Overeating. Overdrinking. Can’t sleep.
You think the problem is your willpower or discipline, or hectic life, or your brain.
It’s not.
It’s a skill you never built because nobody ever told you it was important, or how to do it, when and why.
In my 20s, I struggled with emotional eating.
Stress from studies, work, relationships would pile up, and I’d feel this pull toward food. Like it could cushion me. Protect me. Ground me when everything felt like it was spinning out of control. I didn’t know such words as stress, emotional management, self-regulation.
It was just an urge I couldn’t control.
It was controlling me.
It wasn’t constant. But it was consistent. Every week or two, I’d have an episode — eating until my stomach hurt. Eating past the point of full, past the point of comfort, into something that felt almost like punishment.
I thought it was a willpower problem. A discipline problem. A me problem.
I told myself I’d do better next time. That it was the last time.
New life. New me. Starting Monday.
It never worked.
Because the next time stress hit — the next time anxiety crept in or something emotionally overwhelmed me (I wouldn’t have even had that language for it back then, I just knew: I need to eat, right now, a lot) — it would happen again.
Because I didn’t change myself just by thinking about it. Or wishing for it. So the behavior didn’t magically change either.
Being in the fitness modeling world didn’t help. I was a trainer. I was supposed to have my sh*t together. So I’d swing from a binge episode straight into another strict diet — some fad keto thing, another low-carb experiment, or counting obsessively my macros — disciplining my way through the week until the next stress hit.
And then, guided by luck and a few smart people, I found my way into stress management coaching and nutrition counseling.
That’s when everything started to change.
I realized there was nothing wrong with me. I just didn’t have any skills or habits to manage my stress, my difficult emotions, my anxiety and my worries. Nobody taught me this at school. If they had, I would have known — I was a straight-A student.
So I learned. I learned what stress actually is. What it does to your body, your brain, your emotions. I learned strategies to work with it — physically, emotionally, psychologically. I also learned that the way I was eating — swinging between binges and restrictive diets — was contributing to my stress and making the cycle worse.
And then I practiced. I built new habits. I built new responses. I learned what it actually meant and why it was important to eat a balanced diet.
A year or two in, something remarkable happened.
Food lost its grip on me.
I was free!
I learned how to eat to keep myself well — physically, emotionally, mentally. No diet. No guru. Just a bit more skill: self-care, stress management, emotional regulation, and actually understanding what my body needs versus what some Instagram plan says it should need.
18 years later. I’ve had my six-pack for a decade but that’s not the part that matters the most.
The best thing is that I can eat a piece of cake without needing to eat the whole thing. When stress comes, I don’t feel the need to numb it with food. My smile always comes from the inside. And I haven’t needed a diet ever since!
That’s been pretty remarkable.
And those skills didn’t just change ME around food. They changed how I approached and dealt with the whole life.
Here are the 5 strategies I learned about, practiced, taught to my clients. Not to “fix” yourself. But to build the skill set you were never given to set yourself free from habits that don’t actually serve you.
1. Sit with discomfort.
Every morning I take a cold shower or a cold plunge. Not because I love it. Because it trains my brain to stay calm inside discomfort. To know: this will pass, it’s ok. I will not die from an uncomfortable feeling. In fact, the more you sit with it — without reacting, without numbing — the faster it moves through you.
2. Breathe.
4 counts in. 8 counts out. Repeat 5 times. Eyes closed, body softening, relaxing a little more with each exhale. What you’re doing is switching your nervous system from fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest. That’s the state where urges lose their urgency. Where you get your choice back.
3. Write it all down.
Dump everything onto the page. The worry. The anger. The fear. The frustration. All of it. Brain dump, uncensored. This isn’t journaling for reflection — it’s neurological first aid. Writing activates your prefrontal cortex, the thinker, and deactivates your amygdala, the fear center. Translation: it moves you from autopilot reaction to actual thinking. From “I need to eat the entire fridge right now” to “okay. what’s actually going on here?”
4. Productively distract yourself.
Take a shower. Go for a walk. Nap for 30 minutes. Dance your ass off in the kitchen. Change your physical state and your emotional state follows. The body leads. Let it.
5. Don’t starve yourself.
This one’s underrated. You don’t have to keep yourself hungry OR binge. These are NOT the only 2 choices. Have a banana. A protein shake. A piece of fish. Some warm milk with honey.
SloOOOOOOOOw it all down.
Manage your blood sugar. Take the edge off. Give your stomach something to work with before the craving turns into a wave that overtakes you.
And then, go live your life.
Act on what you can control. Put down the rest. It was never yours to carry.
And remember that these are habits. That means they get better with repetition, better overtime, at first they feel awkward and imperfect, until they feel like a second skin.
And then one day, they’ll just be what you do. And teach others.
And then there will be freedom from all the urges you thought you needed to win.
What’s in your stress management toolkit, and what’s one thing you could practice this toolkit on today?