Free Teleclass Coming Your Way!

After taking a summer break, I'm happy to announce that my free teleclass series is starting up again in September. The next free teleclass is on a specialized topic: Emotional Eating, Overeating, and Success After Weight Loss Surgery. If you are someone who has had weight loss surgery or is considering it, this call is for you.

The teleclass takes place Wednesday September 3, 2008 at
3 pm Eastern, 2 pm Central, 1 pm Mountain, and noon Pacific time.

If you can't attend, don't let that stop you from registering. The call will be recorded and registered participants will receive access to the class recording after the call. If you've never attended a teleclass before, they're easy. You'll just dial in on the phone number you will receive when you register (you are responsible for any long distance charges) and when prompted you'll be given an access code to enter.

You can go here to register and when you do, you'll have an opportunity to submit a question that you would like addressed. I'll try to get to as many as I can on the call. Hope to "see" you in class!

Take good care,

Melissa

Emotional Eating Problem Solving: Top Ten Reasons for Getting Stuck

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

Do you eat because you are anxious, unhappy, stressed or lonely?

You might want to consider blogging. A new, soon to be released study concludes that people who blog feel less isolated and more satisfied with their friendships. The study tracked Myspace users who also blogged and found that after two months of social networking and blogging, participants reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed and bloggers in particular felt better about their current social support and friendships than nonbloggers.

The authors concluded that blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive and critical and analytical thinking.

Contrary to stereotypes of bloggers as geeks isolated in their private internet world, blogging has the potential to create community, connection and support. For many who are struggling or are shy or not feeling so great about themselves at that particular moment, reaching out online or expressing one's self in a blog post can feel both more accessible and perhaps even emotionally safer. Apparently, it might also leave you feeling better.

What do you think?

Melissa

How to Identify Emotional Eating: Ten Signs

I'm often asked about how to identify whether or not emotional eating may be an issue. Emotional eating is not always easily identified. Here are some patterns that are likely to indicate that some kind of emotional eating is going on:

1. The hunger comes on suddenly and the need to eat feels urgent--physiological hunger comes on slowly and it's okay to delay eating.
2. You keep eating even if you aren't hungry anymore or the hunger doesn't go away even though you are full.
3. You eat to the point of physical discomfort.
4. You don't know whether you were hungry or not when you ate.
5. After you eat you realize you aren't really aware of how much you ate or how it tasted.
6. You have feelings of shame, guilt or embarrassment after eating.
7. You eat because you are bored, tired, lonely, excited.
8. Hunger accompanies an unpleasant emotion--anger, hurt, fear, anxiety. Emotional eating begins in your mind--thinking about food--not in your stomach.
9. You crave a specific food and won't feel content until you have that. If you are eating for physical hunger, any food will fill you up.
10. You keep eating (or grazing, or nibbling) because you just can't figure out what you are hungry for. Nothing seems to hit the spot (physical hunger goes away no matter what food you choose to fill up on).

Stressed Monkeys Overeat

So what's the significance of this story? Well, I hope it helps some who tend to get so angry with themselves when they succumb to eating under stress. No, I don't believe this study means that we can't take charge of overeating, but I think it does show that emotional eating is complex and that our appetites are driven by a number of different issues and realities. The desire to eat to cope with emotions and stress is something that should be approached with respect. Ignoring the cravings or the urges doesn't necessarily get us where we want to go.

I think the story supports the importance of having tools to cope with stress, to bolster our self-care and to help us feel empowered--tools that we can strive to use instead of overeating or stress eating. What do you think?

Take good care,

Melissa

Mistakes That Sabotage Weight Loss and Contribute to Emotional Eating: Part Two

The term emotional eating is used a lot, but not everyone understands what emotional eating really is.

Emotional eating is eating and overeating that occurs when we use food as a way to cope with a feeling, situation, or a need that is not physical hunger. Emotional eating is eating that happens when we want to eat but our bodies don’t really need the fuel. Common kinds of emotional eating are “nervous eating,” eating when you are bored, using food as a “reward” (to feel good), or eating when you are lonely. Because this kind of eating isn’t tied to a physical need for food, it can easily cause weight gain.

Here are three things everyone trying to lose weight needs to know about emotional eating:

1. Many people don’t know that they are emotional eaters. How’s that? Well, emotional eating isn’t always as straightforward as feeling a feeling (“I’m anxious”) and then making a choice to eat. Here’s the tricky part. Over time, if you’ve learned to use food as a way to cope with certain feeling states or situations, your brain can stop identifying that you are eating for emotional reasons. Here’s an example. If when you’re stressed, you reach for a snack to comfort yourself, over time, your brain stops telling you, “You are stressed and you are going to try to cope with it by eating a cookie.”

Over time, your brain may start skipping the emotion and move directly to interpreting that stressed feeling as physical hunger. You might not even realize that you are feeling stress. Your thinking will go like this: Something stressful will happen and you will start wanting a snack. You might even feel physically hungry. Food, not stress, will be the central thought in your mind. If you are someone who feels hungry “all the time,” emotional eating could very well be playing a hidden role.

2. Emotional eating and self-blame, shame and guilt go hand in hand. If you are feeling “out of control with your eating,” odds are that emotional eating is happening. The problem is, if emotional eating goes unrecognized, or if we don’t take it seriously, it’s easy to fall into a trap of guilt and self-blame for not being able to “stay in control” of your eating.
Shame and guilt are never helpful when it comes to long term weight loss. They tend to breed isolation, negative self esteem, decreased hope, and ultimately more emotional eating and self-sabotage. If you are struggling with emotional eating and you don’t learn the tools you need to cope with the feelings, the odds are that you will continue to feel out of control with food.

3. If you don’t take control of emotional eating, it can take control of your weight loss plans. Research studies of individuals trying to lose weight find that people who eat for emotional reasons lose less weight and have a harder time keeping it off. The journal Obesity recently published an article concluding that successful weight loss programs should teach clients how to cope with emotional eating in order to improve the clients’ ability to lose weight and not regain it.

If emotional eating is something that you struggle with, it’s important to know that no diet, no fitness program, and no weight loss surgery will fix that for you.

Taking control of emotional eating requires learning new effective ways to cope with your emotions. It’s not about the food.

It’s also important to know that learning new tools to cope with emotional eating can be one of the most rewarding and life-changing gifts that you can give yourself. Learning new ways to cope with life issues and feelings allows you to tackle life head-on. When you do this, food becomes simpler, and your life grows bigger, and ultimately, more rewarding.

Take good care,

Melissa

The New and Improved Emotional Eating Toolbox is Here!

I'm pleased to announce that the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28-day Program for taking charge of overeating and emotional eating is now available as a soft cover workbook and CD set! The previous version, which was downloadable, is no longer available (thanks to those who helped me with my Spring cleaning!). The workbook is hefty--150 pages--and, just as it was before, it's packed with powerful tools, individualized strategies, templates and schedules to help you take control, move beyond dieting, and put food in a much smaller place in your life. If you check out the new graphic on this page you can see the snazzy new cover.

One of the reasons that we moved to a non-downloadable version was because we've had so much interest from groups, programs and support groups who want to purchase the program in bulk quantities and work through it together. If you are interested in volume pricing, please contact us.

Take good care,

Melissa

Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) Spring Cleaning Deal!

There are some exciting changes coming up at Enduring Change, and our Emotional Eating Programs. In the spirit of my last post, you are invited to help with some of my Spring Cleaning. There are a limited number of Emotional Eating Toolbox 28-Day Self-guided programs available at a discounted price. The information about the program and about how to order is here. (this is the self-study program, NOT the Emotional Eating Coaching Groups). A limited number have been set aside. Type in the coupon code springfever at checkout and the price will be discounted by $34! When they're gone, they're gone!

Take good care,

Melissa

More quick tips

Emotional eating, nervous eating, stress eating, bored eating--the eating that happens when you aren't physically hungry--tends to happen when you don't know what else to do about how you are feeling, or you don't feel like you can take the time to do it. If my last post about enhancing the quality of your life in quick ways interested you, you should check out Lisa Newton's post, 50 Ideas for a Healthy Lifestyle That Take Ten Minutes or Less. Lisa is the founder of Iowa Avenue, a healthy living social community where I am privileged to be able to share my blog posts. Lisa's post above appeared at another site you might want to check out, Dumb Little Man. It's a blog about making life simpler with lots of tips for how to stay satisfied when you live a really busy life. Pretty cool!

Take good care,
Melissa