POV You're Fist Deep in The Pantry Again

The Pantry Moment

Two different clients, two totally different weeks, told me almost the exact same story.

One was standing in front of her cabinets, digging through them, looking for something sweet. The other was standing in front of the pantry, hand already in a bag of something.

The moment that made me proud as a coach? Both of them stopped and thought the same sentence. I know this pattern. I know where this goes.

I want to sit in that moment for a second, because I think it's more useful than almost anything else that gets said about emotional eating.

The moment nobody talks about

Most advice about "breaking emotional eating" skips straight to the outcome. Don't keep trigger foods in the house. Plan your meals. Manage your stress. All fine, all true, all useless in the exact second you're standing at the counter with your hand already moving.

That second is the actual event. Not the binge. Not the guilt after. The second where some part of you is aware enough to say I know this pattern and some other part of you is already reaching, already in autopilot. Whatever happens next gets decided right there, not before it and not after it.

So when a client tells me this story, I'm not thinking "how do we stop her from ever wanting the thing again." I'm thinking about what happened in that specific window, because that's the skill. Not the absence of the craving. The catch.

What's actually happening in your head

Usually there's a thought running just underneath it, and it's rarely about the food. It's something closer to: well, I already feel fat today, so what's the point? Or, I already messed up, might as well keep going.

I want to be straight with you about what that thought is doing. It's not an observation. It's permission. It's your brain handing you a reason to do the thing you already feel bad about so that the eating stops being a choice and starts being something that just happened to you. It’s making you a victim because being a victim is a lot easier to accept than making a choice that doesn’t align with your goals.

The cycle it feeds is depressingly tidy: you feel bad, you get the "what's the point" thought, you eat past the point of actually wanting to, you feel worse, and the next voice that shows up is louder and meaner than the first one. See, I told you so. Repeat next week.

The skill, one more time

Neither of my clients this week became someone who never wants to eat when they’re stressed. That's not the goal, and it was never going to happen in one conversation, or one year. What changed is they caught it. Hand in the bag, halfway through the reach, and something in them said I know this before the rest of it played out. It’s the pause, the ability to notice patterns, the power to stop yourself from going into autopilot.

I'll admit my own version of this too, because I have one. I know exactly what it feels like to stand in front of my own kitchen with the same thought running. Recognizing it doesn't make me exempt from it. It just means I've had enough reps at catching it that I usually do.

That's the actual work. Not becoming a person who doesn't feel this. Becoming someone who notices it a little earlier, a little more often, and gives themselves one more chance to choose before the pattern finishes on its own.

If this sounds like your Tuesday night more often than you'd like to admit, that's exactly the kind of thing we work on in coaching. Not by teaching you to want it less. By teaching you to catch it sooner.

Olivia Oneid
Coach, Master Athletic Performance