Too Much on Her Plate

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Are Food and Weight Struggles Interfering With Your Professional Success?

September 17th, 2009, No Comments »

Struggles with emotional eating, overeating, and weight take a tremendous amount of energy.  For women business owners and professionals, these struggles can also take a major toll on their success.

• A prospective client (and business owner) tells me she is avoiding public speaking opportunities because she feels self conscious being on stage because of her weight.
• A successful internet entrepreneur hasn’t had her headshot updated in almost ten years because she’s afraid of the reaction she might get when people see she’s gained weight.
• A business owner on an upward trajectory says, “I have so much to offer.  I know I’m holding myself back because I don’t want to step forward in my overweight body.  If it weren’t for my weight, I would be a rock star.”

Sound familiar?  Struggles with weight and food aren’t just about the pounds.  These struggles take up so much precious space in our busy minds, suck incredible amounts of our time and energy, impact our self esteem and confidence, and for many women, affect their choices to be visible and powerful in areas of their life and business.  Food and weight struggles take a tremendous toll.

What’s a business owner to do?

For many busy women, especially entrepreneurs and professionals, self-care takes a back seat to business building and work.  Especially in today’s economy, many professionals simply feel they can’t afford to sacrifice anything for the advancement of their business.  Here’s the piece many miss.  The successful foundation for a solid business or career includes a strong, confident self.  You purchase the equipment you need for your business. You dress professionally for that important presentation. Addressing the struggles that wear you out, bring you down, and cause you to potentially play smaller is at least as important—and essential for growing the business or career of your dreams.

Are struggles with food and weight holding you back?

Take a look at your calendar and your life and business plan for the next six months.  Have you included the changes you want to make in these areas?  Do you have a plan to create more peace with food and move in the direction you really want to go? Take some time to think about it.  Ending these struggles is one of the best investments you can make.

Take good care,

Melissa

The End of Overeating–I Give Up!

August 10th, 2009, No Comments »

I give up.  For a month now I have been intending to write a post about the information-packed book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by Dr. David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner. This book is a brilliantly written explanation of how overeating is biologically and culturally driven—not a character flaw.  Kessler reviews an incredible range of research detailing how the food industry, our evolving lifestyle, and marketing influences have, in combination, altered our biological self-regulatory mechanisms and how increasing numbers of people of all ages are being “set up” for a lifetime of overeating and an obsessive relationship with food.

It’s great stuff.  And each time I sit down to write about one portion of it, I feel like I’m leaving something out.  You deserve the full meal deal.

Knowledge is power and there is a lot of knowledge in this book.  The more we know about how food influences us, the more we are able to make conscious choices about how and what we eat. As Kessler points out, awareness of the factors that drive us to overeat and to crave foods that are high in sugar, fat, and salt is the first essential step in breaking the cycle and creating a new relationship with food.

Knowledge also helps us let go of inaccurate and unhelpful guilt and self blame.  The truth is, there are important reasons that Americans weigh more and eat more than ever.

How to make time to digest all this helpful information when you’re already very busy?  Here’s what I did.  I listened to the unabridged version on CD while I was driving. This is a listen (and a read) that I highly recommend.

Take good care,

Melissa

Can Oprah Help You Live Your Best Life Instead of Stress Eating?

July 27th, 2009, No Comments »

Whether you call yourself a stress eater, an emotional eater, a boredom eater or just someone who struggles with overeating, you probably realize that you are using food to take the place of something else in your life. The solution sounds simple. Identify what the real hungers are—what you crave in other areas of your life—and really feed those hungers instead of turning to food.  Yes, it sounds simple, but it’s much easier said than done.

Many of the women I work with have felt too busy to take the time to begin to get clear on their personal hopes and dreams and goals—the juicy stuff that really feeds their souls.

Even after spending the time and setting goals, it’s all too common for a busy woman to wake up one day and realize her personal aspirations and goals have fallen off her radar in the midst of her busy life.  She forgot to carve out time and once again she finds herself resorting to “something sweet” (or salty or crispy or savory) in an attempt to feel better (or because she feels guilty).

Here’s a nifty little tool, courtesy of Oprah and her team at Oprah.com that might help you create some space for dreaming—and once you’ve done that, might help you keep those dreams, intentions and goals on the front burner.

The O Dream Board is available as a free download to anyone who signs up on Oprah’s site. It allows you to create a personalized dream or vision board complete with images, your own inspirational phrases or quotes, and intentions. When you’ve created a montage that suits you, you can post it directly on your desk top—where it can continue to remind, motivate, and inspire you.  I’ve been playing around with it this afternoon and it’s fun and easy to use.

Do you have a dream board or a vision board? What are your tricks for keeping your dreams and goals on your radar screen?

Take good care,

Melissa

The Question That Can Get You Unstuck

February 9th, 2009, No Comments »

The words of a coaching client have been cycling through my head lately. This woman, who is DETERMINED to get where she wants to go, ends almost every topic we visit with a very big question. “So what’s my lesson here?”

Do you know how powerful that is?

That question, “What’s my lesson here?” is more than a very powerful inquiry. Asking that question creates a shift in mindset.

Asking “What’s my lesson?” opens us up to being CURIOUS—and curiosity is an incredibly rich tool for growing self awareness. When the question is asked with kindness and respect, it interrupts self judgment and self blame that can cause us to get overwhelmed and stuck.

“What’s my lesson?” opens us up to imperfection. The very act of asking assumes that we don’t know everything. That’s a good thing. We can’t ask the question (at least not with kindness) and be stuck in unhelpful perfectionism at the same time.

“What’s my lesson?” opens our mind to thinking with flexibility instead of adopting a rigid approach about how we need to be and how things need to go. The question reflects the idea that there are new ways to look at a situation.

“What’s my lesson?” opens us up with inquisitiveness. When we approach the world from a questioning stance we tend to see the world freshly and from a different perspective than when we aren’t standing back asking this kind of question.

Here’s my challenge to you:

Write the question down. This question is appropriate to ask in just about any situation or set of circumstances. Use what you’ve written as a reminder to ask the question. When you are most frustrated or confused or even discouraged about how things are going, this is when you might need the question the most. Practice asking the question and if you would, post a comment about the lessons you learn.

Take good care,

Melissa

Oprah and Emotional Eating

December 10th, 2008, Comments Off

If you haven’t heard yet, you will soon—it’s everywhere in the media. Oprah has disclosed that she has regained weight she worked so hard to lose and that she now weighs 200lbs. My heart goes out to Oprah—as well as to the millions of women who struggle just like her. Today, on a morning news show, I watched two reporters banter back and forth about what they believe she should be doing to reach and maintain a lower weight. They discussed their certainty that slower weight loss, smaller meals, and more frequent exercise are just what Oprah needs. They rattled off new behaviors they think she could easily make permanent if she would just follow their advice. My husband just shook his head at them knowingly as my reaction started to show on my face.

It’s not about the food.

I can’t imagine how painful it must be to have the world discussing your weight struggles. As of this morning there were 830 articles on Google about Oprah’s newest admission of weight gain and I have no doubt that the number will more than double quickly.

It’s not about the food—and Oprah knows that. I’ve never spoken with Oprah, but I have worked with enough clients struggling with weight and food and emotional eating to know that Oprah almost certainly knows all those food and nutrition and healthy eating tips. Oprah knows how to exercise and Oprah knows how to lose weight. Oprah knows about the ways the body itself can make weight loss difficult (I understand that she also struggles with thyroid problems which can create havoc with metabolism, weight and energy levels). Oprah knows what she “should” be doing and Oprah might even lie awake at night beating herself up when those “shoulds” don’t come to fruition. That’s part of the vicious cycle. Unfortunately for Oprah, she has an audience of millions as she succeeds and fails and takes missteps.

Oprah is a very savvy woman with incredible power and extensive resources. She has accomplished amazing things. If this was easy, don’t you think she’d have crossed this off her list long ago? It’s not simply about knowing nutrition and exercise facts. Oprah knows that. Oprah acknowledges that she struggles with emotional eating.

Emotional eating is about using food for needs and feelings and situations that really have nothing to do with a physical hunger. Emotional eating is about turning to food because you don’t know what else to do or because the habit is so ingrained, that emotional cravings have become indistinguishable from physical hunger.

Nutrition and weight loss facts are an important part of the weight loss equation, but they aren’t the whole equation. If emotional eating is an issue and it isn’t addressed adequately, any diet or food plan will ultimately fail. Most weight loss plans neglect the issue entirely—or—they point out the problem of emotional eating (like it is a character flaw) and warn the dieter “to avoid it.” What emotional eaters need to know is how to avoid it and what to do instead.

When we approach weight loss without taking emotional eating into account, we’ve failed before we’ve started. No diet in the world is going to help us cope with tough emotions or situations. No food plan exists that will help us face stress or loneliness or boredom. Learning to identify our emotional hungers and respond to them without food is a skill that diets don’t address.

Perhaps the worst thing is that when we approach weight loss with a recipe that is missing a crucial ingredient and we don’t know it, we feel like failures when the recipe flops. When the diet (that never addressed the dieter’s emotional struggles with food) fails, we blame ourselves. We feel guilty and ashamed and awful about ourselves. And with weight, the struggle is all too visible. There is no place to hide. Especially for Oprah.

My hope for Oprah, and the millions who struggle just like her every day, is that they have the courage and the time and the space to take a breath and form a helpful game plan—a game plan that encompasses a lot more than calories and food choices.

Emotional eaters thrive and succeed with a game plan that is individualized and that honors their unique relationship with food, their vulnerabilities, their needs and their strengths. My hope for Oprah and all emotional eaters is that they are working with someone who is able to help them step back from their frustration and shame and self blame and approach this issue with a helpful dose of creativity and curiosity.

There is a way out of the emotional eating trap, but shame and guilt and self-blame will slam the door in your face. I hope that Oprah has a coach or a mentor who is helping her honor the strengths and the abilities and resources she already has and is guiding her in creating new tools and ways of coping.

I hope that Oprah finds a solution that lasts, both for her, and for the many who also live with weight loss struggles and who wake up many mornings mad at themselves and feeling hopeless and like they’ve failed. Whether she likes it or not, the world is watching. I know that Oprah knows that her struggle is not only about food and that focusing on the food is much too superficial. I wish that all the people commenting on it and covering the “story” did too.

Take good care,

Melissa

Emotional Eating Problem Solving: Top Ten Reasons for Getting Stuck

July 23rd, 2008, No Comments »

A few weeks ago I was sorting through school work and papers that came home in my fifth graders backpack at the end of the school year and had been left in a pile. In his math folder I found this great handout: “Problem-solving Top-ten List.” It’s intended to help students who are stuck on a math problem, but I found it to be great life advice and very applicable to eating and weight loss battles. What do you think?

Top Ten Reasons For Getting Stuck in the First Place:

1. You tried to rush through the problem without thinking.

We are often great at rushing into new weight loss programs and diets hoping each one will be the magic answer. Clients often tell me how they’ve picked programs in the past that weren’t compatible with their tastes or their schedules or their preferences and that they probably knew from the beginning they wouldn’t want to continue with long term.

2. You didn’t read the problem carefully.

We don’t just run into this difficulty with math problems. In many life situations, if we don’t clearly understand the problem, we might choose a problem solving approach that isn’t going to meet our needs. In the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28-Day Program, I encourage users to take the time to understand their unique situation. Taking the time to understand your reasons for overeating and the types of solutions that will work for you is essential to not getting stuck further down the road.

3. You don’t know what the problem is asking for.

Again, this doesn’t just apply to math problems. If we’re working to solve the wrong problem, we aren’t going to get anywhere. If you are struggling with emotional eating (stress eating, boredom eating, or eating when you are lonely or upset), no food plan or diet in the world is going to fix that–because it’s not about the food–it’s about figuring out what to do with the feelings.

4. You don’t have enough information.

I often tell me clients that if they feel like they aren’t getting anywhere, or if they feel like they are beating their head against the wall, odds are that there is a part of the problem that isn’t being addressed. The Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) spends a significant amount of time showing you how to collect information about yourself, about your hunger, and about your relationship with food so that you can solve the eating problems once and for all.

5. You’re looking for an answer that the problem isn’t asking for.

If you overeat because you are bored or stressed or anxious or angry (or any other emotion), the problem isn’t about food choice. The answer the problem is asking for has to do with finding new or better ways of responding to your emotions, your stress, and your needs. The weight loss industry spends billions of dollars convincing us that if we follow a certain diet we will be beautiful and happy. I meet far to many of my clients because they feel like they haven’t been able to be “strict enough” with themselves. They are angry with themselves because they haven’t been successful with weight loss plans that stress deprivation and willpower and denial.

The truth is that diets aren’t the answer for this problem. Enduring change and enduring weight loss happen when we make changes that work with our lives–not when we try to maintain behaviors that leave us hungry and grumpy and feeling like we are missing out.

6. The strategy you’re using doesn’t work for this particular problem.

I’ll say it again. Diets tell you what to eat. Often, being on a diet will increase the amount of time and energy someone spends focusing on food. Diets don’t teach you how to change patterns of emotional eating or overeating when you aren’t hungry. They don’t teach you how to feed yourself and expand your life in ways that won’t leave you feeling deprived. Users of my program are often surprised at first how little time they spend focusing on food. The program doesn’t count fat grams or calories or carbs. The program helps you target the reasons you feel hungry and the reasons you eat when you aren’t. The program helps you GET OFF the diet rollercoaster and put food in a much smaller place in your life.

7. You aren’t applying the strategy correctly.

If you’ve been dieting for years, it can be hard to move out of the mindset of deprivation and blaming yourself when the diet doesn’t work out (even though the diet was probably doomed to fail in the first place–remember–a diet is the wrong strategy). Using the tools in the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) takes practice. Often users initially have a hard time looking at their eating patterns and their emotions without feeling the old self-blame, shame and guilt.

One of the biggest benefits that Toolbox users and coaching clients note is being able to stop feeling guilty and bad all the time. That’s HUGE.

8. You failed to combine your strategy with another strategy.

If we try to fit ourselves into a strategy or a program instead of finding a strategy that fits and works with our specific individual situation, we’re likely to get stuck. Cookie cutter eating plans and programs are problematic because we are all different. For instance, the Toolbox program guides you to your own answers and strategies through the work you do and the answers you provide about yourself.

9. The problem has more than one answer.

There is no one magic cause of weight gain and there is no one magic answer for weight loss. People’s paths for taking control of their emotional eating will be different. Once you have the basic set of tools, you will be more successful if you learn to use them in the way that complements your personality, your strengths, your struggles, and your life.

10.The problem can’t be solved.

Emotions and tough times are real. We might not like them but we can’t just wish them away. Trying to ignore or bury emotions doesn’t work well in the long term either. The truth is that there is no diet or food plan that is going to help us cope with tough emotions. If we forget about the emotional part of our eating and simply focus on the food, we’re going to get stuck and we’re likely to fail. And then we are likely to blame ourselves–which isn’t helpful either.

There ARE powerful tools that can help anybody get through the emotions and situations that they struggle with. When we learn them and practice using them it’s easier to put food in it’s place, make choices that feel good about eating, and put more energy into creating the lives we really want to be living.

Take good care,

Melissa

MTV is exploring the impact of yo-yo dieting

March 9th, 2008, 1 Comment »

MTV is reportedly doing a show focused on yo-yo dieting and on the challenges of trying to maintain weight loss. A producer with the network contacted me recently seeking help with an episode they are filming. The producer with True Life, a reality show on the network, told me that the episode is intended to be a show about the world of someone caught in a battle with his or her weight. True Life doesn’t want to depict extremes or eating disorders in this episode. They want to show the day-to-day world of someone trying to successfully change their weight.

Interestingly (and true to life I think), the producers were finding that people are less willing to share their battles to maintain weight loss after they have lost the weight then they are to share their current weight loss attempts.

This makes sense to me. Losing weight is hard. Making permanent weight changes is even harder–and yet that reality is often under-emphasized or not talked about at all in weight loss plans and programs.

Change experts recognized that learning to maintain new behaviors and life changes is a separate and very important part of the change process. If a weight loss plan doesn’t address that part of change–and do a really good job–then the odds of keeping weight off decrease dramatically. Unfortunately, many people don’t recognize how important this maintenance stage is and most people don’t address it as a distinct phase in the weight loss process. When the weight starts to come back on, we don’t tend to think, “Oh, I must need more tools, more help, or something else to help me really solidify the changes I’ve made and master this maintenance phase.” No, what often happens when the weight starts to come back on is that we blame ourselves and feel like we failed (again).

Shame and guilt frequently accompany weight regain, making us less likely to seek the help or tools that might get us out of the shame trap and back on the path we want to be on. It’s an incredibly painful place to be and I can understand why people would be reluctant to share their vulnerability on national television.

I have no idea what the True Life episode will be like once it is filmed, but I hope they do a good job and I hope they talk about this shame trap and its potential pitfalls. Because once we know about the trap, and once we know that it’s not just us that feels that way, it’s a lot harder to get isolated and trapped in it.

Take good care,

Melissa