Your Food Struggles Might Actually Be a Transition Problem

If you've ever wondered why binge eating or emotional eating seems to happen at the same times of day, after work, after lunch, on Sunday nights, or when you get home from a trip, this episode is going to reframe everything. 

The answer might not be about food at all. It might be about transitions.

In this episode I break down what transitions actually are, why the brain finds them so hard to navigate, and how so many binge eating triggers are really just transition moments your nervous system didn't know how to get through. 

Whether you're dealing with the small daily transitions that fly under the radar or a bigger life change that's been quietly driving your eating, this episode will help you finally understand what's happening and what to do about it.

What You'll Discover:

• Why your brain treats transitions as a threat and how that drives binge eating and stress eating urges
• The daily transition moments most people never recognize and how to spot the ones that are hardest for you
• How to tell if a big life transition is behind your current food struggles and the question to ask yourself right now
• How to minimize transitions where you can — a nervous system strategy that also happens to be a productivity strategy
• A practical framework for navigating the transitions you can't avoid so food stops being your brain's default relief valve 

If you've ever found yourself reaching for food after work, during a stressful season, or at the same time every day without knowing why, this episode will help you finally connect those dots. Binge eating triggers aren't random. And understanding them is the first step to changing them. 

Do you want help navigating big or small transitions? Schedule a Breakthrough Call today.

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Today, we're talking about transitions and why they might be behind more of your hard food moments than you even realize. We're going to be talking about the big life changes, but also the small everyday shifts. Your brain is constantly navigating, often without you even realizing it. Welcome to Binge Eating Breakthrough, the podcast to help you stop feeling out of control around food and build trust with your body. If you've tried everything but still feel stuck, you're not alone. I've been there too. I'm Jane Pilger, and I'm here to help you see binge eating in a new way so you can finally break free. Each week you'll get the tools and insights to create peace with food and your body. Your breakthrough starts a trusted listener. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you're here because something in you knows there's more to understand about why food feels the way that it does. And I think today's episode might be one of those that gives you a whole new lens for looking at that. So today we're gonna talk about transitions. Now, I realize this might not sound like a binge eating topic at first, but stay with me because by the end of this episode, I think you might look at some of your hardest food moments in a completely different way. So I recently taught about this concept inside my cultivate group coaching program. And it was so impactful for them that I knew I needed to bring it here to the podcast so that more people could hear about this. So let's dive into transitions, why they're hard for the brain, and why it's so important for us to really just understand what they are. So let's start with that. What is a transition? A transition is any moment of moving from one state to another, from one experience to the next, from one role to another, or could even be from one version of you to whatever comes next. It's the space between what just was and what's coming. The old is ending, but the new isn't fully here yet. Now, when I say it like that, it might sound kind of big. And we do have big transitions in life: moving, changing jobs, beginning or ending a relationship, kids leaving home, an illness or an injury, starting or finishing a program. This is exactly the topic inside cultivate. We had some people who were wrapping up their time in cultivate, other people coming into cultivate. Now, these are some big transitions, and sometimes we talk about them and we might recognize them as impactful to our system and our bodies because they're obvious. We know when we're in those big transitions. But here's something that we don't think about very often. There are small transitions that happen all day long. Now, I'm gonna name some of them, and as I do, I want you to notice which ones are true for you. And I you also might come up with others beyond what I list. Okay. So here are some daily transitions, small things that are happening all day long. Waking up, starting your day, getting out of bed, and getting into your morning routine, leaving the house, arriving at work, switching from one task to the next, breaking for lunch, ending lunch and going back to work or whatever it is that you're gonna do after lunch, finishing a meeting, wrapping up the work day, coming home, going from being on all day to trying to just be relaxed. For parents, the shift when kids get home, when they go to bed, when you are suddenly alone for the first time all day, the window after dinner, the window before dinner, between work and dinner, getting ready for sleep. And that's just a fairly average day. If you work from home, you have your own version of this. The blurring of work and not work, the absence of a physical commute that used to create a natural bridge between one mode and another. If you travel for work, you have transitions layered on top of transitions. You have the transition of the travel itself, and then you have the work and non-work. You also have lots of transitions if you are not working outside of the home. Let's say home is your work. That is big work. There are a lot of transitions involved. If you're a caregiver, you're constantly moving between your own needs and someone else's, which is its own kind of constant transition. But most of these things happen so quickly, so automatically, we don't register them as transitions. We just experience them as part of our day. And here's what matters: your brain responds to all transitions, not just the big obvious ones. Your system is constantly adjusting from one moment to the next, whether you're aware of it or not. So let's talk about why transitions are so hard for the brain. Your brain is wired for predictability, it is at its core a predictability machine. Predictability feels safe. And your brain's number one job is to keep you safe. The brain and the nervous system are always scanning, always asking, am I safe? So when you're in a transition, when that familiar thing is ending, but the new thing isn't established yet, your brain genuinely doesn't know what's coming. It is uncertain. And that uncertainty can register as lack of safety. Now, we also have the motivational triad of the brain. Your brain is wired to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and use as little energy as possible. Transitions require energy, real energy, especially when you're trying to shift an old pattern and you haven't fully established a new one yet. Your brain has to work harder. It can't just run on autopilot. So it starts looking for ways to get back to easy, to seek pleasure, to avoid pain, to get relief, to find any amount of pleasure while avoiding whatever feels uncertain or hard. So can you see where this is going? Food is one of the fastest, most reliable ways the brain knows how to do all three of those things at once. Seek pleasure, avoid pain, and use as little energy as possible. Food is efficient, food is familiar, food works, at least in the short term. So many hard food moments, if you trace them back, they're not about hunger. They're about a transition that the brain didn't know how to navigate. So let me tell you about one of mine to make this personal. For a long time, the period after lunch was really difficult towards me, for me. I would experience this pull towards more food. I wanted to avoid, I wanted to procrastinate. I would finish eating. And then instead of getting back to work, I would find myself either back in the kitchen. If I was home, if I was working from home, I'd be in the kitchen, in the pantry. I'd be scrolling, I'd be doing anything except what I was supposed to be doing next. In that time when I was in the office, maybe I would have a hard time even coming back to the office. Or I would think, I've got to go, I've got to go get something. I would have this, the feeling, that urge, that craving that just felt like it needed to be satisfied. I've had so many binges that started with uh what looks like a pretty, like good, satisfying lunch that led straight into eating non-stop for the next one to two hours. Now, when I really got curious about my pattern, about what was going on, what I eventually came to understand is that right after lunch, it is not my sharpest window. I don't have a lot of mental capacity, and I generally just am not as focused in that time. My brain is in a natural dip. And what I was doing or trying to do without much success was go straight from eating into some of the most demanding work on my list. So my brain would look at that and recognize how much effort and energy it was going to take. And it did categorize it as probably kind of painful because of it, wasn't at its sharpest. And I did have it on my list as probably way too big of something. So my brain just resisted. And it did what brains do. It found an easier route. It went looking for something that didn't require much. And often that meant food, especially when this is a pattern of repeated over and over and over again. And so once I understood that, I stopped fighting it and I started working with it instead. So now I protect that after lunch transition intentionally and carefully. I try to get outside, even briefly, as a real signal to my brain, the eating experience is over and we're moving on. And then when I come back to work, I give myself something small to start with, an easier task, a lower stakes win. Not because I'm lazy, but because getting into action matters way more than what action I start with. Though momentum can build. And once I'm moving, I'm moving and I want to keep going. But I had to lower my expectations of that first step to actually take it. I was expecting way too much of myself in a window where I didn't have that much to give. So that shift changed that window for me more than any amount of willpower ever did. Now, here's another transition pattern I see very often in the people that I work with. So see if you can find yourself in here too. Most people with food struggles tend to have one of two patterns around the week. Either they're fairly consistent during the week and things start to unravel on the weekends, maybe because of more flexibility, less structure. Suddenly food feels harder to navigate. Or the opposite happens. Weekends feel full and fun and connected. And then the trouble begins Sunday night or Monday with the return to the weekly routine. The dread of going back, the tightening, the reaching for food the night before a difficult week begins. And what happened for me was even different. It's like my struggle was absolutely on Mondays. I would have no problem on the weekends. But for me, it wasn't a dread of going back. It was again, I was expecting more of myself than I had capacity for. I would do all of these amazing things on the weekend, and then I would fill my day on Monday, not taking into account just how much I had done and how little capacity I might actually have. So that was really it for me, what the transition that I needed to be aware of and set myself up with. So whether your pattern is more of trouble during the week or trouble on the weekend, both are transitions. The shift from structure to more of an unstructured environment, from resting back to demand, or from being really active to going back to more of a work environment. They're all transitions. And once you can see them is as transitions and you can name what your brain is actually responding to, you stop making it a story about your willpower or your character. And you start making it a story about what your system needs in that moment. So before we talk about what to do, I want to pause and I want to ask you about something else. We've been talking about the small transitions, but we also really need to ask this question: are you in a big transition right now? So I'm not talking about the after-lunch window, the Sunday night dread. I mean a real significant life transition. Because a lot of people listening to this are, and they don't always name it as such. You might know that you're in it, but naming it is huge. So maybe you're about to travel, you're about to go on a trip, maybe you just got back. Maybe you have a big event coming up: a wedding, a reunion, a work presentation, or one just passed, and you're in that strange kind of deflated aftermath. Maybe you're in the middle of a move, a job change, a shift in relationship. Maybe you're navigating grief, loss, illness, your own or somebody else's. Maybe your kids are leaving home or coming back. Maybe you just finished something you worked toward for a long time. And now you're in that odd, unmoored feeling of what's next. All of these are transitions. And every single one of them is placing real stress on your system, whether you feel it consciously or not. So here's the question I want you to sit with. Are you holding yourself to the same standards during this transition that you hold yourself to when things are calm and settled? Are you expecting the same output, the same food choices, the same level of functioning while simultaneously carrying the weight of something your system has never had to carry before or hasn't had to carry in a long time? Or just adds additional weight, which means you aren't able to carry as much. Because if you are that gap between what your system actually has available right now and what you are demanding of it, that gap is often where the excess food comes in. And it's not because you are weak, it's because your system is overwhelmed and it's doing the only thing it knows how to do to get some relief. So if you are in a big transition and you've been hard on yourself about your food lately, I want you to hear this. The food isn't the problem. The expectation is. You are asking a lot of yourself right now, more than you are giving yourself credit for. And your system is trying to tell you that. Naming the transition, actually saying, I am in a transition. This is hard on my brain and my body, and I deserve some grace right now. That's not giving up, it's being honest with yourself. And honesty is always where the real work begins. You've heard me say on this podcast, if you've been listening for any period of time, awareness is the first step. We can't change what we're not aware of. So that literally is the very first thing. It is the most important and the simplest. We name it. So you literally say to yourself, I am in a transition right now. I am transitioning from lunch back to work. I'm transitioning from the weekend to Monday. I'm transitioning from vacation to regular life. Just naming it does something. It creates a tiny bit of space between you and that pull that you're feeling. It shifts you from being swept along by the transition to being someone who sees it happening. I have a client inside Cultivate. She does big things in life. And what she calls her transition from her big adventures back home, she calls it the transition back to ordinary time. Powerful. I can see I'm in a transition from this big event back to ordinary time. So from there, once you've named it, you can set an intention. Now, this isn't like a rigid plan, it is a direction. What do I want here? Who do I want to be in this window? What would it feel like? What would feel like taking care of myself right now? Even asking the question puts you in the driver's seat instead of putting you on that autopilot drive from the brain, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and trying to use as little energy as possible. So then the next step where you can is to create a bridge. So this is a small intentional pause between one thing and the next. And it doesn't have to be elaborate. It can be sitting in your car for two minutes before going inside. It can be a short walk. It can be stepping outside, getting a glass of water, doing something that signals to your brain that chapter is done. This new one is beginning. The brain needs that signal because without it, it's kind of lurching from one thing to the next and it's reaching for food to manage that, that uncertainty. Even setting an intention creates some certainty because we're saying, here's what I want to do with this time. Here is my intention for this time, instead of it just being this big unknown. Now, I also want you to give yourself grace. And this matters way more than people expect. When you are in a transition, especially a big one, I invite you to lower the bar. And I realize that can be really hard to do, especially if you're somebody who has high standards for yourself. But this isn't permanent and it's not forever. It is for the transition period. If you just got back from a trip, you don't need to go immediately back to operating at full capacity. If you're in the middle of a life change, your food doesn't need to be perfect. When we pile high expectations on top of an already taxed system, we make the hard moment harder. When we can say this is a transition, this is supposed to feel like a lot. This is a lot for my brain. I'm going to be gentler with my Myself right now, we make it more likely that we find our footing again. Now, here's one more thing that's worth considering. Where you have a choice, see if you can minimize your transitions, especially these day-to-day, the smaller transitions. Now, we don't always have that choice. Life doesn't always cooperate. But sometimes we're actually creating more transitions than we need to without even realizing it. So think about how you work. If you're bouncing back and forth between email and a project and a phone call and back to email and back to your notifications from your phone, you are not just multitasking. You are literally creating a transition every single time that you switch. Your brain has to reorient, re-engage, and use energy to get back up to speed on what it was doing. And every one of those microtransitions is a small tax on your system. And over the course of a day, that adds up. And so, of course, at the end of the day, you could get to a place where it just feels like, oh, I am so drained. So, are you adding more transitions to your day than you need to? What if you batched your email? You handled it all at once rather than dipping in and out all day. What if you finished one task or project before starting the next? Rather than running two or three things simultaneously. What if you gave yourself permission to be fully in one thing before moving to another? This isn't just a productivity strategy, it's a nervous system strategy. Fewer transitions means less demand on your brain, less uncertainty, less reaching for food to manage the load. Now, you won't eliminate transitions entirely, which is not the goal. But where you have a choice, simplifying the structure of your day can make a real difference in how your system feels by the time you get to those harder windows. Because here's the truth transitions are not going away. We are human, we will be in transitions multiple times a day for the rest of our life. We will have big transitions in our lives forever. The goal isn't to stop having them or to white knuckle your way through them or to just bounce back and forth between being on plan or on track and off because of what's happening in your life. The goal is to start seeing our transitions, to get curious about where your hard food moments actually come from, and to meet yourself there with something more useful than judgment. So start with one. Pick one daily transition that you know is hard for your brain, that you know leads to sometimes challenging moments with food. Maybe it's after lunch, maybe it's coming home from work, maybe it's the end of the day when the house finally gets quiet. Pick one, name it when it happens, start to build a small intentional bridge around it and see what shifts. You might be surprised at how much changes when you stop calling it a willpower problem. You stop thinking this is a you problem, and you start calling it what it actually is. So if you are ready to go deeper on work like this, understanding what's really underneath your hard food moments and building something that actually works for your brain and your life, whether it is the small day-to-day transitions, or if you're in the middle of a really big life transition right now and you just want some support, reach out and schedule a breakthrough call. You can do that at janepilger.com forward slash breakthrough, and I'll have a link in the show notes. Well, spend some time just looking at where you are now and what might actually help in a meaningful and lasting way. All right, that's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. If you've been trying to stop binge eating and nothing has worked, there's a reason. I created the binge breakthrough mini-series to help you finally understand what's driving your binge eating beneath the surface so that you can actually start to change it. Each video is short and they're designed to give you the clarity and direction you've been missing so you can stop feeling stuck and start finding your way out. Start watching now at janepilger.com forward slash mini. That's jampilger.com forward slash mini. M I M I