Welcome to the Widowed Mom podcast, episode 301, Help Me Stop Eating My Grief.

Welcome to the Widowed Mom podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to.

Here's your host, Master Certified Life Coach, Grief Expert, Widow, and Mom, Krista St. Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today, we're talking about something that comes up a lot in my coaching programs, which is emotional eating and grief. So if you have found yourself reaching for food when your emotions feel overwhelming, if you eat to numb, to distract, to comfort yourself, I want you to know two things. First, you are not

broken. There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing to be ashamed about. This is not a willpower

problem. Second, you are not alone. This is so common. comes up all the time. And it's not just about food.

Maybe for you it's over drinking or it's over scrolling or overworking or over shopping.

These are all what I call the overs. And they are not personal failures. They are not signs of

weakness. They are just ways that our brain tries to help us cope.

So the problem, though, of course, is that while they might have us feeling better in the immediate moment,

these habits don't actually solve anything. They give a temporary relief, a temporary buffer,

but they don't really help us process our

emotions. They don't help us deal with our grief. They don't help us love life again. In fact,

sometimes they give us something else that we don't like about our lives, a reliance on alcohol

that we don't like, a reliance on food that we don't like, excess weight that we didn't really

want, less money, and on and on. So today we're going to talk

about why we eat our grief and why it's not a discipline problem, how to understand the part of you

that's driving this, what's actually happening when you feel an urge, and a simple shift that can

change how you respond to these cravings. And by the end, I hope that you have a new way to think about emotional eating and a simple tool that will help you move forward.

First, a little update on my life. A couple of things I wanted you to know. One is that my dad is home from M.D. Anderson. He has been in Houston, as a lot of you know,

doing radiation treatment. He's home and he's recovering nicely. And I just want to say thank you

because so many of you sent me emails about that and sent me messages and told me that you were thinking

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