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

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

In the United States, we’re heading into a long holiday weekend. We’re celebrating the 4^th of July, and among other things, the level of freedom and independence we enjoy. These are two big and very powerful values. While we’re celebrating our independence as a nation, I think it’s a great time to take a look at these ideals on a very personal level.

• ·  Trapped by their busy schedules and commitments
• ·  Overloaded by responsibilities and the professional success that they’ve created
• ·  Unclear on how to get from where they are now  to where they REALLY want to be.

• ·  With food or weight?
• ·  Feeling like you never have any time or energy just for you?
• ·  Feeling like you can’t find the motivation you need to make an impact?
• ·  Feeling unsupported or lacking accountability for the things that really mean something to you?

• · “I declare that I’m going to do what it takes to make peace with food and stop struggling with overeating.”
• · “I declare I’m going to start owning my time and scheduling my priorities.”
• · “I declare I’m going to seek out help with_________.”

I don’t know about you, but for me, summer has always been magical. I find that the long sunny days, our annual family vacation, and the change of pace all revitalize me and create a new sense of possibility. Of course, I just plain love the change of seasons. I’ll be saying something similar when fall arrives too!

The thing is, I see so many of busy women get excited at the beginning of the season, only to find themselves wondering in a few months, “Where did it go?” Life gets busy, the weeks slide by, and the weight loss, or the me-time, or those special activities just don’t happen. Life is too short for this all-too-familiar pattern!

Every day really is precious, and so are the hopes, dreams, and goals you hope to attain over the summer months. That’s why I’ve decided to make my theme for the season, Your Best Summer Ever.

Let’s make it a season to savor and a time in your life to remember. I want to help you make it successful and juicy and inspired. Let’s make this summer the next essential step to you living your best version of your life. Sound good?

To kick things off, I’m going to host a no-cost teleclass on (you guessed it) the first day of summer: June 21, 2011 at 2pm Pacific, 3pm Mountain, 4pm Central, and 5pm Eastern. The topic:

How to Have Your Best Summer Ever! Tips for THRIVING, Achieving Your Goals, and Living Your Best Life–From this Moment Forward!

I'll be sharing:

• Tips you can implement IMMEDIATELY to help you feel and be your best.
• Strategies to help you stay on track so that you don't wake up in September feeling like the summer passed you by.
• Ways to up the passion and the fun factor.
• How to stay on track with your eating and your healthy lifestyle goals during a season of vacations, summer treats, and indulgences.

The plan is to have a fun call that will give you the tips and the momentum you need to start making a real difference. I’ll also be sharing information about my newly available self-paced THRIVE Formula™ Series.

Click here to get all the details.

Take good care,

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

1. Getting too hungry

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

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

2. Evening eating

3. Snacking on treats at work

It’s clear that keeping a food journal or food diary—a written record of every bite you put in your mouth—is an effective weight loss tool. Women who record what they eat eat less and lose more weight. They are also more successful at keeping the weight off.  A food diary (done correctly), can also be an effective tool for taking control of emotional eating. In fact, I use a specialized food log in my Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Solution series programs.

The problem is, just about everyone hates keeping a food log, and setting up an approach that you dread can be an easy path to self-sabotage. Writing down everything you put into your mouth can be inconvenient, tedious, and it requires a lot of discipline. It can also be difficult to record portion sizes accurately, and far too tempting to bend the truth.

Here’s a smart weight loss tip that holds promise. You don’t have to write down everything you eat anymore to get the benefit of keeping a food diary. There’s actually a simple, graphic and accurate way to record what you eat—at the touch of a button. Grab your cell phone and snap a picture. Yep, take a picture of your food—all your food—before you eat it. Pictures don’t lie. They don’t fudge on portion sizes (consider placing something like a fork in the picture so that you can assess for scale), and they show everything on your plate. They even document the times when you skip using the plate (not a good weight loss tactic, by the way).

Research indicates that keeping a photographic food diary may work even better than a written one.

What to do with these photos? A simple, free solution is to set up a free blog at http://blogspot.com. You decide whether you want to keep it private (for your eyes only) or open it up to friends or to the world (accountability helps). New apps and options are being developed as we speak. For those on Twitter, this app, for tweeting what you’re eating, allows you to add pictures to your tweets and says it will be streamlining the process in the near future.

What do you think? Have you used a food diary (written or photo-based)? How has it worked for you? What has helped you stick with it, or what has gotten in your way? Please share your thoughts by adding a comment.

Take good care,

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

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

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

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

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

What do you need NOW?

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

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

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

Take good care, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take good care,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take good care,

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,