I Healed My Emotional Eating With This Notebook

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]What if I said the reason you binge eat has nothing to do with food or willpower and that you were just a few journal sessions away from never binge eating ever again? Now, I know that's a pretty wild claim, but we get messages like this from clients all the time where we use a very specific journal framework and nervous system regulation to help stop years, if not decades, of binge eating in a matter of weeks. After coaching thousands of women over the last 15 years, I found that most women who say that they've tried journaling before have actually been doing it wrong. So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it so you can stop feeling uncontrolled around food.

[00:00:36]For context, I used to struggle with binge eating just like you. My binge eating was a combination of several reasons. Being restricted, unsustainable dieting, emotional reasons, and my relationship with food was terrible.

[00:00:47]Just so we're clear, what I'm about to show you is for emotional-based binge eating. If you want to know all the other reasons for binge eating and how to stop them, comment below and I'll make another video. All right, let's get right to it. Step one, grab a blank journal. Now, the goal with this journal is for it not to be anything super nice.

[00:01:03]One of the big mistakes a lot of people make is they go to get a journal and they get like a really nice leather-bound journal to just dump all their emotions in, but then there's this feeling of, "Well, I don't think the things that I'm writing is worthy of that nice journal." So, it's best to actually get a cheaper notebook that you don't care about because we're going to end up throwing it away anyways. Step two, grab a pen. It is actually really important that you are doing this in an actual real pen and paper because a lot of people right around now start to deviate and they go, "Well, I'll just do it on my phone." Or, "I'll just think about it." And that can be okay under certain scenarios, but if you really want to get the most out of this where you stop emotional eating for good, we need to actually get away from devices and get really focused where this is actually getting outside of you in the physical. Step three, open up the journal and I want you to write down the first prompt or the first question you need to ask yourself.

[00:01:55]I want you to write down what do I feel?

[00:02:02]And then, I want you to quite literally do almost a dump of all of the emotions that you're feeling. You could have had the worst day ever, so you're feeling stressed. You could be feeling sad, scared, anxiety, emotional, overwhelmed, unseen, unloved, unheard. It doesn't matter. Whatever you are feeling, I want you to get it on paper. Because where most people go wrong when they say, "Jared, I tried journaling." They journaled about everything but what they feel. When we have someone come into dieting from the inside out who say, "Oh, I've tried journaling and it didn't work for me." I ask them to tell me about their journaling and they go, "Oh, I just wrote down whatever was in my head." Well, there's a lot of stuff in your head. It could [clears throat] be to-do's, goals, things that went wrong that day, all these other things. But I ask, "Well, did you write about the specific emotions you were feeling and keep it only about the emotions?" And they go, "Uh no." But this is why this is so important. Emotional eating is all about using food to distract from what you're feeling. So, even if you go to journal, but you're not writing or holding space or talking about what you're feeling, you're kind of doing the same thing. That's why this first prompt is to just pause and stop whatever you're doing and just dump on paper everything that you're feeling and experiencing. Just this first question alone starts to break the cycle of reacting and running straight to food because you're actually looking at your emotions for the first time. But we're not done yet. Let's go to step four.

[00:03:18]Now, I want you to write, "Where do I feel it?" You have to understand that we hold emotions in our body. This is why we almost can describe what we feel.

[00:03:28]It's a pit in my stomach. It's a lump in my throat. It's weight on my back. It's pressure behind my eyes. It's because you have to do something with the emotions you feel. It's like if I drink a glass of water, that water goes somewhere in my body before I go to the bathroom. So, your emotions are no different. If you had the most stressful day ever and you're feeling overwhelmed, that overwhelmed doesn't just go through you unless you actually process it, which is what we're doing here. So, it kind of gets stuck and then we feel it in certain places. But, in order for you to answer this question, you really have to sit with the emotion and think about it and almost scan your body and go, "Well, where do I feel it? If I'm feeling anxiety, well, it's kind of like in my throat. It's kind of like a lump in my throat or it's kind of like this pit in my stomach or it feels kind of like electric all over or just feel so heavy on my back like I can't even take a breath." Because what we're doing is getting in the habit of actually looking and feeling and giving attention to the things that we're feeling and experiencing. And then finally, once you do that, step five is the third question. You're going to write down and ask, "What is this emotion trying to tell me if it could talk?" Now, I know that's a really weird question, but you have to understand that all emotions are just messengers. That's it. It's no different than your mailman bringing you a bill. And it kind of goes back to the old saying is don't shoot the messenger because that's all emotions are. But, imagine if you saw your mailman coming with a water bill and then you got really freaked out and thought the mailman was a bad person when in reality, he's just bringing you the bill saying, "Hey, this came for you." He's irrelevant. He is just the delivery man for the message. It is no different with your emotions. But, most people are scared of their own emotions or they think their emotions mean something. The way that we teach this in dieting from the inside out is that all emotions are meaningless until we assign the meaning and that's where most people go wrong.

[00:05:19]Because that's where we get into suffering, rumination, and subconscious sabotages because we'll feel an emotion.

[00:05:26]Like let's say you step on the scale and you feel discouraged, well, instead of just sitting and feeling discouraged and then continuing to go on with your day and plan, you probably feel discouraged, but then create a meaning, "I'm too old.

[00:05:38]I'm too far gone. I shouldn't weigh this much. I'm broken. I'm already a screw up. I should just say [ __ ] it and start over Monday." But, that's the problem is you're taking the emotion and then giving it a narrative and a meaning.

[00:05:50]Then your subconscious and actions align with that meaning getting you into trouble. But this is why this final question in this journal system is so important because if the emotion is just a messenger, what is it trying to tell you? Because the goal of this is to get to the point where you can sit and experience and feel these emotions without doing anything and without creating that meaning. But the issue is not only do most people have a pattern of feeling not wanting to look at it and running to food to distract, but they also have a pattern of feeling an emotion and then creating a narrative and a belief or a story about what it means and it's usually rooted in limitation or in a belief that doesn't serve them. So those are the three questions I want you to start sitting with and journaling about.

[00:06:32]Don't just think about them. Actually sit down and go, "Well, what do I feel?"

[00:06:36]And if you don't know the answer, sit with it longer. Then once you get down your emotions, then we go to, "Well, where do I feel it at?" And then I want you to journal about where you feel it.

[00:06:46]Actually start writing this. No one's looking at this. You're not posting it anywhere. This is literally the equivalent of an emotional dump on paper. And then finally, if that emotion could talk, what's it trying to tell you? Chances are it's about something around safety. It's around that you put too much pressure on yourself or you need to give yourself some grace or I just don't want to get hurt or I just need seen. But again, I don't want you to judge this. I just want you to sit, put all of this on paper and start making this a pattern whenever you feel the urge to emotionally eat. If this is your first time listening to this kind of material, I get it. It feels kind of weird and it doesn't seem why these three questions would be that big of a deal. But you have to understand that the fact of emotional eating is you're using food to distract, numb, or ignore what's coming up. It's like if you feel stressed, we don't want to feel this, we go to food. So this is actually doing the opposite. You are looking at these emotions, listening to them, and actually feeling and processing them.

[00:07:42]So, it goes completely against the pattern of emotional eating. So, what happens over time is you are changing these patterns. Instead of the old pattern being, I feel emotions and run to food out of a reaction, over time the pattern will be feeling emotion, journal about the emotion, then go on my merry way. Because you'll actually take so much of the charge and power away from these emotions because you're not running from them anymore. It's like the old saying goes, that which we resist persists. And when you're running to food or distraction from emotions, that's just resisting them. Where this is looking at them and seeing them and hearing them. We're not trying to fix them. Emotions are not problems to be solved, they're messengers to see, hear, and experience. I know this may sound a little bit too good to be true or almost too airy-fairy, but this is the exact process we use with Sarah to end three and a half decades worth of emotional eating in a matter of a couple months.

[00:08:34]And because we did this before fat loss, ironically, now her belly fat is disappearing right before her eyes because she can actually be consistent without brute forcing this thing anymore. Now, obviously getting completely free around food and transforming your entire body is a very multifaceted process. So, if you've been trying this on your own for years and you have been looking for the right kind of help that gets to the root cause of these struggles, hit the link below to learn more about joining dieting from the inside out.