Before you try the latest idea, here’s a question to consider: Do you need more weight loss wisdom, or is over-achieving actually making weight loss harder? In your quest to achieve success, are you creating overload and overwhelming yourself? It’s an important question, because this can create a big overeating and weight trap for busy women with high expectations.

I recently heard a great comment from someone about overwhelm. She said that even accessing the highest quality help, information, and ideas can feel like being hit by an avalanche if we have too much of it.  If you’ll excuse a food-related metaphor: when the portion is too big, even the best help isn’t digestible. And yet, if you are someone who expects a lot from yourself, you are likely to be haunted by a question that can get you into trouble:

“What else can I do?” or “What should I be doing?”

Are you always adding to your weight loss to-do list? Taking action is a strategy that we use to be effective when we feel out of control. And while taking action is the first step in creating success, taking too many actions creates overwhelm. Are you falling into this trap?

Here are some signs that you are an over-achieving emotional eater:

• Are you an emotional eater who has a bedside table heaped with the latest books on the topic?
• Do you know so much about nutrition and weight loss science that you can’t make a decision about what to eat anymore—because you’ve heard so much contradictory advice?
• Do your attempts to lose weight turn into life overhauls and plans for change that quickly overwhelm you and that feel much too hard to stick with?
• When you finish a task or arrive at a “pause” in your day, do you automatically ask, “what should I do now?”
• Do you have a hard time doing nothing?
• In spite of all your effort, are you feeling stuck or ineffective when it comes to losing weight or eating the way that is best for you?

Over-achieving causes overwhelm. It increases the overall level of stress in your life. If you are an over-achiever in the area of health and weight loss, it could easily be preventing the very goals that you are trying to achieve. Women who are trapped in a cycle of constant activity and “always doing more” end up being exhausted and less productive in the long run. Not only do overwhelm and stress lead to overeating for many women, there’s another problem with over-achieving: constant activity can keep you from seeing the real solution.

Here’s what happens when we over-achieve. We can get so focused on “getting it right” and “figuring it out” that we aim all our energy in the wrong direction and we create a cycle of working very hard but not getting anywhere. That’s what yo-yo dieters are experiencing. They are caught up in a cycle of taking drastic action to lose weight, but they are so busy “achieving” that they haven’t created a blueprint that will allow them to create lasting success.

Stay tuned for my next post. I’m going to share my tips for how to break out of the over-achiever cycle and create a path for change that will last–and not burn you out!

Take good care,

Are you an emotional eater ready to make these changes in your life? The Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Take Action Series starts soon. This six week program is all about creating a lasting blueprint for successfully taking control of emotional eating—in a do-able way that fits with your unique life. You can find out all about the program here.

April is Emotional Overeating Awareness month and to commemorate this, I’m offering a free teleclass to answer your questions about how to take control of emotional eating and struggles with food, weight and healthy lifestyle.

The teleseminar will take place on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at noon Pacific and 3pm Eastern.

Creating change isn’t automatic and it isn’t always easy. However, it DOESN’T need to be a struggle. Join me for this free teleseminar where I’ll answer your questions about how to end emotional eating battles and make peace with food—once and for all. Just go here to register and submit your question.

We talked about emotional eating and why I’m so passionate about the need to address it. We also talked about why smart successful savvy women (like Oprah) can continue to feel stuck and even powerless when it comes to struggles with weight and emotional eating.

Feel free to take a listen:

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,

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

Getting fixated on “fitting it all in” or not knowing when we’ve done enough(because we get stuck in that nonproductive place of trying to make it perfect) can be a trap that leads to overwhelm, stress, feeling like we can’t succeed, and often, resorting to food for some sort of comfort.

Multi-tasking has a way of making us feel super-efficient, but what it usually does is keep us from being truly focused on what it is we are doing. When we multi-task, we lose our ability to be mindful and we are less aware. This also contributes to stress, overload, and the bad habits we turn to to “cope.”

When we are busy; when we are jumping from one thing to another (or even doing three things at a time), we can become so used to that rhythm that we aren’t even aware of the stress or the overwhelm that is building. When we spend every waking moment chasing our day, just doing what “has to” be done, there isn’t any room to be proactive and there probably isn’t enough room for self-care.

Deliberately doing less, or purposefully working to reduce stress, requires creating enough time to pause and to become aware of all that is going on. It’s important to learn to take a step back in order to gain perspective and to even be able to realize when we are in overwhelm. The next step is creating a piece of quiet time where you can make a decision–a conscious choice–about how to move forward.

You may benefit from practicing this act of pausing. Challenge yourself to sit quietly for 3-5 minutes each day. Sit and do NOTHING. Close your eyes, stare at the ceiling, watch your fish in your aquarium. Move your mind gently away from the list of things to do or the grocery list. Practice pausing.

You may find that this act of completely stopping, even for such a short time, is incredibly difficult. You might even tell yourself that this is one of those activities you can benefit from by just imagining yourself doing it. Trust me–it’s not true. The more you resist it, the more you probably need the practice.

Take good care,

Melissa

I spend so much time writing about and helping people with emotional eating and the underlying variables related to weight struggles, that I forget how many people are still looking for the “miracle diet” that will change their weight for good. If there was one, trust me, we’d all know about it. The reality is, weight struggles usually include a huge component that’s not about food but about feelings.

It’s not all about what we eat. A huge chunk of the weight loss battle involves why and when we eat. A diet may provide structured instructions about the what and the when, but if we don’t do something to address why we are turning to food and overeating in the first place, the plan won’t last long.

I also tell my clients that there is no one way of eating that will work for everyone. The key to weight loss success—and weight loss success that LASTS—is learning what will work for you and your life. I strongly believe that one of the most important parts of embarking on a weight loss plan is learning to listen to yourself.

We get so many messages about what we “should” and “shouldn’t” eat that we can grow out of touch with our own real needs, cravings and sense of hunger and fullness. I spend a lot of time with my clients helping them learn to identify what it is they are feeling in their bodies—both physically and emotionally—and fine tuning the specific tools and strategies that they are going to need to maximize long term success. No one I know wants to lose weight only to regain it again in a few months. Unfortunately, that happens much too frequently.

Emotional eating/overeating is one of the major causes of weight gain. Too many diet programs point out emotional eating and then tell dieters simply “not to do it.” In order to really be successful with a weight loss plan, it’s important to spend the time learning what to do instead.

Those are my thoughts–I’d love to hear yours.

Take good care,

Melissa

Just as quitting smoking involves a lot more than throwing your cigarettes in the trash, conquering emotional eating is something we do over and over again, in big and little ways, as we build new patterns and tools for coping and new ways of being in our worlds.

Many of my clients come to me after significant periods in their lives when they’ve walked on the road they want to be on. They’ve taken charge of their relationship with food. They’ve found the groove of eating the way they wanted to eat. They’ve lost the weight and felt the excitement and the satisfaction.

And then something happened.

Their focus on food and eating increased. The activity level decreased. The cravings changed. The weight came back. And now they are feeling defeated and tired and they have a bit (or a lot) less hope then they did before. They’re usually feeling pretty guilty and mad at themselves which makes things even harder.

Change is not a one shot deal.

You probably know how it works. You’ve made a successful change. You feel proud. You feel like celebrating. Or you decide you really don’t need to be quite so disciplined anymore. You start to slack off or you loosen the reins a bit. Is this a bad thing? Haven’t you earned it? How do you know?

Maintenance is not something that happens automatically—AND maintenance is the stage where all the hard work can pay off, or can start to unravel. Most of my clients are very clear that they know HOW to make changes. They know how to lose weight (if that’s their goal). What they struggle with is keeping it off. What they don’t want to do is lose the weight and then have to lose it AGAIN.

Working at maintenance isn’t as dramatic or visibly rewarding as starting something new. Because “maintaining” is the goal, you aren’t seeing the motivating external changes or smaller numbers on the scale. Your clothes fit the same way everyday. But putting a firm foundation for long term maintenance in place is crucial. Sometimes this is the phase where extra support and accountability can pay off big.

My advice to you: don’t hesitate to get the support you need to establish a solid foundation of maintenance. You’ve worked too hard to create the changes you’ve begun to put into place. What do you need to do to make sure that you don’t short change yourself?

Take good care,

Melissa

This month’s topic is: How to REALLY Feed Your Cravings So You Can Lose Weight.

Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 7pm Eastern, 6pm Central, 5pm Mountain and 4pm Pacific time.

In the class, I’ll teach you five ways to feed yourself what you are really hungry for that won’t cause weight gain and should make weight loss easier. Trust me, these are NOT gimmicks or diet tricks. That’s simply not what I am about. These are the real tools that you need to know to be able to lose weight and maintain weight loss.

Teleclasses are easy to attend. Once you are registered, you’ll get an email with the phone number to call. You simply dial in and provide an access code. Note that you will be responsible for any long distance charges.

Attendance at these calls has been growing dramatically each time we offer one, so register early to hold a spot. If you can’t attend, don’t worry, the calls will be recorded and I will provide the recording to enrollees after the call.

Go here if you’d like to sign up.

Hope to see you in class!

Melissa

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