Many smart women struggle with their weight and many busy, successful professional women resort to food to cope with the stress, uncertainty, and other emotions that occur in a full, high-pressure life.

1. Let go of the belief that you are alone and the only one struggling like this. If you are caught in this cycle with food and overeating, you’re in some great company. One of the most self-defeating actions you can take is to continue to struggle alone, heaping on self-blame and even shame. Find someone to talk to. Open your eyes to the possibility of support. Ask other women what they do when they struggle. Consider investing in yourself the same way you invest in your career and your family and your home and pursuing emotional eating solutions that can help you.
2. Take control of perfectionism. You’re human and you’ll never be perfect. Perfectionism or all-or-nothing thinking is common among women who expect a lot of themselves. It can get you stuck in a pattern where making a poor choice is interpreted as “blowing it.” Women trying to lose weight fall for this all the time. Instead of continuing forward and allowing the next choice to be a better one, the tendency is to cash in all your chips and start down a road of overeating because you’re upset with yourself and you “failed.” Plan for imperfection. Train your mind to notice your progress and not just your missteps. Try the “Three Things That Went Well” strategy.
3. Stop relying on willpower. This is a biggie. You are a high-achiever. You probably have a lot of willpower and stick-to-it-ness in other areas of your life. You may be lost in a mindset of beating yourself up over this cycle you are stuck in. If so, you probably tell yourself things like:

• “What’s wrong with me that I can’t get a grip on this?”
• “This should be easy.”
•  “I’m just not trying hard enough.”
•  “This is an embarrassment and I need to stop being lazy and just take a tough line with myself.”

• Help with finding motivation
• Help with creating time for themselves
• Help with accountability
• Help developing new skills and strategies
• Help with getting to the root of what’s triggering their overeating
• Help. Period.

Approaching the problem with respect and allowing yourself the resources you need to be effective can make a world of difference.

If you are an emotional eater or someone prone to overeating, you know well that it’s one thing to decide to change your eating habits—to cut back your portions, stop snacking in the evening, or to stop turning to food at the end of a long day. It’s another thing entirely to act on your intentions and not overeat when you find yourself in the situation where that’s all you want to do.

• Take a bath
• Soak your feet (really—this feels great)
• Blow bubbles
  
• Brew a cup of tea
•  Listen to music
• Watch a movie
• Sit outside (or if it’s cold, by a fire)
•  If you have a cat who will let you, pet him/her and be one with the purr
  
• Curl up with a good book
• Update your Netflix list or put some new books on hold at the library
• Buy yourself some new music for your mp3 player
•  Call a friend
• Play Scrabble or chess or even solitaire online. Better yet, get your family to play a game—live and in person
• Catch up on magazines
•  Do a crossword puzzle
• Work on your birthday wish list (no matter how far away your birthday is)
  
•  Listen to a relaxation CD

It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are some common traps that even the smartest women fall for and the success strategies you can use to avoid them:

1. Getting too focused on what to eat. Cycles of overeating and weight gain are rarely fixed by focusing only on the food. A focus on what to eat doesn’t address or fix the situations, feelings, or relationships that may be triggering overeating. Yes, portion size matters and sometimes food intolerances or metabolic difficulties cause weight gain. However, even these situations become clearer and easier to sort out when you start listening to yourself and paying attention to how you feel, instead of focusing your attention on every bite, calorie, or fat gram that you put into your mouth.
2. Disregarding what you really need. You know yourself better than anyone. Instead of focusing on what “should” work and what you “should” do, take this bold step that many high-achieving women skip:
   
   Ask yourself what you really need to be successful—and then give it to yourself. You’re likely to spend less time, energy, heartache and even money in the long run when you trust your inner wisdom. Do you need the help of an expert? Be honest about that. Better tools to deal with stress or difficult emotions? Do you need some one-on-one mentoring or support? Don’t cheat yourself. Investing in what you know to be true and getting the targeted help you need will likely make more of a difference than all the self-help books you can’t figure out how to make work for you.

   Too many women spend too much money on solutions that aren’t comprehensive or individualized enough and don’t really meet their needs. Not only does this lead to failure, it burns up your hope and your sense of effectiveness. Do you feel like you know what you need but it isn’t possible? Don’t let that stop you. Ask yourself what it would take to make it happen and ask what is do-able that would start allowing you to have more of what you need. Start believing that you deserve to get what you need and start asking for it. You might be surprised what shows up.

3. Refusing to ask for help. High-achievers can fall into the trap of believing that lifestyle change has to happen solo. Many women who are successful in other areas of their lives feel embarrassed and even ashamed of their struggles with overeating. They feel like they are alone in their struggles. Unfortunately, not reaching out for help increases the sense of isolation and decreases your potential effectiveness. Asking for help might be the scariest step you take in order to make peace with food, but stepping outside of your own head, your own mindset, beliefs, and traps, can start change happening—and quickly.
4. Not addressing time issues. My heart almost broke when I heard an outwardly successful professional woman tell me that given the hectic state of her life, she believed that she wouldn’t be able to focus on her own goals for the next ten years. Really? What kind of life is that and what kind of example are you living? Change requires a commitment to making it happen. Whether it’s taking the time to attend a class, listen to audios, create a plan for healthy meals, or meet with a coach, if you don’t create the time, it isn’t really a priority. Honest truth. If you need help learning how to make or find the time, or how to put yourself first, make this your first action step.

When WAS the last time you ate because you were physically famished? When was the last time you ate that you weren't?

Emotional eating is a major part of most women’s lives. We’re taught to use food for so many things in addition to fuel. Diets mess with our relationship with food and add so many “shoulds” to the equation that many chronic dieters hardly know if they are hungry or not. They are conditioned to judge their “fullness” by calorie counts, the clock, fat grams, carbs, and other external cues that are not hunger.

A woman who is at peace with food feeds herself in high quality ways (and I'm talking about feeding her spirit and her soul as well as her stomach).

She also allows herself to savor the food and the experiences that she takes in. Eating doesn't trigger guilt or self-loathing and responding to her hunger isn't something she does in secret.

Let’s evaluate your relationship with hunger.

• How do you decide when you are hungry?
• Where do you feel hunger in your body?
• On a hunger scale of 1 (ravenous) to 10 (stuffed to the gills), how hungry do you allow yourself to become before you feed yourself? How full do you fill yourself when you do eat?
• When you determine that you are hungry, how do you decide what to eat?
• How do you tell the difference between physical and emotional hunger?

If your Inner Champion was running the show and helping you live your BEST version of your life, how would you be responding to your physical and emotional cravings? Would it be different?

In the battle to lose weight, stop overeating, or break free from emotional eating, it’s important to pay attention to the things that trigger your eating to go awry. Simply focusing on what to eat misses an essential point–Your eating choices may be strongly affected by your emotions and your environment. And your food plan is useless if something is preventing you from following it.

1. Getting too hungry

Do you stick to your plan through breakfast and lunch only to find yourself irritable, craving carbs, and ready to eat everything in sight by the time late afternoon or evening rolls around? The end of the day tends to be stressful for many. The transition between work and home, mealtime decisions, and other peoples’ hunger or tiredness can push a busy woman over the edge. When I start coaching a new private client, it’s not unusual to hear that this is THE most difficult time of day.

The key here: take control of what you can. This means doing what you can so that you don’t arrive at the end of the day feeling exhausted and starved. Too many women who are trying to lose weight, eat too little in the middle of the day and, as a result, lose control and overeat before, during, or after dinner (or all three). Make sure you are eating a balanced lunch (with protein) and then calculate the hours you are expecting yourself to last before eating again. Most women do well with a small snack midafternoon. Again, adding in protein can make all the difference.

2. Evening eating

3. Snacking on treats at work

Emotional eating is a tough habit to break, and let’s face it—the urge to overeat usually happens when we are not at our best. It’s all well and good to have a plan to end emotional eating and lists of what to do instead of overeating, but, in the moment, sometimes getting out of the vicious cycle of turning to food can seem impossible.

Here’s an important emotional eating tip: When you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

That’s right. In spite of what your high achieving inner-perfectionist may tell you, you don’t need to unfurl a perfectly designed plan to have an impact on your eating. When you hit that spot where you are starting to feel out of control, when the snacking won’t stop, when you have an urge to overeat at work or to stand in front of the refrigerator after dinner, just stop—and do nothing.

I’m not suggesting you stop forever or title your stopping “I Won’t Eat.” Just insert a short break. Take sixty seconds to breathe deeply and take a small step back from the situation. Don’t focus on the negative. Don’t focus on what you don’t know to do. Don’t focus on being frustrated with yourself.

Breathe deeply and ask yourself what you know and what you need—in this moment. This is not a big picture question. This emotional eating intervention is about taking a few seconds to take care of yourself for the next sixty seconds.

What do you need NOW?

Maybe you need a change of scenery (think small and do-able, this means a walk around the office, not a trip to Tahiti). Consider a breath of fresh air, a phone call to a friend, a drive around the block so you can scream in your car, or maybe two minutes with your eyes closed, breathing deeply and reconnecting with you. Inserting this short break may not feel like much, but when you pause in this way, you break the auto-pilot pull of emotional eating. A short break gives you a different perspective, and, by choosing to take it, you step into the driver’s seat. You get some power back. It’s not a “perfect” fix, but a short break changes the moment and may reduce the power of what is triggering your hunger. It gives you time to refocus and when you refocus you are better able to strategize and to think.

Inserting a short break also allows time for feelings to fade and to shift. Sometimes that can make all the difference in the world.

If you are tired of struggling with emotional eating and overeating and ready to make a change that sticks, the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28 Day Program shows you how to take control in simple, do-able steps that fit with your needs, your preferences, and your schedule.

Take good care, 

Taking control of emotional eating and overeating is usually a process. Figuring out what to do instead of emotional eating can be tricky, in part because food is so darn easy to turn to and it is so widely available.

If you want to make lasting changes with your eating habits or your weight, it’s important to have two sets of strategies—quick, practical strategies that get you through difficult times, and tools and strategies that help you address the root causes of your overeating—so it doesn’t keep coming back and taking control of your life. I shared tips for creating quick, in-the-moment strategies in my last post. In this post I’ll share why it’s crucial to identify and address the root cause.

Stress eating, anxious eating, eating because you are bored or lonely, eating because you are angry or tense or overeating after a hard day are all types of emotional eating. It’s all too easy to turn to food to try to comfort or to distract or to numb. Food is quick, easy to “apply,” and almost always present. Food often makes you feel good—for a few moments. The problem is, the salve doesn’t last, and, the food doesn’t do anything about really addressing the problem that triggered your eating.

If you are an emotional eater, one of the most empowering things that you can do is stop berating yourself and calling yourself names when you overeat and turn to food. Start by respecting that you do it for a reason. If you can face your desire to eat with respect, you can start to examine what I call the “real cravings” that underlie or trigger your desire for food.

What are you really hungry for? Whether it’s love or respect or stress relief; excitement or comfort,, compassion, or something different, identifying your real craving puts you in the driver’s seat. When you identify and begin to address the root cause of your food attraction, food loses a lot of its power and its hold on you (you might be amazed). Once you are clear that it isn’t really about the chocolate doughnut (or whatever you are craving), your mind won’t be so persistently focused on it. There’s a huge bonus payoff as well.  When you identify the root cause of your emotional eating and start feeding that true craving, not only does emotional eating get better—so does your life. Truly taking charge of emotional eating guides you to address important concerns so that your life works better for you. Creating peace with food really does mean creating a better life.

If you would like an accelerated, step-by-step guide for taking control of emotional eating, in a do-able way, you’ll want to take a look at the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28 Day Program, my self-guided use-at-home system that walks you through the process of transforming your relationship with food through daily, do-able steps.

Take good care,

If you struggle with emotional eating: stress eating, boredom eating, comfort eating, frustration eating, or any type of eating designed to help you cope with or avoid your feelings, you know that it can be a difficult habit to break. It’s one thing to identify that you struggle with emotional eating, but even after you have identified the feelings and situations that trigger overeating, it may be difficult to figure out what to do instead of eating when these situations arise.

Of course, you will be more likely to successfully make lasting changes if you have a ready-made list of strategies that you can use when the urge to eat, snack, graze, or binge arises. Unfortunately, when asked to create such a list, it’s pretty common to draw a blank.

What to do instead of something that comes so automatically? That can be a tough one.

Don’t let that dissuade you. If you are trying to kick the emotional eating habit, sit down right now and make a list of ten things you can do instead when the feeling hits. Think about the different situations you might be in—what you can do instead of overeating at work is probably different than what you can turn to to avoid emotional eating in the evening. How do you make such a list? It’s really about trial and error. Without experimenting, you won’t the unique combination of strategies that work for you.

My tips for creating a list of what to do instead of emotional eating:

• Think simple and do-able. You don’t need to eliminate a craving or an urge completely, but you do want to get through it.
• Consider both strategies that help you actively address the emotions you are feeling (stress, anxiety, loneliness, etc.), and, what I call “warm blanket strategies.” These are the strategies you can use when you can’t actively change the situation (maybe you are stress eating at work because you have little control of the demands there) and you simply need some comfort to wrap up in (like a warm blanket). Comfort that is not food. For example, if you are eating because you are lonely, active strategies would attack the loneliness. You might reach out to a friend or spend some time chatting online. A warm blanket strategy would be something kind that you could do for yourself out of compassion for how you are feeling—maybe taking time to read a favorite book or a nonfood indulgence like a warm bath or some new tunes for your mp3 player.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment. To kick the emotional eating habit, you need to get out of the rut of doing things a certain way (turning to food). Consider any way that you can change things up—moving to a different room or location, changing the order of your routine, creating reminders of the new strategies that you want to try. Notice the things that help and keep building on them.

My bet is that you are looking for a solution that lasts—what I often call, peace with food. That’s different from a crash diet that starts with lots of motivation and then, well, crashes. The more you practice looking for what works for you instead of eating, the more you will start to identify solutions. It’s definitely a process, but one that pays off big time.

If you would like an accelerated, step-by-step guide for taking control of emotional eating, in a do-able way, you’ll want to take a look at the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28 Day Program, my self-guided use-at-home system that walks you through the process of transforming your relationship with food through daily, do-able steps.

Take good care,

If you are an emotional eater, you are not alone. Emotional eating is one of the major causes of overeating for women and one of the biggest reasons for weight regain. If you are seeing to avoid emotional eating, you’ve probably already figured out that willpower alone isn’t enough. To effectively stop overeating, it’s important to have a plan for what to do instead of eating or turning to food.

The first step you can take to prevent emotional eating is ditch self blame and guilt and start addressing your eating with compassion and respect. Even though you are using food in a way that you don’t want to, you are eating the way that you do for a reason. Understanding the root cause of your overeating or emotional eating is the first step towards taking effective control. Getting to the root cause of your emotional eating is also critical if you want to make changes or create weight loss that lasts. If you don’t address the reasons or the motivations for eating, any weight loss technique you use will be like applying a bandage without treating the injury. If you don’t address what drives your hunger and your urges, they are almost guaranteed to come back.

Before you can effectively decide what to do instead of eating, you need to understand why you are eating in the first place. What triggers your cravings, your emotional eating episodes, your binges, or the times when you feel out of control with food?

Common triggers for emotional eating:

• Stress and anxiety or worry
• Boredom
• Frustration, anger, or feelings of helplessness
• Loneliness or disappointment
• Confusion
• Overload or feeling overwhelmed

To zone in on your emotional eating triggers (both the feelings and the situations), here are some questions that you can ask yourself. These questions are effective to ask either before or after an overeating episode happens:

• What do you know about why you overate? Too often we get stuck by focusing on what we don’t know.
• What were you feeling and what was happening before the eating happened or the craving started?
• What was different about this time period and yesterday (or a time when you didn’t feel tempted by food or by cravings)? In other words, what do you know about why this happened when it did and not two hours earlier or four hours later?

Don’t worry if the answers don’t flow right away. Getting into the habit of asking these questions will train you to start looking for the answers. Identifying the feelings and situations that trigger emotional eating allows you to start addressing these areas directly and will help you start to take control of emotional overeating.

If you would like a step-by-step strategy for taking control of emotional eating, in a do-able way, you’ll want to take a look at the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28 Day Program, my self-guided use-at-home system that walks you through the process of transforming your relationship with food through daily, do-able steps.

Take good care,