Overcoming Emotional Eating: A Journey Towards Healing with Jessica Procini

What if the battle with food you've been fighting can finally come to an end? What if emotional eating is not the prison sentence you believed it to be? This episode brings you a remarkable conversation with Jessica Procini, a woman whose quest to escape from emotional eating is nothing short of inspiring. Jessica's tenacious spirit led her to create her own healing framework after conventional methods failed. Her journey is a testament to resilience and determination and serves as a ray of hope for anyone walking a similar path.

Other episodes mentioned:
Emotional Eating with Dr. Dee

Timestamps to help you navigate this episode:
(0:01) Reclaiming Power Over Emotional Eating
(10:41) Emotional Fitness and Ceasing Food War
(20:45) Sponsor: Snap Supplements 25% OFF using code LUNDEN25
(24:20) Exploring Emotional Processing Techniques
(24:39) Supporting Emotional Eaters and Loved Ones
(45:27) Spreading Self Love and Support

Together, we unpack the tools Jessica uses to help her clients build emotional fitness. We discuss trigger retraining, an innovative method that breaks the loop of compulsive behavior, and the importance of tangible tools that can be utilized in the midst of day-to-day life. Moreover, we explore emotional processing techniques that include putting pen to paper and focusing on core emotions.

Towards the end, we tackle the often delicate task of providing support to someone struggling with emotional eating. We deliberate on how to offer help without shaming or rushing, and how to cultivate patience and presence. We also address the importance of creating an environment that fosters acceptance and understanding, promoting growth and healing. This episode is not just for those battling emotional eating, but also for those who wish to stand by them in their journey towards healing. So, tune in and let's set the table for a healthier relationship with food.

Connect with Jessica Procini:
IG: @jessprocini
https://escapefromemotionaleating.com
https://www.youtube.com/c/JessicaProcini

Chapters

• 0:01 Reclaiming Power Over Emotional Eating
• 10:41 Emotional Fitness and Ceasing Food War
• 20:45 Sponsor: Snap Supplements 25% OFF using code LUNDEN25
• 24:20 Exploring Emotional Processing Techniques
• 34:39 Supporting Emotional Eaters and Loved Ones
• 45:27 Spreading Self Love and Support

Transcript

Lunden Souza: 2:13

Welcome back to the podcast. Today's guest is Jessica Procini, and Jessica is on a mission to help high achieving women heal the roots of their emotional eating. When overeaters, anonymous and therapy weren't enough to help her end her fight with food, she spent 10 years in research before developing her signature healing framework, escape from Emotional Eating, which has helped women reclaim their power over food. Now that she's been 100% free from her compulsions with food for over five years, jessica helps female entrepreneurs and executives do the same at escape from eating. Escape from emotional eating dot com. Jessica, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here and for what you do in the world.

Lunden Souza: 2:59

When overeaters anonymous and therapy weren't enough, you went on a quest. Tell us about this 10 year journey of finding tools that you feel like were so helpful that you decided to share them with the world, right, So help us understand that a bit more in your journey.

Jessica Procini: 3:19

Yeah. So once I got over the shock that I was indeed an emotional eater because that was such a hurdle to jump, because if you look at me from the outside, you would never assume that I had any issues with food I didn't have hundreds of pounds to lose. I already had multiple certifications in holistic health and integrative nutrition. I was teaching fitness classes full time at the time, so you would have never guessed that I had this secret that I was an emotional eater. Once I understood that and really said, okay, what's next? I really started searching and searching and searching for support that was going to help me get to the root of my problem. And I was coming up with nothing. I knew that overeaters anonymous was just not the place for me. It really didn't resonate. I knew that just traditional health coaching wasn't enough to get to the real roots because I was already eating healthy, i was already moving my body consistently. There was missing pieces I needed to get to And therapy was great from a mental and emotional standpoint, but it never connected the dots to how it's showing up in my relationship with food. So I searched and I searched and I searched and I really kind of hit this rock bottom, or this choice point of what the heck is wrong with me, why can't I figure this out And what am I going to do? And I really saw that I had two options. The first option was that I could just give up, that I could just throw up my hands and say, i guess this is something I have to live with, i guess it's just my cross to bear, like my thing, and just kind of learn to deal with it but not heal it. And then I saw my other option was that I could refuse to settle, that I could just not give up to do whatever it takes and to potentially even live my life trying to heal this, even if I don't know if that outcome is doable for me. And I literally saw my future play out on the movie screen of my mind. First the future of if I throw out my hands and just say, like I just have to learn to live with this. And I saw myself getting older, i saw life getting harder And I saw myself really living in a secret hell. And then the other option of refusing to settle.

Jessica Procini: 6:21

It wasn't crystal clear. I really didn't know what that meant at the time, but I knew, i could feel I could sense that there was like hope and possibility and it felt light, and it was in that moment that I made what seems like such a subtle choice, but it really changed everything And I chose to refuse to settle, and I always come back to that moment because it really is the moment that changed my entire life from there on out. It's what brought me to investigate every single nook and cranny of my relationship with food. It's what brought me to identifying patterns and really eventually getting to this body of work. Now, that's all about the four roots of emotional eating And it's really what brought me to not only heal my relationship with food but help the hundreds of other people, the thousands of other people that I've helped, heal theirs as well And, ultimately, the creation of escape from emotional eating. So yeah, my story is long, but I would say that is really where the tide changed was in that seemingly subtle and very simple moment of that choice point.

Lunden Souza: 7:49

Yeah, that I love the way that you shared that. First of all, thank you. And I love the recognition of the choice point of like, okay, i need to choose something And by not choosing anything, i'm actually choosing something right And that inaction. There's also choice. And so, knowing that you decided to refuse to settle despite the unknown right, you're like I believed in that possible future of self, but I'm not exactly sure what she looks like, what she's doing day to day, and that picture shall be painted, but I don't know exactly. I'm just going to step into it And I just think that's so beautiful.

Lunden Souza: 8:28

You said I wrote down secret because you mentioned that you felt like you had this secret or this, yeah, the secret, if you will something shameful that, like you said, from the surface no one would notice or know, potentially, that there was something with food going on. And one thing that you said before we press record, you were like, hey, let's like not just scratch the surface, like go beyond the surface, because I have talked about on a previous podcast episode about different types of emotional eating, which is a wonderful episode as well, but I would also say it's very surface, because we go down a few different avenues of types of emotional eating, and I think it's a great introduction. But what does it mean for you to go beyond the surface, and how can we go beyond the surface today?

Jessica Procini: 9:21

Well, i think we need to take a look at the things that we say to ourself about our relationship with food and to be really honest about what is going on in our relationships with food and what are the pieces that we are actually, or the places we are actually using food as a way to tear ourselves down or hold ourselves back or to soothe our emotions instead of how can we use food as the medicine, as the support, as this beautiful asset that we have in our lives to really fuel and embody the energy and the life that we want to live?

Jessica Procini: 10:09

So I think that a great place to start is just really approaching a thing that a lot of people think is like well, i should be able to figure this out on my own.

Jessica Procini: 10:22

Like it's because emotional eating can be such a shameful secret and it has a lot of stigma around it and has a lot of embarrassment, especially for those of us who strive for excellence will immediately follow it up with, like I know so much. Like I should just be able to figure this out. But the truth is is that, at the core, our relationship with food, your relationship with food and your body, is a relationship between you and yourself And if you're engaging in any kind of self-destructive behavior, then you are essentially at war between you and yourself. So we need someone, something outside of ourselves, to step in and mediate and ceasefire that war, because we are at war with ourselves And that's where having outside support in the abundance of ways that it's available to us now to help us navigate and stop the war and actually build patterns, behaviors, habits and have tools to change Yeah, and I love the terminology, or at least it really resonates like stop the war and ceasefire And the acknowledgement that there's.

Lunden Souza: 11:51

We can't do it on our own. Sometimes. There's certain things we can know better and do better, and there are certain things where we need that pattern interrupt from a helpful source, right, so that's what you're creating with what you're doing, and so how are you helping people ceasefire, calm the war? What are the specific tools and strategies that you didn't find in overeaters, anonymous, and you didn't find really in conventional therapy, that you're finding with the thousands of people that you're working with? It's like, oh, this is good shit, like this, right here. You know what I mean. Yeah, i think when you find that for yourself and then you also realize this is, you know, working with others, not just in my neighborhood, but like others, i think that's really so amazing. So I want to know more about that.

Jessica Procini: 12:40

Yeah Well, what differentiates my work from any other emotional eating support out there? It starts with the first step, And the first step that we take together is all about building emotional fitness. So in our world today we spend so much time and energy building physical fitness And it does have an impact on our inner world but rarely are we really looking at expanding our capacity to build resilience and be resilient. So in this phase of our work and from the work that I do with my clients, it's really about learning how to shift from a fight, flight free state, especially if we're feeling emotional, and shift into a rest, restore, rejuvenate state, so that anxiety and hyper vigilance is no longer our constant mode of operation but instead we are coming from a more calm, a more grounded, a more connected place. So that's like step one is teaching my clients how to build that emotional fitness, And we do it through a series of tools that I've created, like digesting emotions and the fear flash and trigger retraining.

Jessica Procini: 14:03

So there's actual tangible tools that in between sessions they can reach for, that they are using to build those muscles. Just like if you would go work with a personal trainer they're going to give you exercises to do. For me it's more of like I'm your emotional trainer and I'm going to give you exercises to do to elevate your level of resilience. So, when the hard time comes, you can stay in the middle of the chaos and not use food to escape, not use things to numb, but you just stay calm in the middle of the chaos.

Lunden Souza: 14:44

Yeah, i have an example I want to share that maybe is this I don't know if it is but you mentioned a few different modalities, but the trigger retraining. So I have a friend who's also a coach and she shared this story extensively in her coaching. So I know she wouldn't mind if I share this. But she mentions she used to have a binge eating disorder as well. She mentions remembering driving in the car and then, like turning into the grocery store where she'd normally get donuts or cookies or whatever she would binge on.

Lunden Souza: 15:15

And she would drive in this loop and be like, nope, i'm strong enough to not do it. And she'd go maybe four, five, six times in this loop, multiple times, until she'd finally go in the grocery store park, get in, get her food and just go to town. And she also shared the moment that she realized she was not compelled by that, where it was no longer a magnet to need to loop around. She can enjoy what she needed when she wanted to. And she shared that dichotomy. And so would that be like trigger retraining and those pattern loops or in those moments where you find yourself like, oh, i'm going to go in there. Nope, i'm not, you know, i just find that's like you're kind of in this orbit.

Lunden Souza: 15:52

It gives me very like a orbit feeling when she described it and Yeah, would that be something that you work through in this category of trigger retraining? Am I getting that point across or like you know what I mean?

Jessica Procini: 16:05

Yeah, but what I really want to highlight and pick out of this is that when we retrain our triggers, it's not about muscling through our triggers. It's about going past the same thing and having a completely different experience, one where we don't have to muscle. So a similar example is I used to have this thing with granola. It was like healthy granola. It was made by these women who I went to nutrition school with. It was like made with chia seeds and you know, it was like healthy granola And I could literally go through a bag in a matter of seconds. Like matter of seconds. My hand would hit the bottom of the bag and I would be looking around like who ate all the granola? It was me And I eventually stopped buying the granola because I couldn't control myself around it And yours went on and I did, like my healing work and my healing journey.

Jessica Procini: 17:12

And about a year or two ago, i was food shopping and I passed by that very same granola and I had this moment of like, oh my God, like hello, old friend, i know you And I actually bought it and I brought it home and I had a bowl and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And at that point I'd already, you know, healed and been multiple years free from my emotional eating and kind of just went on with my life. And then, a few weeks later, my husband and I were cleaning out our pantry and he pulls out the bag of granola and he's like, are you done with this? And when we looked in the bag it was full of mold, like it had been in the pantry for so long that it had grown mold. So and it's not that I was resisting it, and it's not that I was like feeling the compulsion or the magnetism and trying to muscle through it It's that my internal experience was so different than what it was when I couldn't even keep it in my house.

Jessica Procini: 18:30

That, and that's what I really believe true freedom from food is really about. But it's not about avoiding the things that are triggering to us. It's about awakening to the blessings and the messages that are underneath the emotional charge, because what I believe is that our triggers are treasures. They're like highlighters from the universe saying wake up, wake up, pay attention, look at this So many people are afraid of, like this sting of a trigger. They're so afraid of, like the electricity that runs through our body when we are triggered, that they want to leave, they want to escape, They want to run away. So it's about supporting my clients and having that emotional capacity to look underneath the hood, to look underneath the surface So we can really discover what it is that we really need, because emotional eating is a sign that there is a need that is not being met. But oftentimes we're misinterpreting our bodies and our minds messages and therefore using food or other substances in a misaligned way.

Lunden Souza: 19:56

Misinterpreting the messages. I also love what you said about emotional fitness Wonderful And also how I felt when I switched from only fitness coaching to life coaching, mindset, nlp and all of those things. What does emotional fitness look like for somebody who's working to retrain a lot of these patterns? when it comes to emotional eating, is there stuff that someone listening now could already start today in their journey? Is there things that you still do today, where you're like this will always be a part of my emotional fitness journey as somebody who's experienced extreme emotional eating? Like what is that? What specific, let's say, treasure tools from your trauma Have you aggregated?

Lunden Souza: 20:45

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Jessica Procini: 22:44

So the path to building and maintaining emotional fitness is using the tools, to use the tools and to really access your toolbox consistently. That doesn't mean that we stick with the tool for now and forever, but it's about knowing yourself and what's going on and knowing your equipment. So what you reach for is going to support you in those hard times, because what we're currently reaching for, what you're currently reaching for, is food and it's not supporting you. So we need a better way, a healthier way, to support ourselves in those hard times.

Jessica Procini: 23:28

So my like emotional fitness is just really built into my life and my lifestyle. in the same way that I move my body consistently to really be present in it, i move my emotions to be present in my body. If there's a lot of like emotional energy to the point where I can get emotionally overwhelmed, that's where I will literally leave my body. So the same tools that I teach, like digesting emotions, is something that I am consistently reaching for, even now, because we are forever going to be emotional. So it's about staying in touch with those. Does that answer your question?

Lunden Souza: 24:22

Yeah, and I would just love if maybe specifically there's like are there a breathwork? Is it a lot of journaling? Is it meditation? Is it visualization? Like what are some of the let's say umbrella terms to some of the modalities that you use? I know you said digesting emotions, but I don't think outside of Yeah, I think it's a wonderful digesting emotions, Like I can get that, but like what specifically might you be doing when you're digesting emotions?

Jessica Procini: 24:49

Yeah, so a lot of my tools are pen to paper. They don't really fit into categories because they are category of their own.

Lunden Souza: 25:02

So when you mean sorry, when you say pen to paper, do you mean like journaling, Do you mean like writing?

Jessica Procini: 25:07

Writing I don't want to say journaling, because that's like comes with a whole other bunch of baggage, but it is pen to paper. And the main reason why is because for us, as emotional eaters, we can be like sponges and be absorbing so much emotional energy or emotional intensity not only from ourselves but from other people, and pen to paper is the first way to be able to get it up and out. Yes, talking is another way to digest and digest emotions, but that can often cause us to be dependent on someone else being available to receive that. So pen to paper is always available. It's a kinesthetic process and it supports people in getting it literally up and out, so that their body is not the container of everything.

Jessica Procini: 26:11

So, depending on what tool we're using, there'll be a certain like, certain steps that they follow. So, for example, the first step of digesting emotions is just what are you feeling? And the work that I do we focus on the five major emotions, because there are so many emotions and so many things we can feel that that can often lead to emotional overwhelm. So we paint with the five basic emotions mad, sad, glad, scared, bad and start there again to help eliminate emotional overwhelm and to be able to just immediately reconnect with ourselves in the process.

Lunden Souza: 27:04

Cool, cool. I love how you said writing and not journaling, and I'm sure you have. Yeah, i like both words are fine for me, at least, neutral in my feeling, but when it comes to writing, i love written exposure therapy. I don't know if you're familiar with that in particular, but that's an awesome modality that I found in the research that I've used for myself and for clients And it's wonderful. Like you said, pen to paper, your body's not the container of it all, and what I love about it is you're writing about the intense experience and you're also writing the because, because this happened, i get to make it mean, and here's my hero's story and journey because of this, and so usually what happens is I'm writing and there's so much to write, right, you're like there's so much to the story, but as you keep going back to that story and writing it at least in my experience and the people that I've worked with it's like you become more detached from the intensity of the story And I always say I feel like at the end I can fold the paper of the story and put it in my pocket. It feels very organized, it feels very like yeah, less, like it's taking up less space And what I've done, which is felt really good. I guess I'll just share this because it's been helpful.

Lunden Souza: 28:25

But I go through a lot of journals and I travel a lot And so we're like the actual physical, the journal, and so I've been tearing out the pages of the story, keeping the because, like keeping the little paragraph of what I'm going to make it mean, and then burning the rest. It was a suggestion from someone. They're like maybe you should just burn this because I feel like it's and I'm like carrying all these journals with me because I'm like this is like the story of my life. I've been writing this shit out for months And I love it and it's helpful.

Lunden Souza: 28:53

But there was a part of me that was like, okay, i need to let it go in some way And I'm not going to just like throw it. So I had a moment on the beach where I was able to tear it out and throw it away, and so those becausees that I have created based on different stories I've written through, are so amazing And, yeah, they do feel like my body is not the container of it all, like it is more organized and systemized And it's actually something I can use. Right, i can take that because and have a little bit of momentum instead of a loop there. Okay, one thing I want to ask.

Jessica Procini: 29:22

Can I interrupt? So I love that you brought up the physicalization of removal, because that's actually where the name the fear flesh for one of the tools that I teach came from, because there are certain things that I might be processing that like I literally need to let go of. And I live in Center City, philadelphia, where there's a lot of old buildings, and at the time I was living in like a multiple hundred year old building and I never felt comfortable burning because the building is so old. So my second option was to flush it down the toilet. So that's where the name fear flesh came from.

Jessica Procini: 30:13

And it really is so funny, because the way I think about emotional fitness and emotional resilience is in the same way that our bodies have to physically go to the bathroom, so do our emotional bodies, so do our mental bodies. So that's where pen to paper is really helpful, because it gives us quite literally the container and then we get to decide what to do with it. Do we keep it? Do we bring it to our sessions with our you know, our coaches? Do we flush it? Do we burn it? You know, like there it gives us agency of. I get to choose what to do with this, rather than feeling like a victim to it, and rather than feeling so overwhelmed because we're feeling five different feelings at once.

Lunden Souza: 31:07

Yes, And it's helped me.

Lunden Souza: 31:09

you know, share. I feel like in a not that we don't, you know, deserve to have friends, or we can just like dump and be like, oh, this app, you know. but I feel like I've had good connections with close friends and people. I love being able to share some of those because is with them, you know, because it's a little bit more concise and clear and, you know, emotionally I don't want to say neutral because it is charged, but it's just like we've spent some time with it. So it's it's clear and concise And I think that's helped me open up a bit more once I've had more clarity, kind of, about what it means for me to share with friends and people that I love of like, yeah, this happened. no, not need to go into all the details because, quite frankly, they're not holding on to me anymore, But here's kind of what I made it mean and here's kind of how I'm navigating that. So I feel like acknowledging some of those stories within myself has helped me connect with others even more And that's been really beautiful too.

Jessica Procini: 32:08

Yeah, and it's what I've also noticed is that it allows you to be witnessed without having our friends or family members be the fixer right. Because when we haven't like spent time with ourselves and what we're feeling and we're just kind of spewing or venting, it puts the other person in a very like, what do you want me to do with this? Like, do you want me to listen, do you want advice? And and a lot of people won't be direct and asking for what they need. But when we spend that time with ourselves, like you're saying, it's like there's that level of ownership of here's what I'm going through And I just want you to witness me and see me in it And if, if you do need support, if you do need advice, then you can be more proactive in asking for it. But when we don't have that emotional fitness or even that emotional consciousness, it can put relationships into interesting positions that they may not even be equipped to support. With Love it.

Lunden Souza: 33:21

Thanks for sharing that So good. I want to touch on what you said about feelings, because I actually have a different experience than what you've said And I just want to chat on it a little bit. So, when it comes to feelings, what I found for myself and for some clients I've worked with and friends and stuff, is that the basic emotions are sometimes limiting. And I felt like me personally, i was always sad and angry because those were the words that I was using to describe And there were so many instances, when I look back in the history of London, where, like, sadness and anger were prevalent. And I remember I was introduced to something called the feelings wheel It's like feelingswheelcom and in this colorful wheel.

Lunden Souza: 34:07

And when I saw that, coupled with reading Brené Brown's book Atlas of the Heart, having more words for emotions was so helpful Because I was like, oh, i wasn't angry, that was like a little bit of resentment coupled with a little bit of And while they weren't necessarily desirable feelings, i wanted to keep all the time right, i didn't want to keep resentment at the forefront. It was helpful to be like oh no, actually these were like it felt more like a dance rather than a straight line down, always being X, y or Z. Now it could be different with when it comes to emotional eating and the mindset that comes surrounding that, and that's not my area of expertise or what I work with day to day. So is that different? when someone's struggling with emotional eating, is it first better to kind of, let's say, chunk up to some of the basic emotions and then be able to chunk down specifically once it feels a little bit more safe?

Jessica Procini: 35:00

Yeah, So usually for emotional eaters like there, there isn't a very wide range of emotional language, So introducing all of these words would be like someone learning a hundred words of vocabulary in Spanish when they don't even know how to say my name is. So I think it really and this is like something that's pretty fundamental in my work is that I don't believe one size fits all And like I can give guidelines and I can say this is what I recommend. But I think this is what I love so much about my work with my clients and why I continue to work in such an intimate one-on-one way is because it's not one size fits all. So if we were working together and you said you know what that feels really limiting, then we can make a tweak, we can make a shift to make it work better for you. But I have a sense, London, that you are pretty advanced when it comes to your emotional language and your emotional self-awareness.

Jessica Procini: 36:15

And I'm not saying that emotional eaters aren't self-aware or have a really articulated emotional language. But if you've spent 20 years of your life numbing and just putting food on top of anything that you're feeling, usually in 99% of the time, if we open the bandwidth to hundreds of words or hundreds of feelings, they will immediately shut down out of overwhelm. So what tends to happen is we start with the first five and then, and then, if they're noticing that they're feeling things that aren't in those first five, it's about starting to give language for what it is that they're feeling, even if it's outside of the box, because that's valid too.

Lunden Souza: 37:13

Yeah, yeah, and starting kind of in that center space and then, when they're ready or feel like it's safe, to explore other feelings and what that might be, totally makes sense. And yeah, like you said, just different experiences being able to calibrate as a coach is wonderful, so I'm sure you do an amazing job at that, which is why you're helping so many people. How can? So, yeah, we talked a lot to potentially people who are listening, who are emotionally eating, and we've given some powerful resources and strategies and hopefully, i would say, kindly nudged to them in your direction or into modalities that are like yours. Right, what about somebody listening who is witnessing the emotional eating patterns as destructive and someone that they love? How do you support them? How do you let them know that you know and you want to be there to support them and you can't fix it? What's a great way that someone listening that might want to support someone in their life that way could be more supportive?

Jessica Procini: 38:23

Yeah, this is really tricky because, especially when it comes to adult to adult, we want what's best for our loved ones and we can't rush someone's healing. It can be really hard to witness someone in a self-destructive pattern, but it would work against you to try to put something on someone when they're still very much in a place of denial or still in a place of figuring out what it is. So when the person is ready, or perhaps they're sharing with you, you can say things like you know, i hear you. This sounds really difficult and have you looked into getting help around it and just starting to open the question to like definitely not shame them, right? Because that's not going to get anywhere. And I would say not even taking it to the point of like, oh, everyone does that.

Jessica Procini: 39:35

Because that was something that I really experienced is I would try to share. You know how much I ate or how, like just how sick I fell, and people would just brush me off Like everyone does that. Come on, let's go work out. And it actually put me, trapped me in the cycle for longer, because I thought what I was doing was normal when it wasn't. So I think part of it is practicing patience, part of it is practicing loving the person, no matter what they choose to do, because that really is, ultimately, our role is just to be a heart with yours, from friend to friend or, you know, family member to family member.

Jessica Procini: 40:20

And then you can't like, if you're listening to this and someone you love comes to mind, forward this episode to them.

Jessica Procini: 40:29

You know, tell them about the resources that you know about and share those resources, even if it's not for you specifically, because that's honestly how people find what they need, as someone tells them something. And I had a client who was sharing with her friend and her friend just happened to be my ballet teacher and like did it, like kind of knew a little bit about my work, but not really, and then ended up like referring her to me and she tells me so much how grateful she is to her friend who shared me as a resource with her because it changed her life. So this is a complicated question that we really have to be willing to be in the process with, because everybody is different. There are people who are knowing that they're doing emotional eating and are not ready to change it. They are just very much in the trenches and there's value in being in that place, but if you are ready, then someone like me can help you take those next steps.

Lunden Souza: 41:56

Yeah, and what I'm hearing you say, those are all super amazing. Yeah, valuable tips for sure, but as you can't expedite somebody else's process as an outsider not being the person we can't expedite it, and I love that. You said be a heart with ears. I drew it. See, my heart with ears. Oh, i love it. It's so cute. I love that.

Lunden Souza: 42:19

It's our job to be a heart with ears, and I think that in my experience not knowing what a heart with ears is, but in attempting to be what I would consider a heart with ears, requires a lot of work on self, too, to not project and like you should do this and you need to be doing this, and you need to go here and fix this and call this person, and I think that that's where the beauty of the connectedness of each other comes through. Some of this pain is like, okay, yeah, in order to be that heart with ears and to not try to expedite your process, i gotta work on what's triggered in me about trying to fix you, and that's what I've found within this dance of yeah, just working on me while others are working on them too. And I'm so grateful that you said heart with ears. That's gonna forever change my life and the way that I think about my head number one.

Lunden Souza: 43:08

I'm gonna think about my head as a heart because, even when I'm thinking I don't know it's funny When people can say things that can change our visual representation. I just I'm grateful for that. So maybe whoever's listening to this too, you can just lock that in like heart with ears. Am I being a heart with ears? in moments where we wanna, you should, or we wanna tell someone how to, you know, manage their journey or try to put the FedEx expedite sticker on their process, i think it's good reminder to ask ourselves if we're being a heart with ears. Yeah, jessica, thank you so much for all you shared today. I appreciate you so much. I know our listeners do as well. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanna share? and also let us know how we can connect with you further and potentially get support from you?

Jessica Procini: 43:52

Yeah, So first, thank you so much for having me and having this deeper conversation about emotional eating and our relationship to food and ourselves. There really is so much more. I could talk for literally years about this, and what I wanted to share with everyone is that there is a free assessment, called the clarity quiz, to getting to the four roots of emotional eating. So if anything that I shared today resonated with you, i invite you to come on over to innerworkme and take the free self-assessment to get to the root of what is going on in your emotional eating, and it'll also supply you with a beginner's guide and additional resources and tools to get started. So that can be a really great next step If you're looking to like not just talk about it but start to change your relationship with food. So that's innerworkme and we can be connected through there, but home base for me is escapefromemotionaleatingcom.

Lunden Souza: 45:05

Perfect. Thank you so much. I'll link everything that Jessica mentioned in the show notes in the description so you can just click it and take the quiz or get connected with her to do some coaching. And yeah, i really like the call to action of just share this episode with someone who you feel like their ears could use it today. right, i think we share, you know, oh, did you see this lipstick I got at Target or this thing I got on sale. It's like let's let this episode be something that we can pass on today as a token of love and support for someone that we think might need to listen to it today. So, thank you, jessica, for all that you do, thank you, guys for listening and we'll see you at the next episode.

Lunden Souza: 45:46

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of self love and sweat the podcast. Hey, do me a favor wherever you're listening to this podcast, give us a review This really helps a lot And share this with a friend. I'm only one person and with your help, we can really spread the message of self love and sweat and change more lives all around the world. I'm London Suza, reminding you that you deserve a life full of passion, presence and purpose, fueled by self love and sweat. This podcast is a hit spot. Austria production.