Here’s my thing: I help women overcome emotional eating.
I can give you processes, structures, and helpful tips about losing the weight you want to lose, and it works. WHILE you do them. You’ve been there, done that, right?
Yeah, me too. I’m not kidding when I say I was on a diet for 40 years, and perhaps like me, you’re a bit jaded with claims. Last week, I saw a post that said, “I don’t want to hear anymore magic claims about weight loss.” I so get that, don’t you?
I could get near my goal, and did reach my goal a couple of times, but the weight must have been taking a holiday, because it started coming back far too soon. I couldn’t maintain my lower weight.
Maybe it was the heady idea that “now I can eat anything I want.”
Maybe it was missing foods.
Maybe it was self-sabotage. I
It was almost always about emotional eating.
So what’s emotional eating about?
Curiously, it’s usually not about the food itself or deprivation or even willpower.
It’s about what drives us to the food.
It’s about what we’ve connected to that food.
It’s about the emotional stuff, the baggage that has shaped us and that we then take into every aspect of our lives.
If you’ve watched my TEDx talk, you’ll remember that I had an issue with peanut butter. When I felt stressed or upset, I’d go to my peanut butter jar. When I finally recognized it as a tangible connection to my grandmother, it made sense. My grandmother and I LOVED peanut butter. AND my grandmother always made me feel safe and loved. She could help me calm down and work through any issue. I should have learned her wisdom and approach to problem-solving instead, but no, I connected that calm, safe, loved feeling to peanut butter. That’s just it. It’s not rational – it’s emotional, and it drives us.
The good news is, we can then disconnect the food from the feel-good experience and replace it with something that works for us. That’s one piece of emotional baggage we can unpack so we make more effective choices.
