779 Jessica Procini: Emotional Eating

Entrepreneurship is stressful, and founders must be resilient to cope with all the ups and downs. Yet that very resilience that propels you forward to success, can also lead you down a path of disassociation, and all too often says my guest Jessica Procini, it manifests as emotional eating.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and founder and CEO of the interactive podcast app Podopolo. Please take a minute, download the free Podopolo from either app store, and listen to Wings on Podopolo because we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is on a mission to help high-achieving women heal the roots of their emotional eating.

Jessica Procini developed her signature framework Escape from Emotional Eating with 10 years of research when she found Overeaters Anonymous and therapy weren’t enough to help her overcome her own emotional eating. Jessica says she’s been free of her compulsions for 5 years and her program is now helping other female entrepreneurs and executives do the same.

Ever find yourself standing mindlessly in front of the fridge at night looking for something, anything to eat. Or at the end of a stressful day munching through a whole bag of popcorn or an entire pint of ice cream without even realizing how much you’re eating? It’s not that you’re eating because you’re hungry, but you are craving something. And chances are you are eating out of an emotional rather than physical need.

Eating could be making you feel grounded. It could be numbing out the emotional highs and lows of the day. It could provide a soothing comfort or a sense of security, it could be entertainment, it could be anything – and anything that stops us from truly feeling our emotions.

Jessica Procini says emotional eating is a form of disassociation, a sense of denial, and women entrepreneurs contending with all the uncertainty and stress of entrepreneurship are especially prone. And it’s a pattern that usually begins in childhood, when parents give you a treat when you’re upset – and then reinforced by a food industry hellbent on getting you to override your body’s natural cue to say enough is enough. It’s not an eating disorder, though it can lead to one. And many women who eat emotionally are not necessarily overweight.

When Overeaters Anonymous and therapy didn’t work for Jessica, she went deep into research and the result is her signature program Escape from Emotional Eating – now helping thousands of women entrepreneurs and executives heal the emotional patterns that lead to food addiction and overeating.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jessica Procini and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Jessica Procini:

Hi.

Melinda Wittstock:

Jessica, welcome to Wings.

Jessica Procini:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think you have a wonderful mission and it’s specifically helping high achieving women heal the roots of emotional eating. How big a problem is emotional eating for high achieving women?

Jessica Procini:

I would say it is a secret problem more than a lot of people would probably be willing to admit. And I actually really see it tied to how high achieving women learn to cope with the high levels of stress that they experience in their life. And it’s also directly tied to resilience. So I know as a woman entrepreneur myself, resilience is something that we just have to hone over and over and over again. So I would say emotional eating is pretty big.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, that’s so interesting, tied to resilience. Because if there’s one thing an entrepreneur has to be is resilient, and gosh, as a five time serial entrepreneur, I know that. So is the food just some sort of grounding comfort in this context?

Jessica Procini:

So it can be so many things. It can be grounding comfort, it could be a sense of security, it could be soothing, it could be entertainment, it could be fill in the blank. So when it comes to emotional eating, it’s not one size fits all. It’s not black and white, as I like to say. It’s complicated and really it’s about using food to try to, quote, unquote, “Support resilience,” but in the way it actually stunts emotional growth and stunts our ability to truly be resilient.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s interesting. So does it kind of dull the senses in a way? If you’re emotionally eating and you’re literally filling yourself, does it become almost like an avoidance of actually dealing with the underlying issue?

Jessica Procini:

Absolutely. It’s an avoidance, it’s a sense of denial. It’s like a demonstration of denial. And really what it is rooted in is a lot of disconnect from self and just a disassociation from what is really going on and what our true needs really are. And it really is an act of acting against yourself.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, my gosh. So this is probably really widespread, even in our culture. Like something bad happens and you see some women at the fridge eating a whole thing of ice cream or whatever, right?

Jessica Procini:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Is it sort of taught to us somehow? I mean, even going back with our parents like, “Oh, you fell down. Let me give you a treat.” I mean, where does this begin?

Jessica Procini:

Well, for me it definitely began in childhood. I come from an Italian family, so it was always, “Stop crying. Here, have a cookie.” And as I got older, what I started to realize was that I never really learned the tools and the inner muscles to have true emotional maturity and emotional development.

So when I started my business, I was in my mid-twenties at the time. I basically had the emotional maturity of a six-year-old because they say that as soon as you pick up a substance, in particular, whether it’s food or alcohol, shopping or sex or whatever it may be, whenever you start using a substance to help cope, it actually stunts your emotional growth and it stunts it to the age of when you first started the habit.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, gosh.

Jessica Procini:

So back to your question about it being a cultural thing, absolutely, 100%. Especially because there is this whole industry called food marketing. So there’s actually people, it’s their job to get you to eat and to override your body’s natural cue to say enough is enough. And then it is connected to generation to generation. And this is where most recently my work has started to branch into is really the research between mothers and daughters and their relationship with food. And how it impacts not only us as women in the here and now but how it will also impact future generations.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s almost like an epigenetic thing. You’re reminding me, my mom in the middle of her divorce when I was a really young kid, she was a major emotional eater. I mean, she’d binge in the middle of the night and we’d wake up in the morning and what happened to those plums? I mean, where are they? You know what I mean? She would’ve eaten all of it. It took me a while and I think it’s great that we’re talking about this so we can demystify it.

I think everyone, if they’re honest, either has this themselves or knows somebody or their mom or their aunt or somebody, right? If we’re being honest.

Jessica Procini:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

But I grew up in that and it made me super conscious in a weird way. A lot of young girls get into adolescence, you’re super conscious of your body so you want to look thin or whatever it is, whatever is the trend of the moment and your body self-image. But meanwhile, you come into all that maelstrom with if you’ve had a mom that was bingey or made you kind of conscious of it where food wasn’t just about fueling your body, getting nutrients, it became something else altogether. And it’s a struggle. I think it is very widespread.

Jessica Procini:

Yeah. And I think it really plagues women entrepreneurs specifically because of our need to be resilient and our need to be able to handle a high level of intensity and to be able to handle it in a healthy way. But for me and a lot of my clients, I didn’t fit the typical stereotype of an emotional eater. I didn’t have hundreds of pounds to lose. At that time, I had already graduated from nutrition school. I already knew so much about health and wellness and what I should and shouldn’t be doing and I didn’t have a full-blown eating disorder.

And I feel pretty much up until this point in our society, like eating is so black or white and it’s really not. There’s such a spectrum and I think there is a lot of miseducation around emotional eating. It’s kind of grouped into eating disorders or it’s kind of talked about as being something that’s not that big of a deal when there are definitely people out there. Myself was one of them who struggled and it was a major hurdle that was sabotaging my success in a lot of areas of my life.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it’s not like a weight loss issue. It’s not an eating disorder. It could escalate, I suppose, to that, right? But bog standard, entrepreneurial female founder, emotional eating.

Jessica Procini:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

I want the list because I want to know if I’m in this group that does this, right? But seriously, what are the things you should be looking out for? How do you know you’re an emotional eater?

Jessica Procini:

Well, we can look at the symptoms. So some common symptoms are getting to the end of a really busy or stressful day and reaching for food to take the edge off. And then from there, where food and your body and your image about yourself is always on your mind or is holding you back. Maybe you’re not making the videos you need to be making to market your business or you’re not going to the meetings that you need to be having.

Or maybe you’re even in the health arena and you feel like a fraud because you don’t feel at peace with your relationship with food and your body. And yet you’re teaching other people about how to have a healthy relationship with food and their body. So there’s a lot of different symptoms. Again, it’s not black and white but I really can’t stress enough that everyone’s relationship with food is individual and it’s personal.

And the main tell of, do you have a disordered relationship with food in your body, is really just answering honestly, are you at peace? Are you at peace in your relationship with food and your relationship with your body? And really the only person who can really answer that is you. Because, again, emotional eating is like we are not engaging with it. It’s not a diagnosis. So you won’t go to the doctor and the doctor won’t say you’re an emotional eater.

I wish we could get that level of clarity and declaration because I think it would help a lot of people. But emotional eating is kind of in a gray area on the spectrum where your doctor would only say things like, “Well you have a weight problem?” Or you have a symptoms of an eating disorder such as bulimia or anorexia or things like that. So I really believed to take the power back and just ask yourself, “Do you feel at peace?” And if the answer is no, why? What are you doing that you know really shouldn’t be doing? And then taking it to the next step of, how is it holding you back?

Melinda Wittstock:

So in your bio, you said that Overeaters Anonymous wasn’t enough to help you with this. And it’s tricky because say with Alcoholics Anonymous, I mean, you go cold turkey but you can’t go cold turkey off food.

Jessica Procini:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it’s a lot more complicated, an addiction, if you will. What was your takeaway from Overeaters Anonymous and what you personally went through to overcome emotionally eating yourself that suggests the solution?

Jessica Procini:

Well, I think one of the reasons why Overeaters Anonymous didn’t really land for me, didn’t really resonate with me was because I never identified with having an addiction with food. I definitely knew I was using it to cope. I definitely knew it was holding me back and robbing me of a lot of energy. And like I said, I didn’t have hundreds of pounds to lose. And when I was looking for support, I already had a decade of therapy under my belt and was pretty much a sophomore when it came to self-development.

And when I explored the avenue of a 12-step program, I just really felt like these aren’t my people, these people aren’t experiencing it in a way that I am. And I also knew that I didn’t want to sit in a circle and talk about my issues. And not only that, I didn’t want to be a sponge to other people’s issues. If anything, I wanted help understanding what I was doing and then take action in the way to my healing. And that’s really what sets my work apart from something like a 12-step program.

Or something as more general like therapy is that it’s a really beautiful hybrid of the inner and the outer work. The inner being the mental and the emotional and the outer being the behavioral changes that need to be made. So for me, it was a lot of trial and error to really find the support that I needed and was going to hit the marks for me.

And when I started all of it, I was just really left frustrated being like, where is the right support for me and people like me? And that’s really where the creation of, Escape from Emotional Eating, came from was this realization that there’s a major gap in support around what I’ll call disordered eating. And once I healed my relationship with food, people started coming to me and being like, “What are you doing? Teaching what you know? And that’s really how this all started and now it’s been like 11 years.

Melinda Wittstock:

And in a business framework you have a rather large addressable market. A lot of women certainly … Men can, as well. At what point do people tend to seek you out? I mean, at what point does this become a big enough issue for a woman that she’s like, “Okay, I got to do something about this?”

Jessica Procini:

That’s a good question because everyone, again, is so different. What I have found is that when it comes to the work that I do, because it’s so deep and quite literally life changing, it actually is the choice to change and to start exploring help and what does a healing journey actually look like? And is it as scary as we all think it is in our minds? It’s actually, well at least the women that I work with, it’s really driven by intuitive nudges.

And, again, it depends on the person of how long have those intuitive nudges been nudging until it really becomes like, “I can’t do this anymore,” and a real acceptance of that. So it really is an individual of when they’re willing to follow through on something that internally they know they should be doing but there’s probably other parts of them that are kicking and screaming about even reaching out.

Melinda Wittstock:

When you mentioned earlier in the show this idea of disassociation where we’ve been taught to not be in touch with our own intuition or we are living a life that we think we should be living, not the one that’s actually right for us. And we become more and more separated from how we really feel because we start to do what we think we should do, not what actually makes us happy.

And over time we can get so disconnected from who we really are and what we really believe. And so it can be scary for people to go into that journey of actually what’s really driving me because most of our beliefs, honestly, were formed between zero and six. So toddlers run the world because 80% of our decision making is made by that toddler. And so going on this journey, I mean, entrepreneurship for me has pushed me along that spiritual path because I’ve found that the only way to really succeed as an entrepreneur is to let a lot of that stuff go but it can be a scary process. So it sounds to me like that’s really the root of the work in many ways,

Jessica Procini:

Yeah. The root of the work is really coming back to yourself, to that true authentic connection with yourself. And then feeling safe and secure to be able to embody that out in the world and even in our businesses because I’m sure you know that, as a woman entrepreneur, it can be very vulnerable to be at the helm of a business, of a mission, of a team of responsibilities and all the things. So yeah, I mean, if we want to sum this up of what is this really all about, if we really drive down to the core of emotional eating is an abandonment of self and the way to heal it is to come home. To come home to yourself.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s a beautiful way to say it. And so tell me more about the program itself and some of the results, I suppose, that you get for your clients with escape from emotional eating.

Jessica Procini:

Yeah. So my programs, there’s a few different levels of support because, again, one size doesn’t fit all, different people need different things. But I do work with all of my clients in yearlong programs. So I am not committed to a quick fix. I do not pretend to be a quick fix. This is not eight weeks to heal your relationship with food. We need time. We need time to really approach this in a really healthy step-by-step way.

And the support is hybrid. So there is a group aspect but the group is a lot of women entrepreneurs who have a lot on their plate and are not interested in sitting in a circle and talking about their feelings. But there’s also the element of one-on-one support. And this is probably what I love so much about my work, is just working with my clients. So there’s a lot of other things that play into what makes the program but that’s kind of a little bit of an overview.

And what I have seen, I think, one of the best or one of my favorite stories I should say about client results is telling you about a client that I have. I’ve been working with her for years and years now and we actually healed her relationship with food and emotional eating years ago but we continue the work in various ways. But way back when we first started working together, she came to me saying, “Jessica, I eat when I’m frustrated and I’m frustrated when I eat.”

And she is a surgeon. She had a lot on her plate, a lot of responsibilities. And when we started working together, there was no place in her day or her life or herself. It was always work, work, work, work, work, work, work. And over time, we dismantled those patterns and started reprogramming. And I think it’s been since 2018, she’s been free from emotional eating.

But one of the things she shared with me a few years ago was how our work together allowed her to reclaim a level of time and energy. That on top of everything else she was already doing, she started an organization that trains ER doctors to be able to identify victims of sex trafficking. And she said to me, “Jessica, this organization would never ever have been able to be in be created if it weren’t for our work together.” Because she was like, “When I first started working with you, I didn’t even have time to eat lunch and now I have this whole side project.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, that’s amazing.

Jessica Procini:

Yeah. So the results not only are freedom from emotional eating and really coming back to touch with yourself and staying in touch with yourself but there’s various ripple effects that the work has because you’re all there. Because you’re personally supported, because you’re fed physically, mentally, emotionally and then from that nourishment able to give back to the world, your life, even to your family in various ways. So while my full commitment and people really seek me out because they’re ready to be free from emotional eating and we do just that, the impact and the ripple effects go above and beyond just a personal relationship with food.

Melinda Wittstock:

How wonderful. Well look, I want to make sure people know how to find you and work with you.

Jessica Procini:

Yeah. So I invite anyone who, if anything I shared today resonates with you, I’d love for you to come over to innerwork.me. On this page, you’ll see and have access to the four roots of emotional eating quiz. So this will help you identify what’s at the root of your emotional eating and it’ll also give you a beautiful suite of resources and tools to get started working with your specific root. So that’s innerwork.me and those would be the next steps for us to take this conversation further and deeper.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for doing what you’re doing and putting on your Wings and flying with us today.

Jessica Procini:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

 

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