Finding Freedom: Healing the Hurt Beneath Emotional Eating with Claudia Braun

In this powerful episode host Laura welcomes Claudia Braun, a holistic mindset and lifestyle coach certified in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Claudia opens up about her personal journey with emotional eating that began at age 10 when she discovered food could temporarily ease emotional pain. She shares how this coping mechanism followed her through adolescence, college, and into adulthood, creating a vicious cycle of stress eating and dieting. The conversation explores how our relationship with food often masks deeper emotional needs and how the cultural messaging around dieting affects women. Claudia offers practical insights on breaking free from emotional eating patterns by addressing the root emotional causes, embracing authenticity, and learning to own both your "yes" and your "no" instead of living to please others.

Claudia Braun is a longtime Chicago resident, certified in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and works as a holistic mindset and lifestyle coach. With 30 years of yoga practice, she brings a wealth of experience to her approach to healing. Claudia has been a keynote speaker at several in-person women's events, hosted the Healing Summit, and been featured on the Holistic Monitor podcast. Drawing from her own journey of healing her relationship with food and emotional eating, Claudia now helps others break free from stress eating patterns and people-pleasing behaviors to live more authentically. She is also a dog mom to Jason, an avid gardener, and enjoys working with clay.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Emotional Eating as a Coping Mechanism: How food becomes a "companion" to manage stress and difficult emotions
• The Vicious Cycle of Dieting: Why traditional dieting approaches often fail to address the emotional roots of eating habits
• People-Pleasing and Boundaries: The connection between people-pleasing, lack of boundaries, and using food for comfort
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT/Tapping): How this approach helps release trapped emotions in the subconscious mind
• Authentic Living: The importance of being true to yourself rather than living based on others' expectations
• Owning Your Yes and No: Practical strategies for honoring your own needs and setting boundaries
• Healing Through Vulnerability: The power of acknowledging and expressing difficult emotions rather than suppressing them
• Cultural Conditioning Around Food: How societal and family messages about food and dieting affect our relationship with eating

Powerful Quotes from the Episode

"One of the things that I'd like to share with y'all is that I have these three strategies to own your yes and own your no. And part of that is kind of getting in touch with what do we actually feel."

"I didn't know my yes. I didn't know my no. I knew other people's yes and other people's no. I was a master people pleaser."

"It brings me back to that story with my boyfriend's therapist... I was saying to him, 'I don't know how to make my parents happy and my boyfriend happy at the same time.' And he looks at me and I could see that there was something about that statement I made that was really off... I'm not even in the equation."

"You can't put a happy face in an empty tank."

"I give people permission to say what they don't want to say."

"When I work with clients, I have them write a letter to food, like say goodbye to your best friend. It is your best friend. It's been your best friend."

"The only way out is through."

"Can you imagine what life would be like if you were authentically you instead of constantly living life based on everyone else's judgments and expectations of you?"

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