Weight Loss Surgery and Overeating: A Free Teleclass

In case you missed my free teleclass: Taking Charge of Emotional Eating After Weight Loss Surgery, there is still time to listen to an audio recording of the class. Just click on the link to access the recording.

There are serious misconceptions out there about bariatric surgery being "a quick fix" or an "easy solution." Not true. Weight loss surgery requires a major investment--and not just financial--in order to develop a successful post-surgery lifestyle and to attain weight loss that lasts. Gastric bypass, lap band, and other bariatric procedures all require patients to develop new relationships with food and additional coping tools. In the teleclass I talked about some of the common mistakes people make and tools that can make things a lot easier.

We talked about:
why ignoring emotional cravings is a big mistake
how shame and guilt can sabotage your weight loss
why it's not selfish to take excellent care of yourself
why curiosity is an incredibly valuable tool for taking control of emotional eating.

Take a listen if you are interested. Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts, your struggles, and your successes.

Take good care,

Melissa

Take small steps for enduring weight loss

It’s one thing to read about the alarming increase in obesity in our country. It’s a stunning thing to see this visual depiction of the growing problem on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website—check this out:

Obesity Prevalence Map

Despite the millions of dollars being spent on weight loss every year, we are dramatically moving in the wrong direction, and clearly the advertising enticing us to try the newest “quick fix” isn’t helping the way the ads promise it should.

So what to do? The need for long term, enduring solutions is greater than ever. When we see a huge problem, we are tempted to think big. The problem is, big changes usually overwhelm. It is important to remember that the path to permanent change is so often achieved through consistent but small, reasonable sized steps. Rapid drastic changes don’t fit easily with our lives and they often don’t last.

This week, I challenge you to come up with one small reasonable step that you can take to improve the health of you and your family. Select a step that you can imagine sticking with for the next ten years—not a short term fix.

Think reasonable and think realistic. Think about improving something about your lifestyle just *one notch*. Think about a pace that you can live with.

The change you select might be serving plates in the kitchen instead of at the table, or leaving the salt shaker in the cupboard. It might be cutting the sugar you put in your coffee in half or cutting your TV time by 30 minutes to do something more active. Maybe you’ll decide to always take the parking spot half a row farther away then you need to. Be creative but think honestly about who you are, what your family will tolerate and what you can commit to.

Leave a comment and let me know what you committed to. Let's start changing the map!

Take good care,

Melissa

Self-care takes discipline

Karly Randolph Pitman has written another great blog post about the role of discipline in establishing good self-care. It's so easy to come to think of discipline as something we have to do--a demand imposed from the outside--that we forget that sometimes discipline can apply to things we want to do for ourselves. Discipline can mean holding ourselves to a standard, or an expectation, or a daily routine because we value what we gain from it. Too often, the things we want or need for ourselves go by the wayside because we get so busy with everyone else's priorities. When we exhaust ourselves tending to the needs of everyone but ourself, we can come to feel like quality self-care means collapsing into a recliner at the end of the day. Not true. Learning to apply the discipline we use in the rest of our life to taking the most excellent care of ourselves creates an incredibly powerful shift. What do you think?

Take good care,

Melissa

It's February: Do your resolutions need recharging?

So how are you doing? Do you feel like you're moving in the direction you want your life to go? Where are you in relation to your hopes and dreams and goals? Do you see yourself making steady progress in the right direction? Taking charge of emotional eating means learning to feed ourselves in ways that are more powerful than food. It means paying attention to our hopes and dreams and taking the steps we need to take to move forward. Taking charge of emotional eating means living a bigger life and learning to think beyond food.

If the picture isn't as rosy as you'd like it to be, if you are off track or struggling or just-plain-not-moving, don't despair. This is a great time to reevaluate, rework your plan, and begin taking some powerful steps in the direction you want to go. Whether you want to write a book, change your job, lose weight, or start using your treadmill for something other than a clothes rack, here are three essential tips for getting (and staying) on track.

1. Be specific.
Set concrete SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible. "I will write three pages every morning before work" is a SMART goal. So is, "I will apply for two jobs this week." "I will get in shape" is not a SMART goal, but "I will complete the weight circuit at the gym on Monday, Wednesday and Friday after work" is.

2. Break your overall goal down into manageable steps.
If you want to quit smoking, you'll need more than one "quit smoking goal." Create specific SMART sub-goals and milestones for each day and each week. If you aren't achieving your daily milestones, you'll need to step back and evaluate why your plan isn't working, then add in the components you need to meet your daily targets. Key questions to ask here might be: "Is my goal reasonable for the time frame?" "What might help me increase my odds of success in this situation?" "How can I add in some support or accountability?"

3. Keep the big picture in mind.
Chances are, you are looking to make a change that lasts; create a habit that sticks; or complete the big project you are beginning. "Slow and steady" really does win the race. We tend greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in the short run and underestimate what we can do in the bigger picture. Make sure that you are being realistic and don't take on more than your life and current stress level will allow. Small changes are easier to maintain than drastic leaps outside of your comfort zone.

If you want some extra momentum, some help with accountability, and a gentle but powerful kick-in-the-pants with your goal or dream, consider joining a Resolution Coaching Group. The next session of the Resolution Coaching Telegroups begins February 27 (just click on the link for more information and to listen to a short audio recording about the groups). This is a terrific opportunity to jump start your goals and gain powerful momentum as you move forward with your dream. The small group format is a fun and affordable way to try out Life Coaching. As an additional encouragement, we're offering a discount when you sign up with a friend. Bring a friend and BOTH of you will get a $20 discount on the session. Go here for the scoop.

How NOT to overeat when you are stressed at work

A client just emailed me. She’s using the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) program at home and has discovered that she’s using food to cope with her feelings at work when a task seems overwhelming. She asks: “How can I handle the stress (at work)?” Great question.

Finding the right answer for you will depend on a number of things, including your individual preferences and schedule, the constraints of your job, and the nature of the task. However, here are some questions that might be helpful.

Can you identify when you start to feel overwhelmed and when you start thinking about food? Is it before you face the task? Is it procrastination? Is it in the middle of the task? When you do think about food, what are you feeling—confused, distracted, anxious, uncertain, overloaded? Do you eat when the task is done as a reward or as a way to deal with the stress you built up “getting through” the process? The answers to these questions give you valuable information to help you shape an alternative response to eating that will work for you. Knowing these answers will allow you to begin to pinpoint how you could respond to your feelings directly.

If the task seems overwhelming is there anything you could do to make it one degree less overwhelming? Could you break it down into smaller sub-goals? Get more clarity about what is expected? Delegate? Can you get additional support—either support to help you with the project or support for you in other areas so that you have more energy to devote to the project? Can you dive in for ten minutes and see how that feels?

Sometimes we just need to take a break. Can you walk around the block or around your office or even go to the bathroom and look yourself in the eye in the mirror and ask yourself what you need to do next? Can you stretch or get a cup of tea instead of heading to the vending machine?

Sometimes we just have to do the really hard thing. If you take a deep breath and dive in, how will you reward yourself for your courage? What can you do instead of snacking? How can you celebrate your progress as you work through the task? How can you give yourself credit?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg. The key point is that once we start asking ourselves what we REALLY need and what we are REALLY feeling (and once we acknowledge that it’s not hunger), we start to be able to formulate solutions that are powerful and much more effective than a bag of chips from the vending machine.

Free Teleclass for Weight Loss Surgery Patients on Emotional Eating

Join me for a free teleseminar!

Free Teleclass: Taking Charge of Emotional Eating After Weight Loss Surgery: The importance of using the right tools to conquer emotional overeating

We had such a great teleclass last month, I’ve decided to offer another. This time we are going to focus specifically on emotional eating issues after weight loss surgery. It's a huge issue—one that many weight loss surgery patients struggle with and an issue that can lead to lots of unhelpful shame and guilt.

Learn the mistakes people make and the tools that help people take control of emotional eating and maximize their success after weight loss surgery. This teleclass will take place on Wednesday, February 20 at 3:00pm Eastern, 2:00pm Central, 1:00pm Mountain, and noon Pacific time. There is no cost for the class, but you will be responsible for the long distance charges to dial in.

For more information about the class (including how you can listen to a recording even if you cannot attend), go here.

Hope to see you there!

Melissa