#142 Jessica Procini – Escape From Emotional Eating

Meet Jessica:

Jessica Procini is on a mission to help high-achieving women who are change-makers heal the roots of their emotional eating so they can use food as fuel rather than a way to cope, soothe and attempt to escape their busy, stressful life.

From over a decade of research into the Psychology of Eating and her own personal emotional eating journey, Jessica consciously created her uniquely effective Escape From Emotional Eating process and programs because Overeaters Anonymous didn’t resonate with her, and the 932 hours she spent in therapy never helped her end her fight with food. Jessica knew there needed to be a different kind of support…one that got to the roots of emotional eating. 

Now being 100% free from her compulsions with food, Jessica helps other high-achieving women do the same through all her levels of support such as her year-long transformational programs, her retreats called the ESCAPE, and through her various public talks, events, and workshops.

Jessica and her work have received awards from the Institute of Psychology of Eating three years in a row. She has appeared in various media outlets such as ABC, CBS, and MindBodyGreen, just to name a few.  For more information about Jessica and her various transformational programs, please visit: www.EscapeFromEmotionalEating.com

Show Notes:

ABOUT JESSICA

• I am the founder and creator of Escape From Emotional Eating
• I am on a high mission to help high achieving women use food as fuel instead of a way to cope, soothe or escape their busy stressful life
• This body of work hat is now called escape from emotional eating really got birthed from my own journey with emotional eating 
• It is such a passion and a mission of mine to help other women just really free themselves from their relationship with food

• I was an emotional eater
• My first memory of emotional eating was from when I was six years old and for more than two decades after that, I just really wrestled with food constantly
• Food was my safety blanket. It was the first thing that I turned to when life got challenging and stressful
• As I got older and more responsibilities got piled on my plate, I just really felt like my relationship with food wasn’t normal – it wasn’t healthy
• I didn’t know I was an emotional eater at the time because I didn’t fit the typical stereotype
• Being an emotional eater, I imagined that you had to either qualify by eating 10 bags of potato chips which I never was able to do but I definitely was out of control with food, and I was definitely using food to fill a hole that food could never fill
• I had tried going to nutrition school and when I realized that I binged my way through nutrition school, I discovered that just more nutritional information is not going to heal my relationship with food 
• I decided to then start teaching fitness classes because I figured, if I could work out all the time then I would fix my issues with food 
• After 900 and something odd hours in therapy, I still was compulsive around food
• It was at that point where I really didn’t overeaters
• People couldn’t really understand what I was going through with food, and I just really felt hopeless and alone
• And basically, my compulsions with food was something I was just going to have to live with for the rest of my life
• It was at that point where everything changed because I dedicated myself to investigating every single nook and cranny of my relationship with food
  
  
• That was where I really discovered the four roots of emotional eating, the four main reasons that not only were triggering my emotional eating but were triggering other people’s too 
• When I focused fully and completely on healing those four roots, that’s where my freedom came from and now it’s been five years since I have emotionally eaten
• Food is really a nourishing asset, I feel at peace around it
• Now,  my relationship with food is, I eat when I’m hungry, I stop when I’m full and I move on and it’s really as simple as that which sounds so crazy because things are so different and so chaotic in the past
• All of that is what has really brought me to my work today
  
• The way that I define emotional eating is using food for a purpose other than fuel 
•  That means if you’re stressed you eat if you’re anxious you eat if you’re overwhelmed you eat, if you’re even overly happy or overjoyed you eat. Those are all common experiences of emotional eating 
• The memory that I have from when I was six years old was when my older brother and I were at a neighbor’s house and my older brother and the neighbor were playing video games and I’m like the little sister bored out of my mind because it’s not fun to watch anyone play video games
• and I just remember sneaking upstairs to the kitchen and going into my neighbor’s kitchen and I had spotted a cookie jar that had homemade chocolate chip cookies with M&M’s in them
• I remember pulling over a chair to the counter and sticking my little six-year-old hand into the cookie jar and eating every single one of those cookies
• I remember putting the lid back on, wiping my face, putting the chair back, and walking back downstairs to where they were playing video games pretending like nothing had happened and yet somehow my brother instantly knew what I did
• Even now as an adult and sort of like coming out about my relationship with food, both of my parents have identified themselves as emotional eaters
• Food was always around because I come from an Italian family. Generations before my parents come from a very addictive cycle
• My parents were never actively engaging in like alcohol as an addiction, they had basically just replaced alcohol with food
• That was very much what was modeled for me, that was how I was basically trained on how to engage with my emotions – don’t feel it, eat it
• That’s everything that I had to undo in order to really heal my relationship with food

• I had spent over 10 years in therapy, and there are a few reasons why therapy really missed the mark for me
• One, the therapists that I saw had no personal experience with emotional eating
• They were coming at the issue from a very clinical perspective without really being able to understand what it actually feels like to be in the skin and in the mind and seeing the world through someone who feels compulsive around food
• Second, it failed to bridge the gap between the mental and the emotional and my relationship with food
• It almost felt like my mental and emotional health were in a sort of like this vacuum or a silo that was very separate from the patterns that I was engaging in with food and that’s something that I’m really passionate about is connecting those dots because I know I’m not the only person that feels like those two things are like on completely different planets and yet they’re so interconnected
• Another way that therapy missed the mark is it didn’t get to the roots of my emotional eating
• There’s so much going on whenever we feel the magnetism towards food and we know we’re not physically hungry
• There is like a whole world underneath the surface of that and that’s everything that I’m really passionate about because there’s only so many times you can hit your head against the wall hoping that the wall will disintegrate or go away when realizing things aren’t working
• There’s just so much more to our relationship with food than what we’re eating
• I saw my options and it was like, I either live with this for the rest of my life which feels awful ot I will figure this out
• I think there’s such missing miseducation when it comes to emotional eating, there’s so much stereotype and there’s so much stigmatism that it’s been compartmentalized with eating disorders
• While emotional eating can sometimes be a sister or a visitor, it is a separate entity
• I do believe that there’s a lot of missing support and treatment to it
  
  
• Emotional eating has many layers and has many deeper roots
• As human beings, we are trained to go towards pleasure and avoid pain but from my experience and what I’ve seen working with emotional eaters is that when we do that with food, it stunts our emotional growth 
• Every time that we are moving away from discomfort or not feeling our feelings, we’re not emotionally healthy but we’re not emotionally growing either 
• Stress and stress eating is just a small surface approach of a much deeper issue
• If we follow someone’s stress all the way down to the root, what we will actually find is fear
• Anytime someone is stressed, anxious, scared, or overwhelmed the root of that is fear
• The behavior and then food just becomes a way to try to mitigate or get away from the feeling of stress in the body
• Food just becomes another problem on top of the existing problem
• In a lot of my work, a lot of the conversations that I’m having with my clients aren’t really about food, it’s not about what’s going in their mouth but it’s about everything that has led them to the experience in the first place
• When I was a fitness instructor, I was about 40 pounds heavier than I am now
• But you’d be surprised how many people who are in health and fitness who have major issues with food
• I don’t have hundreds of pounds to lose but I am definitely an emotional eater

•  I offer three different programs, all with various levels of support but we take  steps no matter what program you’re in
• The first step that I take with all of my clients is what I call, building emotional fitness
• This is all about moving out of a hyper-vigilance stressed out fight-flight free state and into really a rest restore rejuvenate state and the way that I teach my clients to do that is by learning energy management tools
• One of the major reasons why we emotionally eat is because we don’t know how to deal with difficult emotions or circumstances or intense energies
• Then, the next step that we take together is really about untangling physical hunger from emotional hunger
• In healing our emotional eating, we have to untangle the two different types of hunger because they need to be fed and nourished differently
• Our emotional hunger cannot be nourished through food no matter how much we try
• It’s about learning to understand the language of your body both from a physical level and an emotional level
• Then from there, we start to lay a foundation where we can access the deeper roots of emotional eating and this is what really sets my clients up for long-term success
• This is where you know the freedom stays consistent because we’ve gotten to the root of it and healed it right from there

• Emotional eating will only steal things from us
• It’ll steal our energy, our power, our wisdom, our creativity and there’s no place for that in our world today
•  There’s a free video on my website that goes in-depth about what the four roots of emotional eating are and how they may be showing up in your relationship with food and I highly recommend that people go to my website

WHERE CAN PEOPLE FIND YOU?

• Website: escapefromemotionaleating.com
• Blog: https://escapefromemotionaleating.com/blog/
• Programs: https://escapefromemotionaleating.com/healing-programs/

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