Too Much on Her Plate

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4 Questions to Ask Before You Try to Lose Weight—Again

January 2nd, 2010, No Comments »

If you are an emotional eater, an overeater, a compulsive eater or a constant snacker, you’re probably also an expert dieter. Most women don’t just struggle to lose weight once. We struggle to lose weight, to keep it off, to maintain hard-earned healthy habits, and—too often—we struggle to lose the weight all over again because we’ve regained it.

If you want to avoid the weight loss roller coaster—and the emotional turmoil that can accompany it, ask yourself the following four questions before you start moving forward with your weight loss resolutions.

1.    Why are you in this same place again? In other words, what hasn’t worked in the past? Where have the plans fallen apart? Why did you lose your motivation? What part of past programs just wasn’t possible for you to complete? Be as honest and as thorough about answering this question as possible.  Note: this is NOT an opportunity to beat yourself up. If your first response is something like, “I was lazy and didn’t have enough willpower,” I’m not buying it. What would a plan need to have to keep you energized? What was it about the last approach that led you to run out of steam and stick-to-it-ness?

2.    Do you have the time and energy for this project? Really. If adopting new healthy lifestyle habits is important to you, you’re going to need to carve out some space to do this. Do you struggle to find time to take care of yourself? Are you willing to say no to some things so that you can say yes to what you want? What will you need to let go of to stay on track?

3.    When you stumble, what will help you get back on track? We all have bad days (or weeks or months). You know yourself—what do you need to keep going when the going gets tough? Are you motivated by accountability, rewards, feedback, or something else? Do you need a partner, an emotional eating program, a coach who can help you make peace with food? What benefits or features would help you really create the success you are after?

4.    Are you trying to build a house with only a hammer? In other words, do you need some new tools to craft the success that you crave? The best hammer in the world is pretty useless if what you really need is a screwdriver and the best eating plan in the world won’t teach you how to stop emotional eating (stress eating, comfort eating, boredom eating, etc.). What skills or habits or information would help you feel more confident and prepared to win at weight loss—once and for all?

Remember—you are the expert on you. Don’t let your wisdom go to waste. Use what you know to craft a plan that won’t disappoint or leave you tied up in knots trying to be someone you aren’t. That’s how to create a pathway towards peace with food and weight that stays “lost.”

Take good care,

Stress Related Eating Tip You’ll Want to Savor

November 12th, 2009, No Comments »

Are you experiencing a lot of stress? Are you feeling like your life has too many to-do lists and “shoulds?” I have a relatively painless stress related eating tip for you:

It turns out that maybe you could/should throw in a touch of chocolate.

A clinical trial reported in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research found that eating an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones in people who reported feeling highly stressed.

Growing evidence has suggested that dark chocolate may reduce risk factors for heart disease and other physical conditions, and may reduce cravings for sweet, salty or high fat foods. The present study appears to be the first to show reductions in stress hormones and other stress-related biochemical changes in those highly stressed subjects who ate dark chocolate (1.4 ounces) daily, for two weeks.

Enjoy!

4 Tips For Taking Control of Stress Before It Takes Control of You, Your Life, or Your Eating

October 19th, 2009, 2 Comments »

We all know the stress of too much on our plates–too much to do, too much to think about, too many things and people and responsibilities to take care of.

Whether you choose to have a lot on your plate or feel like there is no other option, stress and overwhelm may be a reality–and they take a toll.

Stress and overwhelm prevent us from being and feeling and behaving as our best version of ourselves.  Stress not only feels crummy; many of us react to stress and overwhelm by cutting back and dropping some of the self-care and comfort strategies that benefit us the most and allow us to really shine.

Stress and overload can also lead us to habits such as stress eating, comfort eating, drinking and smoking too much, and sleeping too little.  And the stress that creates can lead to more of the same—a vicious cycle.

Want to do something different?

Here are 4 tips for taking control of stress that you can implement today:

1.    Set Priorities. Take time at the end of each day to identify your top 2-3 priorities for the next day.  Being clear on your priorities creates clarity of mind, focuses your action, and reduces stress.
2.    Avoid Multitasking. Research shows that multitasking does not make us more productive, yet when we’re stressed, there is a temptation to conquer as much as we can at once.  It doesn’t serve us well.  Slow down. Take a deep breath, and focus on doing one thing at a time.
3.    Recognize Signs of Overwhelm. Know what the signs are that your stress level is building.  Are you a stress eater and noticing your eating feels more out of control?  Are you more irritable? Not taking time for the things that you need?  The earlier that you recognize that stress is building, the sooner you can start implementing strategies to do something about it.
4.    Never Underestimate the Power of a Small Pause. Breathe.  Step outside. Take a short walk around the block or your office. Stretch your neck and shoulders and drink some water.  Checking in with yourself for even 60 seconds, several times a day, can help you stay connected with yourself and to what’s important to you.

Take good care,

Stress Eating and the Economy: Tip Three

October 2nd, 2009, 1 Comment »

This is the third in a series of tips on how to take control of emotional eating and stress eating triggered by financial stress or concern.

Emotional Eating Tip Three: Control What You Can

Lots of people are feeling a loss of control these days and that’s leading to more emotional eating and overeating. The economy impacts all of us. If you are feeling less in control, it is important to identify what you can do to begin to feel more in control–because that’s where you want to be.  As you begin to think about this, don’t only think about the big issues and worries.

When life starts to feel out of control, one of the most powerful things we can do is to take charge of the things (big and small) that we can control. Ironically, when life feels out of control, it’s sometimes tempting to throw up our hands and quit entirely. Don’t.

What can you control? What can you take pride in today? Pack a healthy lunch. Walk for twenty minutes after work. Do something kind for yourself this evening. If you are looking for order or predictability, clean out a drawer or your closet. Clear off your desk. Take one proactive action. It will help.

Take good care,

Stress Eating and the Economy Tip Two: Take Care of Yourself

September 30th, 2009, No Comments »

This is the second in a series of tips on how to stop emotional eating triggered by financial worries and stress.

If the economy is causing you stress, you could definitely benefit from comfort.  Comfort eating reaches an all-time high when we are stressed and aren’t feeling entirely sure of (or in control of) the solution to our problems. In order to take control of comfort eating, it’s important to have comfort strategies you can use instead of turning to overeating.  How are you compassionate to yourself during stressful or uncertain times?  How can you take good care of yourself?  Start making a list of things that feel good that you can turn to when you don’t.

Take good care,

Stress Eating and the Economy: Tips to Control Emotional Eating

September 28th, 2009, No Comments »

Worries about money, the economy, income levels, and finances are behind many women’s stress eating and overeating these days.  In a recent group coaching call, every participant’s dominant concern boiled down to money worries of one form or another.  Even if your own financial situation is secure, the worries, stress, and difficulties of others surround us in a big way.

Feeling out of control, anxious, worried, or unhappy are all triggers for emotional eating, so I thought this week I’d share some tips to keep stress about the economy from affecting your actual bottom line.

Stress Eating and the Economy–Tip One to Stop Emotional Eating: Acknowledge the Stress and Your Feelings

As tempting as it is to avoid reality, it’s so important to acknowledge the stress and the way you are feeling.  That doesn’t mean that you are going to dwell on it or feel that way forever, but if you don’t let yourself deal with your feelings directly, you won’t be very effective at responding to them.

One of the members of my Smart Choices Success Circle program had been avoiding getting clear on how her financial situation has been impacted by the stock market.  She was worried and fearful and was trying to cope by “not thinking about it.” Instead of feeling better, she found herself facing mounting dread and guilt for not doing what she knew she needed to do to clarify her situation.  She also found herself snacking more–especially in the evening–and putting on weight.  As this happened, she began to feel more out of control.  Luckily, she saw herself entering a vicious cycle where trying to avoid her feelings led to emotional eating, guilt, and weight gain (and didn’t help with the worry and stress anyway–in fact it added to it).  It wasn’t until she acknowledged how stressed, worried, and fearful she was that she could start to develop a plan to take care of herself.

A coaching client was noticing that economic changes were leading to changes in her clients’ buying habits. She panicked when a popular program wasn’t so popular anymore.  Instead of spiraling into fear (and stress eating), acknowledging how she was feeling allowed her move into some effective problem solving.

Tip: If you have money worries or fears or stress, give yourself some time to let yourself really think about and address your feelings.  This is not the same as “fixing” the situation. Give yourself time to journal, talk with a supportive friend, or think about how you feel.

Take good care,

Stressed With Work? My Favorite Strategy

September 24th, 2009, No Comments »

Why turn to food you aren’t really hungry for when work overloads you?  I have a much better idea.

It has been a challenging few days around here.  I’ve had too much to do.  A backlog of projects for my business, adjusting to back-to-school schedules at home ( and all the events that go with that), and a bunch of unexpected demands, have left me feeling stretched pretty thin. So I’m implementing one of my favorite easy and rewarding self care strategies.

One lovely thing.

The rules: I do one lovely thing for myself—just for me—each day.  It doesn’t have to be anything major, just lovely–and good for my soul.  Today I’m cutting a bunch of incredible smelling lavender and putting it on my desk.

Want to play? What lovely thing can you do for you?

3 Steps To Avoid Stress Eating At Your Desk

September 22nd, 2009, 2 Comments »

Do you find yourself stress eating, comfort eating or even boredom eating during your workday?  That’s emotional eating–eating that we do that is triggered by feelings or desires or needs—not a physical need for fuel. It’s the eating that happens when you’re procrastinating tackling a difficult project, struggling with writer’s block, or avoiding a difficult conversation.  Emotional eating also happens when we’re trying to transform our feelings—like munching mindlessly in the late afternoon in an attempt to perk up or re-motivate. Emotional eating is a major cause of weight gain, weight loss difficulties, and weight re-gain after weight loss. It can be a major issue for many busy business owners and professionals who feel like they are facing a mounting to-do list, challenging projects, financial challenges, and too-little time.

Before you reach for the chocolate—here are three ways to avoid emotional eating during your work day and build skills and awareness that will help you take charge of future challenges with emotional eating.

1. Identify what you are doing

Lots of emotional eating happens on auto-pilot. When we eat without our full awareness we eat more, we often make poor choices, and we don’t even fully taste and enjoy what we are eating.

Don’t put food where you can reach for it mindlessly. Use strategies that maximize your awareness of what you are doing—don’t eat while you are working—in fact, set a personal policy of not multitasking at all while you eat.  If you are feeling cravings or urges to eat that aren’t hunger-driven, say what you know about what’s going on—actually say it out loud (and without judgment). “I’m not physically hungry but all I can think about are those cookies. Something is triggering me to think about eating even though I don’t need fuel right now.” You might feel silly, but don’t skip this step. If you are surrounded by other people and you can’t really talk to yourself, pull out a piece of paper and write it down. Don’t worry if you don’t know anything more than “I’m not really hungry, but I want to eat.”

2. Explore your craving

That urge to eat probably didn’t pop up out of nowhere. The five minutes (or less) it takes to stop and explore what’s going on will be worth it.  Without judgment, try being a detective. See if you can identify what your craving is really about. Pull out a journal or type on your computer for a few minutes (yes, I know you’re busy. Just take a FEW minutes). If you can, you might want to go for a short walk while you think. Why is eating suddenly so appealing? What was happening before you were thinking of it? What would you be thinking of if you weren’t thinking about food? What makes this hour different from one when chocolate (or whatever you are craving) wasn’t calling to you? Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and notice what comes to you. If you figure anything out, be direct with yourself and say that out loud too. “I’m not hungry but I’m focusing on eating candy. I just realized it’s because I’m really stressed out about this presentation I need to get done and I’m worried about whether it will be good enough” If you hit pay dirt here, you’ll now find you have a different problem. The problem isn’t really about eating or not eating, it’s figuring out how to take care of yourself and the feelings or issues you just identified.

Sometimes, simply identifying the real cause of your hunger will be enough to shift how you feel.  Sometimes you’ll need to move to a strategy that addresses the real need or issue.

3. Create Options

It’s much easier not to turn to food if you have a plan for what you can do instead. Take the information you gathered in step two and start developing a list of everything you can think of that you could do to take care of that feeling or need  in addition to eating. It’s not about NOT eating, it’s about figuring out what you can do INSTEAD. Take a break, switch tasks, drink a glass of water, go wash your hands and put on lotion, commit to spending fifteen minutes on the task you are avoiding….You get the idea. Put the list somewhere where you can see it and can add ideas as you think of them. Don’t censor your ideas for being unrealistic or impossible. Write down every strategy (big or small) you can think of to do in response to worry or anxiety or tiredness or boredom (or whatever you have identified). Make a commitment to try two of those things, this week when the emotional eating urge hits and tweak your list as you go.

Business Travel and Healthy Eating

September 10th, 2009, No Comments »

October will be a travel-rich month for me and I’ve been busy this morning firming up some travel plans. Booking an airline ticket is high on my list of “not fun” activities, as is the actual airline travel.  Travel days seem to get longer and longer–and then there’s the food. Maybe it’s boredom, the stress of flying, or just being out of my routine, but I get hungry the minute I get on a plane. Without pre-planning, I’m likely to be stuck with unsatisfying junk food (or nothing at all). Does traveling tend to knock your healthy eating plans for a loop?

One of the most helpful things you can do is to pre-plan.  It sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but can you believe how much we resist it? I know I do.  There’s this little voice that whispers, “Oh, just roll with it—you’ll figure it out.”  Maybe so, maybe no, but I tend to figure things out in higher quality, more satisfying ways when I give difficult situations the benefit of some thought.

Stephanie Quilao over at Noshtopia recently posted some creative ideas for healthy airline snacking –who knew you could get hummus in a tube?  These are also great ideas for those long days with strange schedules when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from (or whether it is going to be something you really want to eat). Take a look, and before your next trip or busy day, take ten minutes to think about how you might feed yourself better.  It can make all the difference. Oh, and don’t forget to drink your water

Take good care,

Melissa

Is Martyrdom Fueling Your Overeating?

August 24th, 2009, No Comments »

Do you overeat when you are stressed or tired or overwhelmed?

Do you flop down exhausted at the end of the day feeling like there is never enough time for you?

Despite your best intentions, do you never seem to get to that exercise plan, that journal that you want to write in, or that fun project you really want to start?

Do you ever feel like no one really understands how much is expected of you?

Are you feeling resentful that there is never enough time to get to you?

If you find yourself answering yes to any of these questions, it’s time to consider whether martyrdom is having a negative impact on your eating, your weight, your health, and your life.

What do I mean by martyrdom?  I’m talking about sacrificing yourself—literally—for whatever cause it is that you choose to be a martyr for.

Martyrdom is not the same as caring for others.  Healthy caring assumes that you are just as human and needy as everyone else.  When you distribute your care, you get an equal share (it’s like dividing up a pizza—everyone gets a piece).

The martyr approach doesn’t work that way.  The martyr assumes that caring for others takes priority or somehow cancels out her own needs. She assumes that in order to be “good” at caring for others (or other responsibilities), she must sacrifice her own agenda.  The martyr believes that “personal stuff” happens after you’ve taken care of everything else. The martyr often says, “I can’t (meditate, go to the gym, ever see my friends, fill-in-the-blank) because Junior’s soccer schedule is so busy or I’ve got that committee work to do or I have to make dinner.  Here’s the litmus test: if Junior has an unscheduled extra practice or the committee calls another meeting, the martyr will move mountains and give up on sleep to make that happen.  Her own needs—they just don’t get the same priority.

The tradeoff for choosing martyrdom is feeling exhausted and deprived and unfed, overlooked, and uncared for.  Resentment usually follows.  Let’s see a show of hands.  When you feel exhausted, deprived, unfed, overlooked and uncared for (with a hefty dash of resentment), who finds those chocolate chip cookies a lot harder to resist?

Martyrdom breeds overeating—of many different types.  When there is never enough time, food becomes an easy-to-turn-to fix for all the unfilled places in your life. If martyrdom is ruling the day, then no matter what great strategies you learn to take control of your emotional eating, you’ll rarely feel entitled to implement them.

How to leave martyrdom behind?  The first simple, big, bold step has to take place in your head.  It comes when you can really truly see the cost of this kind of behavior and let go of the myth that martyrdom is a desirable quality.  It means challenging beliefs you may have that taking time for yourself is selfish.  Care is NOT an either/or proposition.  You don’t have to choose—“Do I care for them or do I care for me?”  The truth is, in order to really be able to provide your best care for anyone else, you have to be in good running order. In a healthy life, self-care and the care of other people and things go together. While you get comfortable with this notion, consider whether you have a support system that can help you settle in to this new way of thinking.  It’s much easier to leave martyrdom behind when you have the support and encouragement of others who believe in what you are doing and will remind you of your priorities along the way.

One more thing—letting go of martyrdom also means accepting the concept of time.  You are not responsible for the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and that sometimes 24 hours isn’t enough time for everything.  It isn’t your job to take your life off the menu so that others can pretend that they are entitled to a bigger slice of life.  It’s not your job, it’s not fair, and it doesn’t work.<

Am I striking a nerve? Preaching to the choir? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.