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The Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) Take Action Series: So What’s It Really About?

February 17th, 2010, No Comments »

The next session of the  Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) Take Action Series kicks off next Tuesday, February 23.

I’ve received a number of inquiries about the program and a number of requests for more information about the following:

What kind of results do people get from participating in this program?

It’s a pretty reasonable question and  I realized that I needed to do a better job of answering it.  Because the program really helps you examine YOUR individual situation and work at the pace that works with YOUR life, results vary widely and I’m not sure that there are “typical” results. It’s hard to measure the kind of changes that happen in this program. That said, here are some things you can expect and examples of what others have reported:

• You can expect to get really clear on the root of your struggles with food and overeating. That means getting clear on the things you are REALLY craving and needing (many of them aren’t really food).
• You can expect to learn how to stop blaming or being hard on yourself and how to use more effective strategies to move forward.
• You can expect to learn how to put a stop to the eating that feels out of control or over the top–not by depriving yourself but by using another strategy that REALLY addresses your needs.
• You can expect to learn how to stop getting stuck in the same old places, how to overcome self sabotage, and how to figure out what to do INSTEAD of emotional eating.

Here are some examples of what past participants have reported:

• They figured out that their eating really wasn’t senseless–there was a purpose to it. Once they understood this, they were able to address the REASON for the overeating directly–find a BETTER strategy for dealing with the reason–and get out of the overeating trap.
• They learned how to stop boredom eating (and how to address the boredom). The same can be said for stress eating, anxious eating, comfort eating, etc.
• They started using new tools to stop stress eating at work and to stop overeating the treats people were bringing into the office.
• They got better at saying “no” to things they didn’t want to do that were triggering overeating.
• They developed a plan for night eating, snacking and bingeing.
• They realized that they needed tools for coping with anger and started building better ways of responding instead of eating out of frustration.
• They developed new strategies for rewarding themselves that didn’t involve food.

I could keep going, but I hope you get the idea.

I can’t tell you exactly what YOUR experience would be with the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) Take Action Series, but I can tell you that if you put in the effort and complete the program, you will learn things about yourself, about your relationship with food, and about how to use new strategies, mindsets, and ideas in a way that will allow you to be more effective and in control.

The program starts Tuesday, February 23, 2010 and there is still time to register and be ready to jump in with us in the first tele-call of the series.

You also still have a chance to grab some incredibly valuable bonuses–including the opportunity to have a personal coaching session with me.

Here’s where you go to get all the information.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Take good care,

Emotional Eating: Don’t Let it Sabotage Your Plan

November 8th, 2009, No Comments »

Last week I was interviewed by Kevin McCarthy on the importance of crafting a strategy for addressing emotional eating when making healthy lifestyle changes. The audience for the teleseminar was primarily health coaches and individuals working at weight loss.  As I spoke and answered questions—from this very knowledgeable audience—I was reminded of an important truth. Sometimes it’s not about knowing enough information.  Sometimes success is crafted when we know ourselves and when we design an approach and a support system that meets our unique requirements.

I shared quite a bit of information and some very important tips for taking control of overeating and creating peace with food. I also shared a special offer on the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ which you are welcome to take advantage of.

Want to listen?
Taking Control of Emotional Eating

Take good care,

PS: My Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Take Action Series kicks off this week. We’re going to be addressing the nuts and bolts of creating an individualized blueprint for taking control of emotional eating–just in time for the hectic and tempting holiday season. You can get all the information and grab your seat here.

What Would You Choose? The D-word or the Blueprint?

October 30th, 2009, 2 Comments »

Why choose a healthy lifestyle blueprint over a diet?

That’s part of what I talked about during my Busy Woman’s Holiday Healthy Lifestyle Blueprint teleseminar last week.

Diets (the D-word):
• Don’t work and don’t create permanent changes.
• Are about deprivation.
• Don’t work (did I say that already?) and anyway, they are almost impossible to undertake during the busy event-and-treat-filled holiday season.

A Healthy Lifestyle Blueprint:
• Doesn’t tell you what NOT to do. It’s a plan that is do-able and that is designed to create change that lasts.
• Takes into consideration all the important variables including your life, your schedule, and your unique needs and challenges.
• Gets you where you want to go in a way that feels satisfying (not hungry or deprived).
• Is something you can continue to follow and refer to when things don’t go perfectly (they never do), or when you get stuck. In fact, an effective blueprint is a powerful plan that doesn’t require you to be perfect for it to create success.

Last week I showed you how to ditch the d-word and craft a blueprint for a healthy lifestyle that you can take with you through the holidays and into your new year. If you want to listen to the recording, you can do so here.

One of the key components your blueprint must have to move you into effective action with weight and overeating is a plan for taking control of the REASONS and the triggers for overeating and unhealthy choices (this is a key component that’s usually overlooked).

Would you like some help doing just that during the time of year that presents incredible eating and lifestyle challenges? The Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 6 Week Take Action Series begins November 10. I’ll be walking you through my Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Program with action plans, templates, and activities that move my clients out of overwhelm with food and weight and into action towards their goals (and there’s no d-word). Join me live on the calls or follow along on the mp3 downloads of each class.

You can learn all the details and register here.

Grab a seat now and you can also get special pricing, free coaching (!) and a personalized Q&A call.

Take good care,

PS:  I really AM offering a free personal coaching session to the first five women who grab a seat in this program and bonus personalized Q&A opportunities for a select group. You can sign up here.

Do You Have The Time To Stop Overeating?

September 11th, 2009, No Comments »

Do you have the time to stop overeating? To take control of emotional eating? To get on track with your healthy lifestyle goals?  Lately I’ve been encountering many women who tell me they don’t. I’ve been hearing from women who are incredibly frustrated with their eating habits, their weight gain, their lack of progress on important health goals.  I’ve talked to women who fear their family history of diabetes or heart disease. I’ve talked to women who’ve even had weight loss surgery and are terrified because they are seeing the weight they’ve lost start to creep back.  I’ve also talked with too many women who have put some aspect of their life “on hold” until they can start losing weight. Their struggles with food and emotional eating or overeating are something they think about every day.

But they aren’t moving forward.

They aren’t moving forward because they are using a faulty recipe for success.  These busy woman are trying to make a positive change by cutting back; taking things (food) away and doing with less.  But they aren’t adding anything else in—because they don’t have time.  They don’t have time to feed their spirit, their soul, their passion in non-food ways.  They don’t have time to go to the groups, the seminars, the inspiring places or activities that could keep them on track.  They don’t have time for themselves.

Really, we all have time. The truth is, we choose how we spend it.

Struggles with food are created in many ways.  Struggles with food end when we learn how to really truly feed ourselves the things we need (these are different for everyone) and this can only happen when we take the time to listen and hear ourselves, sort it all out, and respond.  Ending emotional eating, overeating, and weight struggles requires us to take the time—to spend a portion of our time on ourselves.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be a lot of time, but it does have to be dedicated time we allot for ourselves and our needs.  It’s not food-focused time, but it’s time that helps us become less focused on the food.  It’s essential. There really are no short cuts with this step.

Take good care,

Melissa

Personal Health Care Reform

September 3rd, 2009, No Comments »

Okay readers,

It’s September and we’re approaching Labor Day weekend.  If you’ve been telling yourself all summer that you’re “waiting ‘til September” to take better care of yourself . . . you’ve just run out of excuses.

I know–summer does have a different rhythm to it, and many of us look to September as the start of a new chapter in our lives and a return of more structure and planning.

So now that it’s here, what are you going to do?  What one step will you commit to to undertake your own personal health care reform?

Do you need to clean up your eating?  Find a better way to cope with stress and overwhelm and exhaustion?  Make a commitment to getting more activity?  Create more space and time for yourself?  Grow a stronger support system?  It’s time for that next step. Set your intention, create a goal and then answer the following question:

How can the world support you?  What do you need to ask for, do, or say no to in order to be effective?

It’s September ladies.  Time to take a stand.  Time to reform YOUR health care. What’s it going to be?

Want to be bold? Share your commitment in a comment.

Take good care,

Melissa

PS:  If you could benefit from some extra tools and support to propel you forward, the good news is that there are still a few spots left in the fall Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Smart Women’s Group and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Group for Weight Loss Surgery Patients (both held by phone).  Take advantage of our fall sale on this and other resources until  9/13/09 or supplies run out.

Smart Choices Success Circle: Key ingredients for creating winning lifestyle change

June 22nd, 2009, No Comments »

Announcing The Smart Choices Success Circle

Calling all smart savvy women who are BEYOND sick-and-tired of struggling with food, weight, and their eating: I’ve designed the program you’ve been asking for–a Mastermind Community for smart capable women who want to make peace with food, get off the diet roller coaster, and start living the life they hunger for.

Accountability, motivation, help and active support–it’s all here.

The Smart Choices program is designed to be effective, accessible, and easy to use.

This innovative program provides the tools, support, and targeted coaching busy women need to get on track, stay on track, take charge of day-to-day overwhelm, and create lives that support the new choices they are making.

This is NOT a diet program. I know that you probably know more than you ever wanted to about what you think you “should” be doing to get where you want to go. This is a program designed to help you take those tools and make them work for you. The Smart Choices Success Circle is designed to provide the tools that traditional weight loss programs don’t discuss. The focus of the Smart Choices Success Circle is accountability, motivation (that lasts), solid support, and enduring change.

In the Smart Choices Success Circle, we take on the reasons those other plans haven’t worked.

Fun (really!) and easy to use, the Smart Choices Success Circle provides wrap-around resources including a motivating goal-setting process, online message board and community forum, weekly audio tips and coaching challenges (emailed directly to you), a weekly accountability tool, and productive Smart Choices Coaching Club phone calls where laser coaching, brainstorming, strategizing and celebrating keeps members in action and out of stuck spots.

Too many women feel alone with their struggles with food and weight.

The Smart Choices Success Circle provides the opportunity to share in the collective wisdom and support of other like-minded women who are striving to make peace with food and end their struggles with weight, eating, and overwhelm in a lasting way.

You can learn more about the program here.
Take good care,

Melissa

PS: I’d love to have you check out this great new program. Join us this month and use the code NEWSLETTER to receive your first month’s membership for only $12.99!

Are you busy reinventing the wheel when you could be enjoying success?

June 16th, 2009, No Comments »

You have a lot on your plate and a lot of things that are important to you. You’ve decided that you want to make health or lifestyle changes and spend more of your valuable energy on yourself. You want to feel better and be more of the person you know you can be.

The question is, “How do you actually make it happen?”

How do you keep your goals on your radar? How do you remember to say no to other requests that interfere? How do you stay strong in your resolve and how do you keep moving forward when you aren’t sure how to do it or if you even want to?

In the years that I have worked with strong, capable, determined women, I have observed a crucial mistake that can make the going much tougher, and the related component that will boost the success rate of just about any attempt at lifestyle change.

The crucial mistake that I see frequently is the tendency to underestimate the benefit of a dynamic support structure when working to create new habits with food, with exercise, or with managing a busy and stressful life.

Many successful women have found success by learning that they can rely on themselves. They know they are tough and many feel like if they want it done “right” they want to do it themselves. While some struggle to delegate in their professional lives, they know that success in business comes from creating and leveraging a team that can support you, expand your capabilities, and help you get where you need to go.

The place I see many smart successful women struggle, is in allowing themselves to have that same type of quality support when working to build something important in their personal lives.

The truth is, engaging a strong, active support system is one of the most effective strategies for creating changes that last. I’m not just talking about having a group of people who care about you. I’m suggesting that you evaluate your current support system in terms of its ability to actively help you get where you want to go.

Here are some questions to consider:

1. Who’s in your corner? Who can you rely on to stand with you and support you in your current goals? Who are the people who want you to achieve whatever it is that YOU want to achieve?
2. Who holds you accountable? I’m not talking about the “diet police” here. Who is willing to hold you to your goals and your objectives in a kind and helpful way? Who helps you make sure that you follow through and asks you about it (again, in a way that feels helpful), when you haven’t?
3. Who contributes to your motivation? Who can you rely on to remind you why you are doing the hard work involved in making changes? Who can you count on to hold up that picture of your final destination and encourage you to keep going? Who reminds you how far you’ve come and all the ways your efforts will or are paying off?
4. Who do you celebrate with when you achieve victories along the way? Acknowledging the milestones on the way to the finish line are incredibly important in maintaining motivation and feeling good about the work you are doing. Who encourages you to celebrate when you decide you are “too busy?”
5. Who believes in you? Who are the people in your support system who know you are capable of achieving what you have set out to achieve? These are the ones who can tell you WHY you are able to be successful. They know your strengths and help you see how you can leverage them to move forward more easily. They remind you that you can do this during the times when you might not believe that you can.
6. Who is your example? Are you the leader of the pack-the one who motivates everyone else-or do you have someone in your support system who is one or two steps ahead of you? Are you reinventing the wheel or learning from the wisdom of others who have succeeded before you? We tend to see more possibilities and grow more when we are surrounded by others who encourage us to stretch our ideas of what we believe we can do.
7. Who is your sounding board? Who do you talk things through with? Who do you go to to brainstorm strategies, tweak plans that aren’t working for you, get advice or just blow off steam after a tough day?
8. Who tells you the hard truth? Who do you trust who will tell you (in a supportive and helpful way) when you are missing the boat or getting in your own way? Sometimes strong women send out the vibe that they are “fine,” they “have it under control,” and they don’t need help. The truth is, we all need help sometimes. Who are the people who will call you on it when you are trying to be the Lone Ranger and it isn’t working for you?

Use these questions to identify any holes you need to fill in your support network. Doing so will absolutely pay off.

Get on track with your healthy self and take control of emotional eating

April 28th, 2009, No Comments »

Spring is finally here and it feels wonderful. For many, it’s a season of renewed interest and commitment to getting in shape, taking charge of emotional eating and making those health changes—once and for all.

This spring, I’ve joined forces with someone who is as passionate as I am about making a difference in women’s lives. Together, we’ve put together an incredibly powerful series of teleseminars at a ridiculously affordable price. The goal—to help you spring into action and get where you want to go—and to make that process as painless (and even as fun) as we possibly can.

My partner in this series, Debi Silber, is a nutritionist, personal trainer, and dynamic coach who specializes in helping moms “get their mojo back.” I hope you’ll join us, every Wednesday in May as we cover:

• How to start to take charge of emotional eating—tools that will last for life
• How to determine your “fitness personality” for quick, enjoyable and lasting results
• How to identify strategies for learning how to feed yourself in ways that won’t leave you feeling deprived
• How to identify food triggers (people, places, thoughts, feelings) before they derail you
• How to tame your “inner bully”, reduce negative self talk and limit limiting beliefs
• Tips to change your focus from surviving to THRIVING

…and so much more. You can get all the information (and learn how to qualify for a special private bonus class) as well as registration details here.

Take good care,

Melissa

Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Group Program

March 11th, 2009, No Comments »

Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Six Week Tele-Groups, including a specialized program for weight loss surgery patients, begin next week.

Designed to enhance and expand the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28 Day Self-guided Program, these small groups have received great reviews. The groups have been newly updated (I’ve added on two additional weeks) and now contain new upgraded activities and exercises.

Learn how to:

• Identify emotional eating
• Learn what you are REALLY hungry for (when it isn’t food)
• Develop tools and strategies you can use INSTEAD of eating
• Reduce anxiety and stress in your life
• Identify strategies and mindsets that sabotage you and begin to eliminate them
• Set goals that are designed to be successful and motivating
• Address perfectionism, negative thinking and self blame

Groups are limited in size to ensure plenty of time for individualized coaching, feedback, and discussion. There are still spots remaining in the traditional Six Week Emotional Eating Toolbox Program™ as well as in the specialized Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Program for Women Who Have Had Weight Loss Surgery.

Both groups begin 3/17/09 and will be held by telephone on six consecutive Tuesdays. Specific times and dates and registration information can be found here. Registration fees for the group include a copy of the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28 Day program ($139 value).

Take good care,

Mindsets That Sabotage Emotional Eating Success

March 2nd, 2009, No Comments »

If you missed last week’s free teleseminar, you missed some great questions about coping with overwhelm, how to get motivated to exercise, and tips for dealing with stress and the economic worries (a post on that is coming soon). We also talked about some of the mindsets that people mistake as “helpful” but that can quickly sabotage attempts to take control of emotional eating, lose weight, or adopt other healthy lifestyle changes.

Here is my short list of mindsets and mistakes you’ll want to avoid to avoid sabotaging your plan for change:

1. Perfectionism. I’ve covered this one in previous posts (and here ) but it bears repeating. Perfectionism—the belief that you have to get it perfect in order to be successful—will sabotage a plan for lifestyle change (and may trigger emotional eating) faster than any other mindset. It’s not possible to be perfect and the pressure a perfectionist puts on herself is entirely unrealistic and unhelpful.
2. Go big or go home: Taking steps that are too big. Trying to do too much too fast is a quick and easy way to overwhelm yourself. Even if you can take the big steps in the short run, drastic change is a jolt to the system and can be very difficult to maintain for the long haul. It’s generally better to take small consistent steps that you can gradually integrate into your existing life and way of doing things.
3. Choosing the plan you “should”: Taking on a plan that doesn’t honor who you are, what you’re good at and what you do and don’t enjoy. Think carefully about a plan that will work for you before you try to make yourself work a plan that might not be workable. The more any new plan of action meshes with who you are and what you enjoy, the more likely you will be to remember the new behaviors, to be consistent with them, and to gradually develop changes that will last.
4. I just need to eat healthy food: Choosing a diet or program that tells you WHAT to eat but doesn’t help you figure out how NOT to overeat. Success requires the necessary tools—all the necessary tools. You can’t build a house with a screwdriver but no hammer. Likewise, you aren’t likely to be successful with taking control of emotional eating, overcoming your unique challenges and hurdles, or creating a fitness program that lasts if all you have is a food plan. I feel so strongly about this that all of my programs and resources have a component to allow you to assess the unique tools you need to build you own success.

Avoiding these mindsets will help keep you on track and help you avoid a downward spiral in motivation. At the teleseminar I included one additional tip: If you’d like more support, companionship and help with motivation and accountability as you continue to move forward, you might want to take advantage of this month’s special at the Weight Loss Winner’s Circle. For a limited time, new members can use the code WWC01 to enroll in this ongoing program and pay only $9.99 for the first month.

Take good care,

Melissa