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If Food Isn’t the Answer to Everything – What Is? Part 3

August 30th, 2010, No Comments »

Last post, I introduced the concept of making peace with food and discussed how this happens when you can move past the food struggles and toward more satisfying solutions.

2.     Peace With Food Takes Courage (and it takes you new places)

A client told me recently that she’d never have predicted where she’d be now, seven months after she began coaching with me to transform her relationship with food. She’s thrilled with where she is. She’s made changes in her life that feel really good. She’s created more time for herself and she is addressing some needs she’d been trying to ignore for a very long time. She also shared that she’s not nearly as hungry for food as she once thought. She’s feeding herself in other ways. She feels in control of her weight. But she has also learned that in some ways, using food as the answer was easier than addressing the real problem was (at least in the beginning). It has taken courage to ask herself what she really needs.  However, by taking that courageous step, she’s feeling more grounded, more balanced, and more satisfied than she has in a very long time.

3.     Peace With Food Takes Time

The thing about food is that it’s easy and it doesn’t require a lot of dedicated time to eat it. If food is the answer, you can comfort yourself, respond to your stress, chomp out your frustration, or soothe your hunger while still driving the carpool, working late, or doing that volunteer project you committed to finish. Food is a seductive answer because you can squeeze it in to a very full life.

In all honesty, those other solutions—the enduring, satisfying ones that really address your needs—tend to require more time, thought, and commitment. Before you shake your head in despair, know that I’m sharing some critical information here.  If you are tired of failing with diets and food plans, it’s time to ask yourself whether what you really need are the tools and support necessary to create the mindset, skills, and strategies that will allow you to live a life that feeds you. You know, a life that works for you and allows you to thrive—one where your needs count and you feel comfortable saying no and asking for help (among other things). Yes, this often requires a redistribution of time and energy, and some new learning, but getting there is usually not nearly as drastic and difficult as you might think.

By the way, creating peace with food is a process that occurs over time. It doesn’t usually happen overnight. And yet, it can be amazing how seemingly small shifts can lead to big changes.

The final post in our series will unveil some key ideas to consider as you begin your path to peace with food.

Take good care,

If Food Isn’t the Answer to Everything – What Is? Part 2

August 27th, 2010, No Comments »

To summarize my last post:  If you are eating for the wrong reasons, the only way to make a change that is satisfying and lasting is to find other answers, solutions or strategies that address those reasons.

Real Change Means Making Peace With Food

In the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ program, I teach a process for making peace with food. Peace with food is different from losing weight (although people who make peace with food often lose weight), enduring a diet or food plan (peace with food is not about doing something with food you don’t want to do), depriving yourself and going “without,” or feeling out of control and resigned to a life where food is “the answer to everything” (except that it really isn’t). Peace with food happens when you can move past the food struggles and toward more satisfying solutions.

The Path to Peace With Food

It’s important to know that peace with food is available to anyone. Really. No matter how long you’ve fought with food or your weight, no matter how much you struggle with emotional eating, it’s possible to create a new and improved relationship with food. Just like any change, it’s a process of taking the correct steps and making adjustments and changes—in a way that works for you.

1.     Peace With Food Requires New Answers

Peace with food only happens when you move beyond the food and start creating better, more effective, more satisfying answers. When you have a range of strategies to comfort yourself, to celebrate, to cope with anxiety or stress or boredom or loneliness, and when you know how to really zero in on what it is your spirit is needing or craving (the things that are not food)—guess what happens? Food loses some of its charisma and its importance. Oh sure, it still tastes good, and sometimes you’ll want to eat more than is really good for you, but the struggle to NOT eat and the drive to overeat or keep eating, is transformed. Because food doesn’t have the power that it once had—and—because you now have some higher quality solutions.

In the next post, I’ll go into more depth on how to successfully make peace with food and will show you how it really can make a difference.

Take good care,

If Food Isn’t the Answer to Everything – What Is? Part 1

August 25th, 2010, No Comments »

Does it sometimes seem like food can be an answer to everything?  Had a hard day at work? Why not relax with some creamy pasta? Have something to celebrate? A dinner out is always nice. A heartbreak or disappointment isn’t fixed, but might be comforted with a bowl of ice cream in front of the TV. If you’re tired, sugar is easy to reach for, and munching on candy is a great way to distract yourself or just get through the work you don’t want to be doing.  Got stress? You might not even realize that you reached for the snacks until the bowl or the bag is almost empty.

Yep, for many women with a lot going on, food becomes a convenient, easy, low-maintenance band aid for whatever needs attending to.

So what happens when you want to change that?

Here’s the interesting thing. The biggest mistake that most people make when they want to stop overeating is that they focus their efforts on . . . the food. They develop a plan of what and when and how much they will eat. That’s how diets work (or actually—don’t work—but that’s another story).

You see the problem don’t you? If food is the answer to everything and you take food out of the equation, than you are still left without an answer.

If you are eating for the wrong reasons, the only way to make a change that is satisfying and lasting is to find other answers, solutions or strategies that address those reasons. Preferably ones that work better, address the real problem, and aren’t only a band aid.

This blog series will address the concept of making peace with food and the impact that it has on many aspects of life.

Take good care,

Weight Loss Without Dieting: The Weight You Can Stop Carrying – Part 1

August 4th, 2010, 1 Comment »

Are you carrying around weight that you can put down? This is a question that’s crucial to your long-term success.

I don’t need to tell you that losing weight is hard work—really hard work. What I can share is that many people get stuck in attitudes and ways of thinking that make losing weight even harder. Some attitudes that people often think of as motivating, actually tend to de-motivate us. Trying to lose weight with these mindsets is like trying to climb a mountain carrying a fifty pound boulder. The journey is much easier if we put the boulder down.

JUDGMENT & SELF-CRITICISM

When a new client begins to talk to me about her weight struggles, I can often feel the heaviness that enters the conversation. Her voice may change, her posture slumps, she may adopt an expression of embarrassment or shame or guilt. Her energy dips. Clients talking about attempts to lose weight often stop making eye contact and sound very tired, and frustrated, even angry with themselves. Repeated attempts at weight loss (and repeated weight regain) leave people frustrated and cynical about their ability to succeed. Clients often tell me how “they have failed at weight loss.” They feel defeated and angry with themselves before they even start their next attempt.

Here’s the thing: when we don’t succeed at an undertaking, we are not failures. It is our plan or our approach that has not worked. Beating ourselves up gets us nowhere, and it diverts us from the powerful and important task of reevaluating, taking inventory and making corrections to our approach so that we can get back on target. In addition, the negativity and self blame weigh down our future attempts at success by causing us to feel less capable and less hopeful.

When we’re the most disappointed, the most frustrated and the most vulnerable, many of us have this thoroughly unreasonable idea that an emotional version of the slap-upside-the-head is what’s needed. If we allow it, the critical voices in our head that tell us we’re “not good enough” or lazy or incapable can really take control. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard tell me the harsh, awful, demeaning things their judgmental inner critic tells them about themselves and then, in the same breath, tell me how carefully they listen to it! This is not helpful!

The first step in creating a successful plan for weight loss is to attack that judgmental attitude head-on. If you’ve been frustrated in your efforts to lose weight in the past, it wasn’t you that failed—it was your plan that didn’t work. Anger and self-critical judgment don’t effectively motivate anyone for more than very short periods of time, and long-term, these attitudes will get you seriously off track.

Keep an eye out for my next post where I’ll lay out some simple and practical ways to overcome those inner voices that keep you from your goals.

Take good care,

Too Much On Our Plates: The Experiment

September 1st, 2009, No Comments »

Last week I blogged about plate sizes and research that shows that the size of your plate affects the size of the portions you serve yourself and ultimately, your weight.    Around the same time, my husband pointed out that our own plates and dishes (wedding gifts from the 1980s), were dwindling in number and not looking nearly as spiffy as they had when we watched the Huxtables eating from a similar set 20 years ago.

Browsing online, I decided to look for a ten-inch plate like I blogged about last week, and for the first time ever, paid attention to the actual size of dinnerware.  Wow.  Oversized is in, with advertisements literally bragging about how much their big dishes will hold.

And apparently, size is important to Americans. I ended up ordering a basic white set of restaurant dinnerware from Williams Sonoma.  It met my requirements—neutral, tough, and it has a 9 ¾ inch dinner plate.  Before I ordered, I skimmed the 91 reviews that customers have submitted.  Size matters, and was frequently mentioned among reviewers who couldn’t agree whether the plates were too small or just right. A few like me had actually been drawn to the dishes because of the smaller plate size.

I’m a little nervous.  I’m the only female in a house with three males who love to eat.  Our current plates are not only bigger, they have a lip around the edge that allows for “extra.”  Will I face a mutiny?  Brian Wansink’s team claimed the downsizing was painless.  I’ll report back.

Take good care,

Melissa

Size Matters

August 26th, 2009, No Comments »

When it comes to weight loss and overeating, it’s not only important to pay attention to what you put on your plate, it turns out that it’s also worth being careful about the plate you choose to use.

Want a fairly painless weight loss tip? This one comes from Brian Wansink and the researchers at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.  They’ve found that we tend to fill the real estate on our plates rather than actually making a conscious decision about how much food we need to fuel ourselves. And once the food is on the plate, we’re more likely to eat it.  According to Wansink, we tend to eat 92% of any food we serve ourselves.

Here’s the good news: Size matters—and it can matter significantly. On average, downsizing from a 12-inch to a 10-inch dinner plate would result in an average of 22% fewer calories being served. Even better, researchers find that this difference is not drastic enough to trigger a counteracting response (sometimes when we cut back we tend to compensate by eating more of something else—this is not the case here). If a typical dinner has 800 calories, a smaller plate would lead to a weight loss of around 18 lbs. per year for an average size adult.  Interested?

Wansink is the expert on Mindless Eating (and his book by the same name is one I’ve recommended before).

Here’s one more quick tip for you, courtesy of Wansink: fifty percent of the snack food bought in bulk (such as from your local warehouse club) is eaten within six days of purchase. Are those huge bags of chips still looking like such a good deal?

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.

Savoring “Julie and Julia”

August 24th, 2009, 1 Comment »

Sunday afternoon, my husband and I saw Julie and Julia.  To say that I loved it would be an understatement.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.  Meryl Streep is brilliant, funny, and just-plain-great to watch.  The movie made me want to go to Paris.  It made me want to cook complex food (and maybe even try de-boning a duck).  It made me want to really appreciate the food and the ingredients that I eat.  It made me want to savor.

I don’t know about the real Julia Child, but Meryl-as-Julia savors everything.  She savors her experiences, she savors her marriage, and above all, she savors food.  Watching her enjoy herself, whether she is shopping for ingredients, sitting down to an incredible meal, or creating a culinary concoction in her kitchen, is to truly see someone who is fully in the moment and who is fully sensing and experiencing what she is seeing, smelling, feeling, and tasting.  Julia eats mindfully and she embraces life with the same spirit. Julia Child is now definitely on that list I have of famous people I would have loved to have had dinner with.

Both Julie and Julia are so engaging to watch because they follow their passion.  For Julie, finding a way to use the best parts of herself (her strengths) more and to do something that she loved and was passionate about, transformed her life.  What an incredible example of how we can make things a lot better without doing a major life overhaul.  She still went to work at a very hard job every day.  She still didn’t like where she lived.  She still fought with her husband, but when she set a goal that engaged her with her passion—and she kept taking consistent steps towards that goal, her life flowed differently.

Before I saw the movie, someone said—don’t go hungry. Well, I actually was pretty full of popcorn before the previews were over.  But the one thing that I didn’t walk away from Julie and Julia with was an urge to overeat.  It left me inspired to do a little more of what I love, to be myself, and to live the life I crave–not eat it. Oh–and it made me laugh–a lot.

Take good care,

Melissa

Could Yoga Curb Your Emotional Overeating?

August 12th, 2009, 2 Comments »

Mindful eating is an important tool for taking control of overeating and emotional eating. When we are mindful, we can tune in to the things we need and crave that we might be trying to replace with food.  Mindfulness encourages us to notice and attend to signals of fullness and to not eat if we aren’t really hungry.  Mindfulness is not always so easy to come by—especially in the midst of a hectic or chaotic life.  New research now suggests that yoga can help.

Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating and people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese according to a study conducted by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA. The study was published in the August, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

In an earlier study, these researchers found that middle-age people who practice yoga for as little as 30 minutes a week gained less weight over a 10-year period than those who did not. This finding was independent of physical activity and dietary patterns. The current study supports the researchers’ initial theory that mindfulness is learned either directly or indirectly through yoga practice and that mindfulness affects eating behavior.

In the most recent study, Researchers administered a specially designed Mindful Eating Questionnaire to more than 300 people. Eighty percent were women and the average age was 42. Participants also provided information on a number of variables including exercise, weight and height.

The researchers found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating. Participants who ate mindfully – those who were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression.

Sun salutation anyone?

The Secret to Implementing All Those “Best Life” Tips

August 11th, 2009, 1 Comment »

There are so many good tips and tools and strategies that can help us live a fuller,  more authentic and meaningful life. Tips that can lower our stress, help us lose weight, prevent overwhelm and improve our relationships. But learning about these tools and ideas and strategies just isn’t enough.  These gems are only helpful to us if we are able to figure out how to implement them and allow them to be useful in our lives.

There is an ingredient that is essential for metabolizing good information.  It’s necessary for creating a plan for implementation.  It’s a crucial factor in reducing stress and overwhelm.  And, it is in very short supply in many of our lives. I’m speaking about good, quality, quiet time.

What I see in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, is that many of the things we can do to increase our happiness, productivity, success with weight or health, or whatever it is that we want to do, only really happen if we allow ourselves enough quiet time to listen to ourselves and discover the how and when and why of implementing.  When we have quiet time we can hear what we need.  We can think about how to address the need, and we can plan and schedule the actions we are going to take.

Do you get enough quiet time?  When you have an opportunity for quiet time, do you allow yourself to take it?

It’s interesting about quiet time.  Many of us—especially women with a lot going on—have a tendency to avoid quiet time—to fritter it away or to distract ourselves from it—to  fill it with things like the internet or TV we don’t really care about.  Or to fill it with food and nibbling or overeating.

It sounds so simple, but truthfully, taking more quiet time isn’t always an easy thing. For someone perpetually on the go, the beginning stages of quiet time can be uncomfortable.  Listening to ourselves or discovering what we need can be difficult.  And sometimes we don’t like discovering that we have questions or needs that we don’t know how to answer or address.  But here’s the real truth.  If we don’t take the time to listen and hear what we feel or need or want, we won’t be able to match those things up with the tips and tools and strategies we know about or are capable of acquiring.

Do you get enough quiet time?  What does ideal quiet time look like for you? I encourage you to choose a regular “quiet” activity—walking, writing or journaling, quiet contemplative or meditative time—maybe a gentle yoga workout.  Consider how you could add some quiet time to your week and make a commitment to stick with it for at least a week.  It’s the kind of action that really pays off.