Episode Overview

Have you ever found yourself standing in front of the pantry during a stressful moment, reaching for something sweet, salty, or crunchy—just to take the edge off?

If so, you’re not alone. In this episode of the Better Than Before Breast Cancer podcast, I open up about my own experience with emotional eating during cancer recovery and share gentle, compassionate strategies to help you understand and shift this pattern—without guilt or shame.

We’ll explore:

-How cortisol (your stress hormone) drives cravings

-What emotional triggers might be signaling

-How to respond to your body’s needs with love and presence

You'll learn mindful, doable ways to support yourself when stress eating feels like the only option, plus calming alternatives that nourish both body and soul.

Whether you're fresh out of treatment or navigating long-term survivorship, this episode is a supportive space for reflection, kindness, and taking small steps toward healing.

🔍 What You’ll Learn:

• Why emotional eating is common
• The science behind stress, cortisol, and cravings
• How emotional eating can impact inflammation and recovery
• Gentle ways to pause, reflect, and respond to cravings
• Practical “comfort menu” ideas to replace emotional eating
• Nutrient-rich foods that naturally calm stress and support healing
• How to build a supportive food environment at home

Referred to in this episode:

Feel Good Reset Lesson on Foods that Calm

The Five Day Sugar Challenge

Better Than Before Breast Cancer™ Life Coaching Membership

🧠 Study on Chronic Stress and Inflammation

Title: Immunology of Stress: A Review Article
Published in: Cureus, 2023
Summary: This review explores how chronic stress impacts the immune system, leading to increased production of pro-inflammatory cytokines like IL-6 and TNF-α. These changes can exacerbate health issues, including those relevant to breast cancer survivors.
Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11546738/PMC

🧘‍♀️ Study on Mindfulness-Based Interventions and Emotional Eating

Title: Effects of Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Obesogenic Eating Behaviors: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Published in: Obesity Reviews, 2024
Summary: This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the effects of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) on various obesogenic eating behaviors, including emotional eating. The findings suggest that MBIs can be effective in reducing such behaviors, which is particularly beneficial for individuals recovering from breast cancer.
Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11791380/ResearchGate+1PMC+1MDPI+3MDPI+3Wikipedia+3PMC

📣 Share the Love:

If this episode supported you, please share it with a fellow survivor or leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your voice helps other women find this healing space.

Connect with Laura Lummer:

💌 Join my email list for weekly wellness tips & podcast updates → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

👩‍💻 Follow me on Instagram for daily inspiration → @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach

👩‍💻 Follow me on Facebook → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts → Better Than Before Breast Cancer with The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎥 Watch on YouTube → @BetterThanBeforeBreastCancer

Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey there, friends, welcome to episode 412, of better than before breast cancer, with the breast cancer recovery coach, that's me, Laura Lummer, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show today before we jump into it, I want to give a heartfelt thank you to two very special people who left a review and rating for the show recently. Chime I see your review. Thank you so much. And there was another review from it was funny because so I figured out, you know how, when you see one of those personalized license plates go by you and you're trying to figure out what they say. So the handle on the iTunes handle for this person, I figured out, says rusty, fun gal. But when I first looked at I was like, Rusty, fungal. What the heck. That's a strange handle to choose. But then I figured out it's Rusty fun gal. And I think I know who it is, because in the very nice comment, that person also said that they went to high school with me, so I think I have an idea who it is, and I thank you so much for taking the time to leave a rating and a review, to write out a review. It means so much to the show, whether you watch it on YouTube, and if you do, please hit subscribe. It's amazing. I think the last time I looked at my YouTube statistics, it's like 75% or more of people who watch the podcast on YouTube are not subscribers. So subscribing really helps the algorithms show other people this information. So it helps the show, it helps it to be seen, and it helps other people who need to hear this information, both on iTunes and on YouTube, to get it to them. So if you can take the time to do that, I really appreciate it, and I wanted to give you two a shout out. Thank you so much for doing that. All right, let's jump into this. We're going to talk about something today that affects all of us at some time or another, and it's an important topic to explore and to understand why we do it, and how we might make some simple, carrying, gentle changes. We're going to talk about emotional eating. You know, food comes with a lot of emotional attachments, and we are fortunate enough in the United States to have access to an abundance of food, which sometimes can turn to or create an unfortunate circumstance where it's just too easy to get to and so when we are feeling a lot of emotion, and I want to be careful how I say that, because it isn't just emotional stress. Now that's a big one, and that's one that we're going to touch on really here. But if you think about it, it's not just when we're under emotional stress that we turn to food for emotional eating, it can be boredom. That's a big thing for me, when I turn to foods that I would normally not choose. And make a confession here, when it's me and I'm bored and I'm having that urge, the one thing I want is cheesecake. I love cheesecake, and especially we don't live far from a Cheesecake Factory Who makes the best cheesecake in the world. And worst yet, I've discovered that I can have a few bites of cheesecake without spiking my blood sugar because it's such a high fat food. So the good thing about knowing this about myself is that I never keep cheesecake in the house, which means I have to go through a lot of effort if I want to get to a piece of cheesecake, and that helps me really deal with those urges when they come up. So I want to talk about not only when we we turn to this emotional eating, why we do it, what the cycle of emotional eating is, but if we think about it, we also turn to it in times of happiness, right when we're having an emotionally happy experience. And I'll share something else with you that recently I got a great PET scan. My last PET scan was November of 2024 and it showed that I had still some activity in a lymph node in my chest, which I'd seen from February of 2024 in November, it was less bright and smaller, and now it's less bright and even smaller. It's almost gone. So that is great, great news, because going from having very widespread metastatic cancer to just almost so I'm so close to being cancer free, and I'm going to get there. It's so. Close that it's just a wonderful thing, and I'm sure you can all relate to this, even though we believe in our healing and we believe in our health and that, you know, being cancer free and living cancer free is possible. Avoiding recurrence is possible. When we get those tests that confirm that that's where we're headed. It just feels so much better. And isn't it interesting that even if you're making lots of healthy lifestyle choices, then you get good information, and you're kind of elated about this information, that rather than our mind going to oh my gosh, what I'm doing is working, let me stick to it. That's really the time when we go, Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Let's go celebrate with a piece of cheesecake. So emotional eating can be under a lot of stress, really, really difficult, challenging times, but it can also happen with very happy times. So we have to be very mindful of when we're allowing ourselves to do it intentionally. I know a lot of people are very hardcore about no breaks, no things that you know don't align with the right eating plan. And I am much more of a belief that we need to enjoy our life. We need to give ourselves space for enjoyment, and we need to do that with intention. And that means that what we do 90% of the time is going to have a lot more impact than what we do 10% of the time or 5% of the time. And that's why, when we talk about emotional eating, whether we're eating something that is maybe high sugar kind of food, or something you normally wouldn't eat, or maybe we're indulging more in alcohol because of a celebration, but you know, we're not doing it all the time, that it's important to know that this is done with intention. Actually, on my website, you'll find I have a five day sugar challenge, and in that five day sugar challenge, there are several different steps, but two of those steps I'm actually going to talk about here, and one of them is being intentional and deciding, like, if you have a wedding, you have an anniversary, you have a birthday, you have some kind of celebration coming up, how do you want to show up there? What do you want to do? Do you want to avoid high sugary or maybe processed foods, or do you want to allow yourself an indulgence? And do you do with intention, so that it's not one of these guilty spirals of emotional eating. It's very important. So when we talk about this topic, when we talk about emotional eating, I want to encourage you to listen to it, examine it with yourself, without the idea of shame or guilt or restriction, because this conversation is really about increasing awareness and approaching yourself with compassion. That's what the the foundation to everything good we do for ourselves is to have that sense of self compassion. So let's talk about what is actually happening in our body when we turn to emotional eating. Well, when we're under stress, our body releases cortisol, and cortisol is our main stress hormone, and cortisol has a strong preference for sugar, fat and salt, and it literally will drive us towards comfort food, because in that moment, your body is trying to soothe you, it's actually trying to help. We don't really think about it like that, because we think of urges and cravings about our body working against us, but it's almost as if the urge or the craving is a symptom of something else that's going on. So let me give you the cheesecake example. Nine times out of 10 when I want cheesecake, it's because I'm bored. So what do I want? Do I really? Am I hungry? No, do I need to eat cheesecake for some reason? No, absolutely not. But I'm feeling bored and I want something that feels fun, right? And so something that feels joyful, something I'm going to enjoy. And so in those moments of boredom, cheesecake is that that sounds fun, That sounds yummy, that's a dopamine hit, right? So what it is is really just addressing the symptom of the boredom, which is the real underlying problem here. And so the body is noticing, because it's got this wonderful innate intelligence, and it's noticing there's a discomfort here, right? There's an emotional discomfort here, whether it's boredom or sadness or worry, there's something going on, and we want to feel different. When I say we, I mean all these cells in our body, right? They want to feel different. They don't want to feel stressed. They want to feel calm. They want to feel soothed. They want to give you that feeling that you want to experience. And the problem is is very easy to turn to food for that feeling, and when we do that, it may give us a quick sense of that comfort that we seek, but it's going to. Followed by a crash, and that crash can bring fatigue, inflammation and the worst of all, emotional heaviness, judgment, shame, feeling awful about yourself, telling yourself you're weak, you have no willpower, all of the ugly things that are exactly what we're trying so hard to heal from. So what's important when it comes to emotional eating is that we increase our awareness. Do you notice patterns around when your cravings hit? So I shared one with you, which is boredom. Maybe it's anxiety with you, maybe when we are going through these difficult times like waiting for a PET scan result or waiting for a new lab work, and it's that anxiety that you want to solve for and so we turn to something sugary for a dopamine hit, but we miss the real problem, right? Maybe it's a difficult interaction with someone whose thoughts you're living by. And what I mean by that is that you want people to perceive you in a certain way. You want people to think about you in a certain way. And you're going to go to an event or a place and you're going to see someone who you believe judges you right, who you believe when you're around them, the things they say, the things they do, the looks they give, those trigger stories in your head, and those stories undermine your own sense of self worth and self love, and we turn to food, right? So again, there's no judgment in that. It is just saying, are you aware that that happens? Because if you can be aware of it, then we can turn to addressing the real problem. Emotional Eating is not a weakness and it is not a failure. It is a signal that craving and that urge is a signal from your body that something deeper is going on, and that deeper thing needs something like rest or connection or comfort a hug, maybe just to be seen, maybe just to be heard. So let's talk about how, when we increase that awareness and we notice that we're turning to emotional eating, how can we support ourselves in a much kinder way? So I want to give you a couple of tools to consider. One is a mindful check in. So what that means is that when you feel that tug towards the food that you crave, or just mindlessly going through the fridge or during the cupboard, asking yourself, what do I really need right now? Is it food? Are you actually hungry? If so, that's fine. But what if it is one of the things I talked about a moment ago. What if it's just some space? You need five minutes of quiet, you need a nap, you need a hug, you need some excitement. You need to call a friend and get out of the house and go do something fun. You need to have some stimulation in your life. And so when we can start to recognize what we need more clearly, we can respond in ways that truly nourish us, because nourishment is more than about just food, but we've got to know what we need. So I mentioned earlier in my five day sugar challenge, one of the things that I suggest people do is to put a note on the refrigerator, on their go to food, on the pantry that says, What do you really need right now? And that causes us to just take a moment to pause right and then we can make a shift. So when I mentioned the cheesecake, and I mentioned that I don't keep cheesecake in my house. That causes me to have to pause, right? If I really want to go get a piece of cheesecake, it's going to take some effort. It's going to take me getting in a car and driving to get some or calling DoorDash and paying twice as much as what a piece of cheesecake actually costs to have it delivered to me, which I don't like doing. So if I can pause and then just notice too what really, what is really going on, then I can say, you know, what, what I really need is to just get outside and go for a walk right now. So even literally, physically putting that note, a post it note, a sticky note on your fridge, on your pantry, that says to you, what do you need right now? So it causes you to pause and help yourself with a mindful check in. It can make a really big difference. We can also put on the pantry, put on the refrigerator, have on our phone, or just in our mind, what I call a comfort menu. So what that means is a short list of maybe three to five non food things that bring you the ease that you look for, right? So is it stepping outside to get some fresh air? Is it texting someone because you just need to laugh, you need to call a friend, or you just need someone to listen to you who isn't going to try to. Fix things, but just allow you to vent. You know, my daughter, I love it when she calls, she says, I'm calling and it's just to vent. I just, I know I can work around this, but I just need to say everything out loud. Okay, that's awesome, right? She doesn't need to be fixed. She just needs to say everything and get it out of her head and out of her mind. And that's totally fine. So an important thing here to remember also is that there are foods that do support our mind and body during stressful times. So if you're going through a stressful time, if you're going through a particularly difficult period at work, if there are a lot of challenges happening in the family, if there's a lot of worry over the state of your health. You know things are really stressful for you right now. Know that you can take these steps before urgings and cravings come up and take over for you to set yourself up for nutrition and food that actually does calm the nervous system. So right now, in my better than before breast cancer membership, we are doing what's called the feel good reset. And that is a three month program. And each week we focus on a different attribute, a different action, a different way of nourishing ourselves that is actually a healthy way of resetting our body. And week six in the feel good reset is all about eating for calm, to reduce stress. And so to support this podcast, I'm giving you a link below the breast cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash, calm, C, A, L, M, calm. And if you go to that link, I'm going to give you that week six lesson, you'll get to see the video. You'll get the downloadable PDF, because they're going to give you some information and some prompts and some foods that actually do support your nervous system. And so you can set yourself up for success when you know that life is a little bit stressful, your environment is very important, right? So thinking about the feel good reset, thinking about setting yourself for foods that are calming, it's equally important that you think about setting yourself up to get foods that don't support calm and don't support your wellness out of your house, out of the fridge, out of the pantry. You want foods in your home that really reflect your intentions to care for yourself. And it's not the foods that you're being kind of misled by your brain to think these are foods that make me feel good, right? Because what you need a hug, calming peace, process, emotions, those are things you need, and the cheesecake or the chocolate bars or something like that are only addressing a symptom, which is an urge, right or a craving. So when I talk to people about changing their environment, especially in stressful times, I do get pushback, because I often hear, Well, my spouse or my kids, you know, they like having this food. Well, if we think about high sugar foods, highly processed foods, and maybe just foods that are, you know, hot, deep fried foods, things like that, inflammatory foods, nobody needs them, right? And I'm not saying nobody's not going to ever have them, and I'm not saying don't ever have them again. I'm a believer in the 9010 you know, we got to live our life and we're going to indulge sometimes, but it's what we do consistently that's important. But what we have in and around us helps us to be consistent. If we have to physically pause if we want right white truffle potato chips, and they're not in the house, we're going to have to physically pause and put some serious intention into driving to Trader Joe's and getting those potato chips. Is that urge that strong? Will you really do that so helping yourself by setting up an environment with foods that support your wellness and that you enjoy having the nut butters you like the fresh berries, you like the ingredients for smoothie that you enjoy. Those are great things to have around and really looking at the story in your mind behind keeping other Ultra processed, packaged foods, foods that are packaged in plastics, anything like that, in your house, it's not good for you, and it's not good for the people you love. And we're actually training ourselves right, whether we're teaching it to our children or we're supporting it in for ourselves or for our spouse, that if we have those foods, it's like we need to have them around. So examining the thought around that is like, why is having that type of food around important for you? Why do you have the story that this food has to be in your life and in your environment is a really interesting thing to get curious about and start to notice, right? And I think this is what I want to emphasize here. This is all about noticing. It's all about awareness, and it's all about making choices that show yourself. Kindness along the way and looking at stories about what you tell yourself as kindness. Is it kindness for me to just have a lemon meringue cheesecake in the refrigerator all the time? No, no, it's torture, right? It's either going to be torture for me trying to stop myself from taking a bite, or I'm going to be taking bites and then regretting them, because obviously that's not going to be supporting the anti inflammatory lifestyle that I try to lead, right? So every small decision that you make with love for yourself is a very powerful step towards healing physically and emotionally, which is important during those times of stress. So my invitation for you for this week is to go to the link the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash calm and explore the feel good reset lesson on nourishing yourself for calm. Take a few minutes to print out the PDF guide in that lesson, and go through the journal prompts and understand and increase your awareness about what stress feels like for you, it is such a common thing, and I've talked about it many times here on the show, that we live such a stressful life that we're in third gear all the time, so we Don't know what it's like to be a neutral anymore. And when we can start using prompts, getting thoughts out of our head, doing some journaling, having some steps to create pause and increase awareness, we can learn a lot more about ourselves without judgment, but with curiosity. We can start noticing and saying, Wow, I didn't even realize that that was stress. But I see now that turning to snacking all the time is really because I just want to feel calmer, right? Or I just wanted something that makes me feel happy. That's an incredible thing to be aware of. So go to my website, check out that lesson, or check out the five day sugar challenge, and download that program for yourself and go through five days at a time. One thing that you explore each day to set yourself up for increasing awareness about what you have in your home, why you have it in your home, what you turn to, what causes you to turn to it, and how you would rather support yourself? Because that's what this is all about, supporting yourself, little steps at a time, right? If you start to notice you're craving connection, you start to notice that you're craving excitement, that you're craving fun, maybe you just need more joy in your life. Wouldn't it be great? So substitute a ding dong with a walk outside at a nature center with someone that you care about, right? So much better for you. So much more long, lasting joy. All right, if you need more help with that, if you really think that you could use the support to create a better, healthier life for yourself. You don't have to do this alone, because I'm here for you, and you can come to my website, you can download any of my programs that are available as standalone coaching programs, or, even better, join my better than before, breast cancer life coaching membership, where there are is a huge library of support available to you, along with group coaching, private coaching, discounts on the services that I offer so much value in that community, and that word itself is value there. You know, community is so important, turning to people and being part of a community it takes a village, is really true, and especially when things are difficult for us and we're going through a lot of stress and we're just trying to make important changes in our life. Getting that reinforcement and that understanding and care from people can make all the difference. All right, sweet friends, take care of yourself. Go to the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash calm and download the calming lesson, and I'll talk to you again next week. And until then, take good care of yourself.