Root Causes Behind Food Cravings with Stephanie Dodier

Trevor:                    Hi there, I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to the Spa Doctor podcast. Today we’re talking about food cravings and root causes behind them. My guest is Stephanie Dodier. She is a clinical nutritionist, author of The Crave Cure Program, inspirational speaker and host of the Beyond the Food Show. Stephanie’s integrative and comprehensive approach to nutrition focuses on finding the root causes of your cravings and aligning your body and mind. She’s been there too. Her health journey began six years ago while working as a senior executive in a Fortune 500 corporation. She went from suffering severe panic attacks to transforming her life completely allowing her to regain her health. She is passionate about sharing her journey with other women while educating and empowering them to achieve the same results. That’s what we’re talking about today and today’s interview Stephanie shares her journey and we discuss the root causes behind cravings with various tips and resources to help you also get your health and life back on track. Please enjoy this interview.

Stephanie it’s great to have you on my podcast.

Stephanie:            It’s a pleasure to be here and all the listeners as well pleasure to meet you.

Trevor:                    Yeah absolutely, so I want to start off with you sharing your health journey because I think that’s gonna really set the tone and the stage for what we’re gonna be talking about today.

Stephanie:            Absolutely. If we dial back the clock about six and a half years ago when I was 36 years old, I was at the peak of my corporate career. I was in the retail industry and at one point I was going up on stage that day to give a talk to my employees like I normally did. The whole concept of speaking publicly wasn’t a stressor per se, but I got up on stage and I literally collapsed on stage. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, and I thought at that point that I had a heart attack. My team shipped me out to the hospital in a ambulance. I ended up at the hospital and they put all the wires on me like I was having a heart attack at 36 years old. For the listener to understand is, at that point in my life otherwise the peak of my corporate career, my body was actually at its worst state of my whole life.

I was smoking a pack a day, was working 100 hours a week traveling all the time. My fridge was literally McDonald’s at that point. I was there two to three times a day drinking coffee, like my health was a complete disaster. Being at that state in the hospital everyone thought that I was having a heart attack and six hours later this young doctor came in the foot of my bed and told me I’m not having a heart attack I’m actually experiencing what he called a panic attack. I had no idea what a panic attack was at that point and I went back to work thinking like it’s just something that happened we’re gonna forget about it, went back to work the next Monday and did a conference call with all my team. As I pressed the mute button to start talking to my team, the exact same thing happened again.

Went back into a state of panic attack. Couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing. I got really, really scared at that point because my work, my career was who I was. In that moment where that panic attack happened again, I realized that I could lose who I was. I could lose my job. I had no other purpose in this world. I went to my doctor desperately looking for a solution and the answer was medication which is what doctors are. The result of my condition resulted in me being prescribed anti-depression and anti-anxiety medication and something happened when I left my office of my doctor. I actually had this, what I call Yoda moment. This moment of clarity in my life where I looked at the prescription and realized that if I was going to start taking medication at 36 for depression and anxiety, I’ll likely be on those medications for the rest of my life.

You know one of those moments where you make a decision and it changed the rest of your life? That happened that moment when I decided to look for other solution for my anxiety and my panic attack. That brought me to a journey of discovering natural wellness and natural healing and ended up quitting my job a year and a half later. Went back to school and today I have a practice helping mainly women with their mindset and their nutrition when it comes to their health, in particularly when it comes to weight loss and relationship to food. Here I am today with this health journey trying to help other women in the same path as me.

Trevor:                    Yeah. Wow. What a journey. What an experience. It’s great that you paid attention to this wake up call and decided to do something about it. Sometimes that’s what it takes for people to make a change, unfortunately, but one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is for people to realize, “Don’t wait until something like this happens.” This is not the easy path. It’s better to make these changes before you hit a wall like this.

Stephanie:            Totally. I want to say and totally be transparent with the listener and to yourself as well I had many other signs before this gigantic moment of collapsing and having panic attack. I was diagnosed a year prior with pre-diabetes at 35. The year prior to that, I was having the high cholesterol diagnosis. I had inflammation everywhere in my body. There was mold growing around my mouth from smoking cigarette, but to your point, I never paid attention until it actually threatened my life. That’s my mission now in this world. My second career as I like to say at 38 years old is actually a purpose driven mission to help other women not to get to where I was. Because like you said, it is not necessary. If we can only pay attention, the challenge that I’m seeing and that I saw for myself is that we are not educated to pay attention to those small signs.

As a matter of fact, we’re actually putting medication or over the counter medicine to numb those signs so we can keep foraging through in our career or our life and our body is trying to talk to us through all those small little messages but we don’t listen because we don’t know. That’s why my mission is today is to educate women that actually all those little things that happen to us are there to prevent the big drama that I had in my own life.

Trevor:                    Yeah so what are some of the big signs that people should be looking for?

Stephanie:            In my case, and many of my followers right now, is anxiety. This state of feeling that you’re not into your body. That you are stressed. It’s commonly, people will refer it as distressed, but this anxiety level every time you get up. For me, it used to show up first thing in the morning when the clock rang in the morning. I woke up with this deep breath of anxiety into my life. Anxiety, the weight gain is another one. Particularly for women. Understanding that our body wants to be at this stable weight. That doesn’t mean to be lean like a cover model, but it means to be at a stable weight. When our weight struggle or goes up and down for some unknown reason that we haven’t actually caused it to go up. We just don’t know what happened. That’s another major sign.

The third one that I want to talk about is this is where my specialty lies in to is what we call craving, binge eating, or overeating. When our relationship to food goes beyond just simple nutrition and feeding our body and we start using food as a way of numbing feelings or emotion, our body is just trying to survive in the way of using food in those moments of craving or binging. That’s just some of the sign.

Trevor:                    Yeah. You talk about going beyond food. When you talk about that, that’s what you’re talking about here. We know food is important, but what does it mean to go beyond food?

Stephanie:            That’s the whole concept. Understanding that our body is more than just nutrition and calorie. Our body has this spirit, the soul inside that is trying to move us forward, both physically and emotionally. Going beyond food and recognizing that. Recognizing that our craving or eating habit are actually a sign that our body is trying to balance us emotionally. It means paying attention to the sleep habits that we’re having because the lack of sleep can cause us to actually overeat. We can talk about the product we’re using, in your case, on our skin. The chemical that may be contained in the product that we’re using can actually lead us to have a hormonal imbalance thing which will then lead us to having craving and distorted relationship to food. This means to go beyond calories and macro to look actually at how we’re relating to food.

Trevor:                    Yeah. It is interesting because we can get so obsessed with food and it could be consuming. Of course, food, like I said, I think we agree on this is food is important and we want to nourish our body. You certainly learned this. Eating McDonald’s food on a regular basis was not helping your body, but there’s so much more than food and our sleep and how we manage stress and environmental toxins, what we’re exposed to in our environment and toxins in skincare products like you mentioned. There are so many other things that we need to look at. That it’s not just about what we eat.

Stephanie:            Unfortunately, the current state of the weight loos, fitness, and diet industry leads us and educate us consumer that calories in calories out, exercising and over exercising is the only way to maintain our weight and that is the only cause of us not being able to manage our weight. That’s where for me, I didn’t know any of those principles until I hit 35 until I collapse. If I had known this and if I had been educated to the truth behind weight management and health was way more than just calorie, I would have made different choices in my life which would have prevented me from collapsing. That’s what the mission of going beyond the food is is to educate the women listeners, principally, that there is more than just calorie in and calorie out. Quality of food is a big important element that the industry doesn’t talk about right now.

Trevor:                    Yeah. That’s really true. I think the more we get back to whole foods and getting back to nature, the better off we are. It’s not about restricting and starving yourself or depriving yourself. It’s about getting back to home cooked meals and wholesome meals. Certainly that makes it … There’s so many different health benefits for that. Let’s talk about cravings. Let’s talk more about that. Because there are a lot of different layers to this. There’s some people that just crave a little bit. Every now and then they’ll crave something. Then there are some people that crave foods all the time and they really struggle. How was that for you?

Stephanie:            For me, I crave mainly at night. I know that’s the case of many of the women listening right now. For me, it was 5:00 on forward. What happened for me is I wouldn’t eat all day long because I was too “busy” and then I would show up past 5:00, 6:00, 7:00 and then I would devour everything in sight. For me, that was the main element of my craving. It was a lot of salt that I was craving. Knowing what I know now, I know that my nervous system and my adrenal particularly were completely unbalanced and I was craving the salt. This is again what I want the women to know is that your craving are not there because your body is betraying you. There’s specific reason why you’re craving based on the time of the day. The type of food you’re craving that will give you information about the status of your health, the status of your well being, both emotionally and physically.

I invite the listener to a guide that I have, The Crave Cure Guide. You can find it on my website, but basically we dissect physical craving versus emotional craving. Number one, recognize that both have different presentation. Physical craving will actually be long built, where an emotional craving is very sudden. With that guide. You’ll be able to differentiate both physical and emotional craving. Secondly, when we look at physical craving, very easy to resolve. We just need to eat. Our body is telling us what we are lacking fuel and we need to eat. Then come the education of having the right food choices, but those are very simple in itself to deal with.

When we come to emotional eating, this is where it gets more complicated because we actually need to get in touch with what’s going on inside of us, inside our mind, inside of our soul. Then there is exercise provided in this particular guide for you to understand which emotion actually trying to show up through your craving. Very quick example if I can is with chocolate craving. Chocolate craving is extremely popular with women. If I speak in front of an audience, I typically will get the women to raise their hand as to who experience craving and that’s literally 99% of all women will raise their hand and say, “Yep, chocolate craving is part of my life.” If there’s any men in the audience, no man or barely any will experience chocolate craving.

There’s actually a very scientific reason for that. When we crave love, there is a mechanism in our brain that will produce neurotransmitter. It’s a neurotransmitter imbalance. There’s actually compound in chocolate that are precursor to the making of those neurotransmitter into your brain. Particularly serotonin. There’s a compound in cacao, the pure chocolate. We’re not talking about Kit Kat here. We’re talking pure cacao. There’s a compound there that’s called PEA that actually is a precursor to you making that serotonin and dopamine in your brain to make you feel good, love, and accepted. When you are in a state of not feeling love for any reason, in particularly as women we’re very emotional being. When we feel that we have this lack of love, we’re actually craving chocolate as a means of creating those neurotransmitters in that state of well being and love into our brain.

Actually studies that have been done with women and that’s the result of it. Craving chocolate doesn’t mean that your body is broken. It simply mean that you need comfort, you need love because in your current environment, you don’t feel that coming to you. I hope that makes sense.

Trevor:                    It does make sense. It seems like a lot of food cravings from that emotional level have to do with that too, not just chocolate. People tend to reach for sweet things or just crunchy or snacky or certain comfort food items that they’re used to. That it creates this temporary neurotransmitter shift that makes people feel the things that they’re missing. I think it’s an important differentiation that you talk about of a physical versus an emotional craving. I think there’s a lot of overlap too of the two. Then of course, once you get into it, you start doing emotional eating, then that causes changes in your blood sugar to make you then want more of the sweets or more of those foods. Then it becomes a pattern and it’s hard to break that.

The ups and downs of blood sugar like you were talking about of restricting food thinking, “Oh, well I should just not eat because I want to lose weight or I don’t have time. I’m too busy. I’ve gotta get my kids to school or I’ve gotta get to work.” Not setting yourself up for a success like that is just going to feed into this crave cycle.

Stephanie:            I want to say also binge eating because that is a big one for many people. I want to clarify here it doesn’t mean the diagnosed eating disorder. It means simply the act of overeating in one moment, commonly known as bing eating. That leads into this on top of being something that is … will bring a lot of calorie at once into your body and put your body into a completely overwhelmed state. The digestion will also lead to an emotional craving with the shame and guilt associated with it. You will binge, feel shame, feel guilt, you will not want to feel those shame and guilt emotions so what do people do? They eat some more to cover this emotions. Now when a full circle of negative emotion that’s constantly trying to be numbed with food. That is on top of the digestive issue and the blood sugar issue is a compounding and overlapping craving that we’re experiencing.

We end up thinking that our body is broken. Meanwhile, all our body is trying to do is survive and be better.

Trevor:                    Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I do want to point out about eating disorders and that if you’re listening, watching and you are in the habit of purging in any way, you want to get help. Certainly if the binging is something that’s taking over your life, it’s not just a little snack here and there and it’s becoming to the point where it’s impacting your health, it’s impacting your life, those kinds of behaviors you need to get the help of a practitioner that you can work directly with. It’s not something to take lightly because of the physical damage it can cause. Also, it’s time to get to the root of what’s going on and get some help.

I just don’t want people to think that they need to battle through this by themselves. There are people out there that can help.

Stephanie:            Absolutely. We have a … To further emphasize that point, we have a conference coming up that’s called Going Beyond The Food. Some of the expert on that conference are actually eating disorder or food addiction specialists. All of them are conclusive that those behavior are not because your body or your mind is broken. It’s actually caused by emotional element, mainly in your youth. Emotional trauma that are there from very long time in most women’s life and that the binging or the eating disorder is only a compensatory act in which there’s this emotion that’s way and deep of our depth of ourselves.

Trevor:                    Yeah. It sounds like with the guests that you have, there’s some good information there and some good resources so people can learn more about that. We have a link for that coming up. Do you want to share any details? We’ll have the link on my website below your podcast interview, but you have any other details you want to share about that? Then we’ll talk some more.

Stephanie:            Absolutely. It’s a free conference. It’s called going beyond the food project November 1st through the 8th, 2017. We have 22 health experts that will address the various component to what we’ve just talked about. The other reason why we crave. The other reason why we gain weight that are beyond just calorie in, calorie out and fitness. I’m going to expose from digestive health to food addiction to detoxification pathway because sometimes when our detoxification pathway are broken, we end up craving food. Blood sugar management. We’re going to address the 22 other reason as to why we’re challenged with maintaining our weight or we’re craving food with all those experts. It’s going to be video and audio November 1st through the 8th. I invite all the listener to use the link in the show notes here to register for totally free.

Trevor:                    Okay. Great. Thank you. Can you give us some of the key takeaways from the interviews that you’ve done? I know you’ve interviewed people already and I’m sure you’ve gotten some really great bits of information of course to get all the information people will want to go and check it out. Can you give us some of the biggest takeaways that you have from these interviews?

Stephanie:            Absolutely. The biggest one is the roll of our emotional life journey from the tender age of being born one years old, all the way where we are right now and how those emotions when not process properly for lack of a better word, will actually be inside of us and causing us to feel disturbed today. That was the case for me. There was a lot of trauma in my youth which I had no idea was causing me to overeat or to over perform in my work at the age of 36 years old. That would be the biggest takeaway is understanding your journey. Since I’ve understood that, my relationship of food has totally changed because I can recognize my behavior. The second one is something that you are an expert in as well which is digestive health.

The state of our microbiome has a tremendous impact on our ability to manage our weight and our craving. It’s a microbiome and it’s also all of our digestive mechanism in to our bodies. That was a big one. The next one is the whole concept of food addiction and how sometimes when we put a label on ourself as a food addict, we’re actually making the behavior of addiction even more complicated and more aggressive. Simply removing that label is an action that will free our relationship to food. That would be the biggest three takeaway from the conference.

Trevor:                    Okay. With the first one, you’re talking about the emotional issues and the childhood issue things. What are the remedies for this?

Stephanie:            The number one is being aware and self awareness. For many of us, we don’t realize. We don’t understand that what has happened to us is actually leading us to behave a certain way. While we don’t understand, we put the blame on other things in our lives. The correlation between the two is the number one step is understanding also in reframing our perception on those event in our life. For many of us, we look at those event and we place anger around it. The simple act of looking at those element in our life and accepting it for what it is, for what it has happened in our life and moving forward with an acceptation instead of an anger will diminish the effect on that emotional trauma in our today’s life.

Trevor:                    Yeah. I think that a lot of times we might think that these things aren’t important. They’re not related. They’re just things from the past we don’t want to stir up and it can be hard to go there. Sometimes we have pretty repressed feelings and thoughts from the past. At the same time, you don’t want to dwell in it too long too, right? Just being aware of it. Letting it be what it is and releasing that and doing some release work around that. I think sometimes working with a therapist can be particularly helpful for people. It’s not always easy to just recognize it and let it go. Sometimes you need the support of a therapist to help you work through that and understand why is this happening and there are different therapeutic ways of doing that. Gestalt therapy and then there are also things like doing … I talk about different exercises in my book in the clean mind section.

Forgiveness exercises, free form writing, meditation, so many things can really help. Any other suggestions you have for people?

Stephanie:            Absolutely. One of the thing that I discovered while filming this conference is actually a branch of therapy called somatic work where it’s a mixture of actually physical therapy, like massage [inaudible 00:25:52] therapy [inaudible 00:25:53] placement on to the body and the ability of releasing the emotion in our tissue. What I didn’t know, and I’m sure many listener don’t know is our emotion are actually, it’s an energy that is stored in our body in a type of tissue called the fascia tissue. Think of the fascia tissue as a plastic wrap around your muscles. You have your bone, you have your muscle on top and then around that muscle comes that saran wrap for lack of a better term, that plastic wrap which is called the fascia tissue.

That’s actually been demonstrated that the emotion are stored in that tissue. What somatic work does among other things is actually will help release the emotion that are stored in that fascial tissue through different various exercise, physical exercise [inaudible 00:26:40] work and hand placement on to the body. By doing that, the emotion that have been stored for a long period of time are actually to your point released. It can be released through that or through [inaudible 00:26:51] exercise and so forth but somatic was one of my biggest discovery on this conference.

Trevor:                    Yeah. I think that’s a really great point. I’ve been trained in somata emotional release or there are different names for the somatic work. There are a lot of different types of therapies that use this kind of technique and this philosophy. This meta emotional release is a SER that’s through … I did my training through Upledger Institute, but there’s a lot of other programs out there. I remember when I was doing the class, they talked about how it’s like if you’re driving your car and you’re really upset about something and you’ve got this emotional upset and you’re thinking about something. Then you get rear ended at that same moment and you have an injury, that emotion that you’re feeling actually goes in to the physical body.

I think it’s a really interesting concept. I did see a lot of pretty amazing doing that technique with patients. I don’t do it anymore in my practice, but when I did, saw a lot of really interesting things come up for people and lot of times, I don’t even know about when I started work on their neck for a whiplash kind of thing or something. Then that kind of … Those emotions start to come out. Wow, I didn’t even know that was connected to my physical body. There’s so many different layers to that. It’s fascinating to me. I’m not the expert on this. I do know a little bit of information on it, and so I think it’s definitely worth looking in to.

I also think that hypnosis can be a really great thing. I don’t know if anybody talked about hypnosis with people that you interview?

Stephanie:            Yes. We did talk about hypnosis and the whole conscious and subconscious mind, right? Because a lot again of our behavior in relationship to food is not conscious. It’s not something we decide we’re going to crave this. It’s a thought or an emotion in our subconscious mind that will actually drive this behavior with food. That’s the problem with the weight loss and the fitness industry is that we’re only focused on what’s conscious and our choice that are conscious. We never address this which is actually more than 70% of our brain is unconscious. You’re not conscious that you want X, Y, Z or you’re going to behave X, Y, Z isn’t unconscious. That’s what hypnosis will go and tap into that to release, again your word, releasing those emotions that are driving our behavior to food right now.

That’s why so many people struggle with their food because all of what we just talked in the last 15 minutes is never addressed with the typical weight loss and diet industry programs.

Trevor:                    Yeah. There are a lot of different layers to this. I’m glad you’re going in depth in this. Thank you, Stephanie for the information today. Anything else you want to share with audience before we go? Before we end?

Stephanie:            I would invite everyone to come to the conference, even if it’s to grab one piece of information that you weren’t aware of that can change your relationship to food go forward. It makes you feel good today, not wait when you achieve a “goal” but actually feel happy and good today in your body.

Trevor:                    Perfect. Alright. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your journey. I think that’s great information for other people to realize what’s possible for them and maybe even other people that they know. They see them going on this path. They can have them watch your interview and learn from you. Thank you for sharing all that.

Stephanie:            Thank you.

Trevor:  I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Stephanie. I got some great information. To learn more about Stephanie and the interviews she has coming up, just go to thespadoctor.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Doctor community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. That’s another option. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you take this skin quiz. Just go to theskinquiz.com. It’s free. Takes just a few moments. You’ll get information about what your skin is trying tote ll you about your health, what your skin type is, and recommendations for you. Just go to theskinquiz.com. I also invite you to join me on social media. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Join the conversation and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Doctor podcast.