single day.

Start to shift your focus from, how does my body look to, how does it feel? That will give you a really good indicator again, because if you're binge dating, you're probably not feeling very good in your life right now. So if you start to give yourself nourishing meals, listening to your hunger and fullness, you're probably gonna feel better in your body, and that is going to help you feel better overall and start to shift your focus on my experience of life is so much better and I am a happier person when I feel good in my body, and that has nothing to do with how I look.

One of my favorite thoughts that my clients love to use is when they're in these moments to remind themself that I'm working on it. I am working on healing my relationship with food. I am working on changing my body image. I am working on feeling lighter and more energized. I am working on speaking kindly to myself that can help you feel like I'm actually doing something about it.

Because a lot of times when we're in this space of I'm feeling fat, we're like, I just wanna do something about it. I wanna go on a diet. I want someone to give me a weight out of this. But the only way out is through. We can't just do a quick fix diet in order to get out of this. We can't just take a drug or ozempic and feel better about our bodies. It needs to start with our mindset first and by changing our whole relationship with food.

So what I wanna leave you with today is if you are feeling this way and feeling fat, first I am sending you so, so, so, so much love and compassion because I know what it's like to be there. And this is unfortunately, a common experience that a lot of people have felt before. You're not alone in this. But don't let this feeling stop you from living your best life right now. Life is happening in this moment. We don't know how much longer we have to live. Like that is the harsh reality.

So you can take this feeling of, even if you're feeling insecure today and having a hard time with it, don't let that make you cancel the plan. Don't let that make you mope around and continue eating all day. Decide to be there for yourself and have your own back because otherwise you are falling into society's form of oppression and oppressing yourself.

You are deciding that yes, because I feel a little bigger today and I feel unworthy because of that. I'm gonna do nothing. And that is taking away your own pleasure and joy from your life. No one is doing that except you. So be the person who still continues to give yourself that self-love, that kindness, and who encourages you to keep going because if you can't do that for yourself, no one else will.

You know, we can have a lot of amazing people in our life, but if we don't believe we're deserving of love and respect first, we're not gonna be able to receive that from other people. Okay. I love you all so much. Have a fantastic week.