One of the first questions that people ask me as we begin working together is: “will this process of making peace with food help me lose weight?” This is such a tough and loaded question! This question always makes me feel the frustration, disappointment and pain so many of us experience with our bodies.
The desire to lose weight has often plagued so many for so long and after trying countless diets, supplements, workouts, and other extreme measures, the weight never seems to stay off. When it begins to creep back on, most are met with many overwhelming and uncomfortable emotions such as fear, frustration, denial and even hopelessness. So, when I hear this question about weight loss, I know it comes from a place where you may not quite trust this process.
When you heal emotional eating, you are metaphorically healing yourself. The struggles with food really are not about the food. The struggles, control and fear related to food point to the challenge of managing your internal emotional world, not having your needs met, and feeling in some way inadequate or not good enough. When you address these underlying emotions that trigger cravings, overeating and even binge eating, it can be overwhelming, tiring and it’s just plain old draining. Many of us don’t even recognize how deep the roots run because it has been happening for soooo long.
The thing is, healing from those deepest roots takes dedicated time. This means that the weight loss that results with this type of work (a non-diet approach) well—it takes time. A mindful approach to making peace with food is not an overnight fix. This process is not a crash diet. This is not a one-size-fits-all plan. That is why the way I work always begins with visioning, goal setting and, at the core of the process and consistently throughout the process, mindfulness. And I know, I talk about vision and mindfulness A LOT. However these tools offer such a powerful difference in the ability to feel, understand and accept emotions. They offer a mind shift towards progress, not perfection. They offer guidance and direction from within rather than grasping from random external fleeting diets. With your vision and mindfulness as the driving force towards healing and change, we can then work with evidenced based practices to continue the growth and change. These practices include nutrition, movement, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-compassion and accountability that create real, lasting, sustainable change in mind and body.
Basically, working in a mindfulness and intuitive eating approach is flipping everything you ever thought, did or tried over and shaking it out—with intention. The work ends up creating space to feel like yourself, to become who you truly are meant to be. The hard work, focus and determination creates progress and an opening to accept all parts of yourself, all of your emotions and the whole of who you are and your life as it is unfolding.
The work with mindfulness to heal emotional eating moves you through any stuck and stagnant places and even will lift you out of back slide. The work is about addressing resistance, head on, and building resilience. Do you know how resilience builds? With hard-hard work. Resilience builds and generates itself with failure and mistakes and from shifting your perspective from “why bother?” to “I am worth this bother,” or “today I choose to bother.”
If you are ready to immerse yourself in this alternative approach, keep on reading! Freedom From Emotional Eating is an online group coaching experience that meets live weekly for twelve weeks. This course sets up the specific and valuable circumstances to create real, intentional, actual change. The processes you experience with this course are transformative and healing. Many of the modules are not easy, however they are SO worth the hard work. There are smooth transitions between the modules to keep your progress as linear as possible. Throughout the course, you have the constant support needed to create the change you desire, slowly and over time so that they are sustainable.
As you begin to integrate the changes, you have consistent support and coaching which frees your ability to transform your mindset so you can remain in action mode. Another big difference between healing emotional eating versus putting a band-aid on the symptoms is that it is a life-long journey. This process is a commitment to yourself. This process requires a sound commitment to change, and then to create the circumstances necessary for the changes to continue to evolve. Throughout the course you will add new layers of change upon change until you find you are truly living your vision for your life. You find yourself truly making peace with food. While you are creating the circumstances within your life to no longer eat when bored, sad, angry, anxious, happy, fearful, lonely or otherwise, the weight naturally comes off. However, once this course, it is no longer about the weight and more about freeing yourself of old wounds, old patterns and creating a new way of existing within your own life.
If you are ready for a different approach to heal your relationship with food, with your body and with yourself, join me and a supportive group of like-minded others going through the exact same process. Healing your relationship with food could occur one day, or this could be day one. Your choice. Your life. You get to decide when the time is right, right now. I hope you will consider joining me on this journey to healing and wholeness this spring. I look forward to walking with you along your personal path to making peace with food. If you are ready to take the start the journey, you can click here to learn more. If you’d like to be on the wait list for the next offering, reach out, I’d love to hear from you!