From Emotional Eating to Empowered Living with Megan Gaul & Manon on The Healers Café

so much that goes into where your weight ends up, and it’s not definitely not all emotional, definitely not all behavioral. There’s so many pieces to it, but I find that a lot of the folks that I work with have run the gamut of trying to find everything mentally wrong,

Manon Bolliger  06:35

exactly. No, and there’s plenty of those, right? Like, yes. Then you go, what’s wrong with me, right? Like, why am I like this, or you know? And how do I change habits, right? It’s one thing to acknowledge you got habits, but you know who’s going to keep you, you know, accountable to the change of the habits, right?

Magan Gaul  06:57

Yeah, and I like to most of the folks I start chatting with, before we work together, they will say these are the things that I know are holding me back, you know, they already have decided it is this behavior or this thought circle that always brings me back to doing these eating behaviors, and so that’s where, where I want to create the change, so in that case, you know they’ve done, they’ve done all the background research that they need to do, they already know what they want to do,

Manon Bolliger  07:26

right. So, can you share like a common mental behavior or loop, or whatever, that you know, like obviously people find you as they find everyone at the right time for what they need, you know, and, and thankfully, a lot of people do their research, so they kind of know what they need, so that helps. But let’s say they find you, and you’re they’re the perfect client for you, and you’re the perfect person for them. What are the types of things that come up that you resolve or help resolve.

Magan Gaul  08:09

So, one thing that I see often is this is a very kind of very common one, is that kind of the weekends are not a part of my plan. The weekends I just do my best, and that’s all that I can hope for. So, I often see that folks who have a really strong weekday habit, they’ve got, you know, their work responsibilities, their home responsibilities, they can line in any diet or any food change that they want to make, they can put it slot it right into those weekdays, but once a really unstructured day hits, like a Saturday, or like a day where they’re not working, they feel very adrift, and so that’s when a lot of the kind of boredom eating or grazing kind of behaviors happen that often derail what they were trying to do in the weekdays.

Manon Bolliger  09:06

I see. Okay,

Magan Gaul  09:07

so and some of that thought cycle is I deserve to rest without over planning every moment of my life, which it’s a very enticing thought circle to me too, yeah. So that’s one where it’s really interesting to find out how they define rest and whether any of the activities that go into having a more structured weekend, whether that can feel aligned to what they want to do, so there’s all sorts of ways we can put a kind structure or a relaxed structure into a weekend to make it work better for their goal and stop undoing what they did during the week.

Manon Bolliger  09:53

Okay, so in a sense you’re working with the meaning they have. Behind things, in a sense, right? Like, if we’re using the word structured, so the weakest structured, and by nature, because it’s unstructured, it means that there’s no parameters, they don’t know what to do, but then there’s those who believe that that’s what they deserve, right? I actually like to go down the road of that’s what they deserve. What do you do with those people?

Magan Gaul  10:28

So then it becomes a one I love to validate, like you deserve everything, like I agree. Wait, we all have lives that are full of suffering, right? So, of course, there’s we deserve relief from that suffering, and then the question becomes, How do you want to get that for yourself? So, there’s a short-term relief of having that unstructured Saturday, you know, where you can stay in bed as long as you want, or where you don’t have to put the meal prep together, you know, that’s one kind of relief from suffering, but there’s other suffering that’s happening too. There’s the, the, you know, the pain that you feel getting up in the morning, or there’s the pain of having to, you know, get the seat belt extender on the airplane. You kind of get to choose where you want that relief to come in, and you’ve always chosen this way. So, is there a different way you want to choose? So I like to, I like to understand, you know, once I pose that, usually the client will have some kind of reaction of where that’s like kind of bumping against a value that they have, and so that’s a great place to unravel there too,

Manon Bolliger  11:43

right? So, so the value they would have is I’m assuming one would be freedom, like they don’t want to be told what to do, or or it shouldn’t be this hard, right, like that kind of thing, right?

Magan Gaul  12:01

Yeah,

Manon Bolliger  12:02

like, why do all these other people don’t have to worry about that kind of thing, right? Like, so, so, how do you deal with that?

Magan Gaul  12:09

So, and that’s a common one too, like,

Manon Bolliger  12:11

yeah, it

Magan Gaul  12:12

shouldn’t be this hard is a fascinating thought circle that that often leads to giving up the actions that were working, so it means I back away from doing my meal planning, or I back away from, you know, eating the meal that I know would have worked for me today. So, what I like to do when someone feels that, what was the.. how did you phrase

Manon Bolliger  12:38

it? What did I say, like something about why me? Why does this have to happen to me, or why? Why it’s like you’re the victim of it, you know, kind of.

Magan Gaul  12:51

Yes, yes,

Manon Bolliger  12:52

yeah.

Magan Gaul  12:52

So I like to, I like to kind of poke at how true it is in all circumstances. So I like to kind of ask, is that true all the time, you know? And what is the evidence for it? Where, where do you see the evidence pop up for you? Is it true for, you know, people you know? Do they never have to worry about this kind of thing, or are there ways that they’re doing hard things with their health, and they’re making hard choices with their health, maybe in a slightly different way than you, maybe some people are struggling with, you know, addictions to alcohol and things like that that you’re not struggling with. So I kind of like to get a sense of where, where that idea came from from them, and also see where they’re seeing holes in it, and I like to help them kind of widen those holes a little bit, to you know, lessen the power of that belief in the moment.

Manon Bolliger  13:53

And what have you found to be the, like, the most stuck pattern, the one that you know, in general, if people have that, it’s.. it takes a lot to break it, not that it can’t be broken, but just that it takes quite a lot to work through.

Magan Gaul  14:16

So this is an interesting one, and it’s one that kind of bothers me because I want to be better at helping folks through it, but it’s the one where, and it’s really a good problem to have. It’s the one where you’ve already kind of gotten rid of the on and off idea of health, and you know, sometimes I’m on and I treat my health well, sometimes it doesn’t count, right? So now this person is probably maintaining their weight helpfully. They’re, they’re eating well. They might have overeating moments or times where they eat something that doesn’t serve them, but it doesn’t really hold them back from doing their everyday life and having joy in their life, but they want to now, and that’s a really healthy place to. Be right, because you’ve kind of undone a lot of the harm that the diet industry has done to us. Yeah, your carbs, you can’t have your wine, you can’t have your sweets, but at that point sometimes the stuck place becomes well, now I accept, and it’s a wonderful thing, I accept where I am, and so that goal that I had before of losing weight, coming to a healthier weight, it doesn’t seem as pressing, because now I know that this is a lifetime journey.

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Magan Gaul  16:35

Hey. now I know I’m not on or off, and I don’t have to do this in six weeks, so I can take as much time as I want. So, do I have to really work on this at all? And then there’s a stuck point of always putting off the work of achieving a deficit and taking off five pounds or taking off 10 pounds that maybe improves your blood work or something like that, so but it’s a good stuck place to be, because I would rather have someone be there for their whole life than be stuck in, you know, maybe be skinny for 10 years, but always be stuck in that harmful diet-minded food noise place,

Manon Bolliger  17:22

yeah, yeah. Well, plus their body then knows what works for them, you know,

Magan Gaul  17:27

yeah,

Manon Bolliger  17:28

right. So it does make sense, you know, yeah. So, what do you think’s harder to for weight loss, the physiology and the biology of the body, or what goes up in the mind,

Magan Gaul  17:42

I think it’s the mind every time, because you know you can put anyone, almost anyone, in, in a vacuum, hyperbaric chamber, some kind of, you can shut them off from society, and probably, depending on what you give them to eat and what you give them, you can have them drop some body weight, right? So, the mechanics are the same for most humans, but it’s the mind that prevents people from being able to keep it off, or to prevent that five pounds down, five pounds up pattern, or even 20 pounds down, 20 pounds up pattern, so it’s the mind every time for me.

Manon Bolliger  18:27

All right, okay. And so, for I mean, do you want to share a little bit, your like your story, because it’s probably the easiest one to know inside and out. Yeah, what? Yeah, what got you first of all decided that you were going to become healthy, and yeah, when, when we go with that?

Magan Gaul  18:51

Yeah, so I think it was, it was around, it was the age of 28 and I had, I had, I had started to become conscious of a behavior that I had been doing for probably months, and the behavior was I would go to, in the middle of my work day, I had two hours between shifts, and I would go to a McDonald’s or a Subway or a Dunkin’ Donuts, and I would order enough food to last me for that two hours, and afterwards, you know, I didn’t recognize it for what it was, which was I was trying to numb whatever stress had come up during the day, I was fearing for later in the work day, but what I did notice was that I, I just felt guilty about eating, I just felt like I wasn’t doing it like a normal human, like I didn’t have control over what I chose to eat, and so it was that guilt that kind of drove me to get some help. It drove me to say there must be people who can tell me what’s going on here. Um, and thankfully, once I started having a little bit of insight into what was behind, you know, the desire to numb what was behind that behavior, it started to become more possible in my mind, like maybe I can do something about that, maybe I can change, I can change what I’m doing here, and it really, it was nice, because I had a question from my therapist, which was, well, why don’t you drink another, an extra glass of water each day this week, and I was like, of course, I can do that easy, and I did, and then the next week, I think she said, well, what if you wasn’t a walk, what was it, so what if you downloaded this app and kind of did a food journal each day, and I said, “Of course, I can do that’s easy. I don’t have to change anything else. Sure, I’ll do that. But what those two questions showed me, and what I was able to do with them, was I can make a very small change in my daily behavior and do it for seven days in a row, and see that I feel different two weeks later. It was so.. it seems so small and obvious, but

Manon Bolliger  21:10

it

Magan Gaul  21:11

didn’t feel obvious to me that I could control anything on my day, so that helped me decide I can do something about what I want to be, I can become healthier,

Manon Bolliger  21:23

so giving getting the control back, like seeing it, that you, you actually have some control.

Magan Gaul  21:30

Yeah, like therapist could have told me I have control, but that wouldn’t have done anything. No,

Manon Bolliger  21:35

no, exactly. Yeah,

Magan Gaul  21:36

it was great to do it, to prove it to myself, to see that evidence.

Manon Bolliger  21:40

Yeah, and I think I would be stuck with, well, you’ve got a morning job if I understood you’ve got an afternoon shift, but you know, my brain goes, well, you should be eating in between, right, because you got to nourish your body, so.. so I would have thought, okay, that’s what I should be doing eating,

Magan Gaul  22:01

yeah, and I did. That’s kind of how I got to that point, because I was like, of course, this is the time for eating, but I think the severity of how much I was ordering was the thing. It was, I ordered maybe four different McDonald’s sandwiches and 20 piece McNuggets, it wasn’t just a meal, it was during that whole two hours I was able to put something in my mouth every few, every 30

Manon Bolliger  22:31

seconds. Okay, okay. Well, also, if it’s not nourishing, your body doesn’t feel fed, right? So it’s kind of how it goes with junk food,

Magan Gaul  22:41

absolutely. Yeah, one of the first things that I, I guess it wasn’t one of the first things, but maybe one of the first ways I, I could make a difference with lunches was my, my partner at the time, who’s now my husband, he was making slow cooker lunches, right, you know, for his job, and I was like, I guess I hadn’t cooked at all, but I said, I guess we could do, I could do that, and so I remember my very first Sunday lunch prep, and that whole way, you know, I overcooked the chicken, it wasn’t perfect, but it really made a huge difference in that two hour time, you know, I had a few minutes, and I ate,

Manon Bolliger  23:25

and

Magan Gaul  23:26

then I was forced the rest of the time to confront how nervous I felt to calm myself in other ways.

Manon Bolliger  23:35

Yeah, because you weren’t actually hungry anymore, right? Like, I think that’s something, you know, we say we do, what’s the psychological term, but when you’re, yeah, you’re eating like nervous eating, but you can’t over eat, I mean, a little bit, yes, healthy foods, in the sense that you’re, you know, your body has the signal I’m full, right?

Magan Gaul  24:02

Yeah, you don’t really crave endless sweet potatoes, do you not the same way,

Manon Bolliger  24:09

not the same way, exactly. So it’s working closer in tune with your body, basically.

Magan Gaul  24:16

Yeah, and it was a great experience for me to, to start doing that for myself, not that I had never had a healthy meal, it was just that at that point I was, you know, a young adult on my own, not cooking for myself, and I had fallen into a really easy place to be, which is you’re super overstressed, you’re gonna find some easy things to soothe that, and thank God it wasn’t gambling, or thank God they didn’t have sports betting at the time, that would have been horrible.

Manon Bolliger  24:48

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So, okay, let’s.. I want you to think about another example, because I think that that’s. Really good, it shows very clearly, sort of how there’s both the mental component, but then also the biology, and then you’re, you’re so-called stuck with your anxiety, and so what did you do for that to help yourself?

Magan Gaul  25:18

So I, I guess what I, I’m trying to think of the sequence of it, because I know where I am now with it, but at the beginning I saw it as a thing that I needed to get rid of, right, and I saw it as a state that I was kind of stuck in, like you said, my thinking on anxiety has changed a lot since then, I was really influenced by the three principles and Dr. Amy Johnson, her just thought book. Oh, I love it, but what I, what I started with was getting more kind of calm in the day, so one place was during work, you know, even after I had changed jobs, I was still super nervous going to work, so I started to do a five minute guided meditation, having having never done any meditation in my life, I just picked, you know, an app and chose some five minute mindfulness prompts for myself, and I did that every day before I went into work, because I said I have to be able to do something about this constant pit in my stomach, and so that was nice, because I started using it as I think it’s more intended to be, which is kind of practice in focusing my attention and my awareness, and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of healing that can come from changing your awareness from those things and those beliefs that are worrying to you and beliefs that are much more buoying and much more helpful and positive, so it’s not like I got rid of the anxiety, but I was able to be aware of other positive things happening at the same time that kind of righted my reaction, my anxious reaction to everything. So that was really helpful.

Manon Bolliger  27:18

Yeah, it’s a holistic thing. It makes sense, yeah. No, interesting. And what was your the hardest thing for you to to shift?

Magan Gaul  27:32

Let’s see. Well, I think I think the in my own journey I was I’m a numbers person, I call myself identify as a numbers person, so I feel it’s fun and it’s interesting and flowy for me to dive into the calorie counts and the amount of protein I’m having, and so to my brain loves to work like that, it loves to kind of clunk things into place and plan my day, so I have just the right amount of protein for the day, and so it was really helpful for me, about four or five years in. So, after losing the 100 pounds, and then now maintaining, I started to see some emotional eating come back, come back after years of not being there, and so at that point it was so it was so difficult for me to let go of the control of planning my day, so it was just right, and acknowledge that I need to, that’s not, that’s not a focus that’s helpful for me right now. I, what I need is the ability to eat in a free way, right, to eat in a way that balances my health and what I desire in the moment, and I don’t need to be judging myself on what I’m eating, and so I went through a period of time where I switched goals, I wasn’t aiming to maintain my weight anymore. My goal was very specifically, I would love to be able to eat without, I think it was I would love to have agency over what I’m eating. I think there’s something like that, and involved in that was, you know, giving myself full permission to have this really delightful, sweet thing that I’ve been craving for a week. It was, it was really helpful for me to pause the numbers focus and look more inward and get more comfortable with, because obviously I was again soothing something with food,

Manon Bolliger  29:45

right?

Magan Gaul  29:45

So, because I allowed myself full freedom with what I was eating, then I could focus on, well, what is it that I’m not bringing myself? What is it that I’m looking for, and trying to change by going for this food, and that helped. Me, because I was able to plan in more joy in my life. I was like, I think I want more joy, and so I got myself a Six Flags season pass with my sister, and we went every few weeks. I got more massages, I, you know, I chose to get more things that were fulfilling and relaxing to me, and that was such a help too.

Manon Bolliger  30:22

Yeah, I know this has been.. it’s very inspiring, you know, being able.. no, but it’s.. it’s good because they’re real stories, and you know, and people can kind of relate to that. And so our time was actually up, but how.. if.. if somebody wanted to work with you, how do they reach you?

Magan Gaul  30:39

Sure, so I have a website, which is Partake Meal planning.com and all my information, how to work with me, is there. But you can also, I update daily on my Instagram with strategies, tips, and stories, so that’s Partake underscore foodie, and you can, you can chat with me there, and you can find the link in bio has all my little free resources.

Manon Bolliger  31:07

Okay. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Magan Gaul  31:10

Yes, this was wonderful. Thanks for having me.

ENDING: 

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