096: Driving Stick In An Automatic World

Do you drive an automatic or stick shift? The first car I bought for myself was a stick shift, a Toyota Tercel. I drove it basically into the ground. But three years ago I bought a new car and it’s actually sort of challenging to buy a stick shift now. Everything is automatic. There’s less to think about while driving. This struck me as a really interesting analogy to emotional eating. Emotional eating is like driving an automatic car. The car does all the shifting for you, you don’t have to think about it. That’s what happens when we stress or anger eat, we aren’t even conscious of searching for the food until we’re actually eating it. How do we engage thought about it? How do we shift out of automatic and get back in control of the car?

If a stick shift is what you’re used to driving, eventually your body understands when to gear up or gear down. There’s an actual physical sense of when it needs to happen. You’re in control of the car without effort, you just have awareness of what’s needed. And that’s what we need to cultivate with food. The awareness and control of driving a stick shift. When we let our eating go on automatic, we are in danger of losing our intuition for what to do. It’s empowering to take control of our direction and let our bodies learn to read when they need to gear up or gear down in terms of eating. And just like it’s never too late to learn to drive a stick shift, it’s never too late to gain control of emotional eating. I forget how to drive stick every once in a while. But there are checks in place to help me. I’m going to share with you how to get back into that place of conscious body driving in this episode.

About host Michelle Tubman:

Michelle Tubman is an emergency physician in Alberta, Canada. She is also an overweight woman who has struggled for decades with her own weight and body image. She has spent her adult life constantly battling the urge to overeat with her desire to be thin and healthy. As a physician she understood the nutritional aspects of a healthy diet, but having the knowledge wasn’t enough to produce the changes she wanted in her body. And so she pursued extra training in life coaching, nutrition coaching, the science of habit formation, and eating psychology. And this is where the magic is. There is so much work that needs to happen on the inside before we can see changes on the outside.

Michelle founded Wazya Health to help successful, professional women who, after years of dieting, understand that optimal weight and health is more than calories-in-calories-out. She wants to help women listen to that quiet voice inside that tells them there’s deeper work to be done when it comes to weight and body image.

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Learn more about Dr Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health: