Relief eating chocolate makes sense when you understand her Food Story
- Bronwyn Fletcher
- 17 hours ago
- 2 min read
Nicole wanted to lose weight, so she did what most women do.
She cut calories, replaced foods with low-calorie versions, and followed the same eating plan every weekday.
✅ Green smoothie for breakfast.
✅ Salad for lunch.
✅ Apple in the afternoon.
✅ Meat and vegetables for dinner.
But that schedule didn't work
Because, at night, when she was alone, she ate chocolate bars she kept hidden in the laundry cupboard.
She didn’t understand why she kept doing it.
From the outside, the answers to her problem look simple.
✅ Eat more during the day.
✅ Stop eating sweets at night.
But these are only simple tweaks that she won’t be able to stick with. Because they don’t touch the underlying system that is creating her eating behaviour.
When Nicole looked deeper into her food history, she recalled spending evenings alone while her mother worked night shifts.
Her mother would leave her a meal and a brown paper bag filled with lollies and chocolate to keep her company.
Night after night she ate while watching TV, trying to settle the fear of being alone.
Now, she's doing the same eating to get relief and she doesn't know why'
As an adult, she followed the same pattern when her husband was away.
Her eating chocolate and lollies wasn’t random. It was familiar and calming. It was what she knew to do to bring emotional relief to feeling alone and frightened.
Diets had never solved her weight problem because they only touched the surface by reorganising her eating.
Deep change became possible when Nicole understood the whole food back story.
She realised that restricting food during the day created intense hunger at night, what I call the hungering tsunami. It's when we eat to get relief.
One of the hardest ideas she had to accept was that she needed to eat more during the day if she had any hope of stopping the overeating of chocolate at night.
Like Nicole when women understand their entire food story, they can finally make sense of their eating.
And when you know what’s driving you to eat the way you do, permanent change becomes possible.
You can also listen to my Podcast (Before Dieting) on Apple or Spotify or wherever yiu get yiur Podcasts.
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