Category Archives: Tools

Should You Weigh Yourself?

Should you weigh yourself if you have a history of eating issues?

I’ve decided to cut back from posting a new blog every week to just 2 a month. I’ve been pumping out a new blog every week for a long time and my brain is starting to feel a little fried when it comes to keeping the content fresh. On one hand I’m kind of bummed to take a break from it (I love to not break a long streak!) but I also need to listen to my needs and get out of that kind of perfectionism. I think backing off a little will help bring back some creativity that I feel I’ve been lacking in my writing lately. It will at least free up some of my time to work on other things I want to do in my business which is something I have to do.

Today’s topic is a question that I hear many people asking and my answer is a little more unconventional than you might think considering the business that I’m in.

Is it okay to weigh yourself?

Should you throw out your scale if you’ve struggled with body image issues or disordered eating?

This is a question that comes up a lot for women who have struggled with some aspect of their relationship to food or their body. Many health and mental health professionals and those in the body positive movement usually recommend that we toss out our scales.

I personally think it depends on the individual person and their specific relationship with the scale.

I go through periods where I weigh myself daily and then I sort of walk away from it for awhile and might only weigh myself once or twice a month, sometimes I go through longer stretches where I don’t weigh myself for a few months (mostly in the winter!). This works for me. I don’t get anxious about not weighing myself and I don’t get anxious about the number when I do.

When I weigh daily, it confirms for me that the way I am eating and the amount I am exercising is the right amount for my body.

It also has helped me understand the normal fluctuations in weight that my body has week after week or throughout the month, which results in not being alarmed by them. Lots of things contribute to our weight going up or down a pound or two – salty food (up), slow digestive transit time (up), dehydrated (down), week before period (up) etc. Weighing regularly has made me very comfortable with these changes.

As someone who has been challenged in her eating habits and used to be so dependent on tracking calories to know if I had eaten too much – the scale helps confirm for me that I’m on the right track (since I no longer count calories and instead use my hunger / fullness signals as a guide). Weighing myself occasionally tells me that the way I’m living is working, that I am in tune with my hunger signals (or when my eating issues are cropping up again) and that my intuition is working. It actually reinforces some of the good things I’ve worked on in the last 3-4 years.

When I take breaks from it for longer than a few weeks at a time, I find it’s like a silent decision I’m making that I’m going to go a little rogue with my food choices for awhile. I’m choosing to silence my hunger signals and while there’s nothing wrong with doing this once in awhile, I do have a history of really going overboard for long periods when I avoid the scale. If it don’t “see” it, it’s not happening! It’s a way I can lie to myself. For me, purposely avoiding the scale is an indication that I’m heading into unhealthy territory. It’s the opposite of what you’d expect!

When I’m using the scale as a tool, it doesn’t have a ton of power over me. I don’t give the number a ton of meaning. The number doesn’t tell me I’m good or bad, that I’m worthy or unworthy. It mostly serves to tell me if I’m staying present and being honest in my choices or if I’m trying to hide from myself.

Using the scale occasionally gives this former yo-yo dieter the confidence to keep choosing foods that both give me the nutrition I need and also tastes and textures that I enjoy. When you’ve had 90 pound weight losses and also 60 pound weight gains in your life, you realize that you are someone who can easily turn a blind eye to your ups and downs, and the scale helps me keep my eyes open to my actions. It’s something I keep in my personal tool box because even though I don’t put pressure on myself to weigh a certain amount anymore (and I do think it is possible to be healthy and overweight), I do know that if I allow my weight to creep too far back up and stay up, I am increasing my risk for diabetes (too much of this in my family history) and complicating my own history of high blood pressure (and each year that passes, I would be increasing those risks). I’m heavily motivated by living longer and healthier than the people in my family who passed away too young and for me, I know that keeping my weight stable is an important part of this, again, for me personally.

I know this is not the right thing for every woman with a similar history as mine. And I know there are many other women who feel like they get completely crazy over the scale.

It’s important to know yourself and listen to what is right for you, rather than doing what the masses are doing, or what a stranger on the internet says (that includes me – just because I’m sharing that using a scale helps me stay mindful, doesn’t mean that my answer is right for you).

Some women really become obsessed with the scale in a very unhealthy way. If the number on the scale isn’t a number they like, it can ruin their day or their whole week, it can make them restrict food and punish themselves with harsh exercise. It can make them feel helpless, worthless and value themselves less. Feeling this way can lead to really unhealthy behaviors. For these people, not weighing themselves is a better idea. Using a scale causes them stress, anxiety and depression. In these cases, it’s not a tool, it’s punishment.

The key to knowing if you can continue weighing yourself or not is how much meaning you give it. In my opinion (and experience), if you can use the scale as a tool in a neutral way, that has about as much effect on how you feel about yourself you as tying your shoes does, then it’s probably okay to keep using the scale in some way. If you can step off the scale and not feel virtuous or ashamed, you might be able to still use it. If you don’t feel the need to do something in retaliation to what number is on the scale, you may be able to still use it. It’s important to know how it affects you.

If you are wondering if you should toss your scale out or not, ask yourself:

How do I feel after I weigh myself?

Do I feel virtuous or depressed depending on the number I see?

Do I feel the urge to do “something” to affect my weight in response to the number I see?

Does even thinking about giving up the scale make me feel very anxious? Why?

When in doubt, talk to your doctor or a professional you trust who is aware of your history to discuss what would make the most sense for you. And trust your gut!

Do you need more support with emotional eating? Come join my Ending Emotional Eating Group on Facebook to talk with other women going through the same thing. We’d love to see you there!

Have you gotten my newest free guide You Have What it Takes? If you’re an emotional eater, overeater or longtime dieter who wonders if she has what it takes to change her relationship with food, then this for you. And it’s free. Click on the image below, then enter your name and email and it’s yours!

A Reminder After This Exhausting Election: Let Yourself Feel Those Feelings

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Feel those feelings!

I’m not going to fill this space by telling you how I feel about the results of Tuesday’s presidential election. If you know me, you already know what I’m thinking and feeling and as much as I try to incorporate some of the personal into my blog and certainly into my social media presence – ultimately I want what I put out here to be helpful and not just self-serving and venting (this is a space for my business after all!). Along those lines, feelings are very raw for many of us right now and tensions in our country are high so one way I can be of help is to make this week’s blog post something constructive and supportive.

This is a just a reminder to let yourself feel the feelings you are having this week. About the election. About the candidates. About the state of our country and the people in it.

If you are feeling sad. Feel sad. Be sad.

If you are angry, disappointed, disillusioned, disgusted, dismayed and demoralized (all those d words work perfectly here!), then let yourself feel them.

Really feel them.

This doesn’t mean you should wallow or indulge in your misery or disappointment for days or weeks on end but it’s necessary to let these feelings run their course. We as people try to avoid feeling uncomfortable under almost any circumstances and when these shitty feelings arise, we want them to go away as fast as possible. We take pills to go to sleep so we don’t have to think about it. We drink so we don’t have to feel it. We eat so we can numb ourselves out.

Don’t try to numb yourself out right now. Don’t avoid, resist, repress or push away what you are feeling. Don’t try to change it. Don’t try to take action on those feelings.

If you are feeling bad, that’s ok.

Let it be there.

It will end.

I promise.

You will feel good again.

These uncomfortable feelings will not last forever.

All feelings pass, even the ones that feel unbearable.

Your job right now is to process this and get really good at feeling your own discomfort. This is part of being a human -feelings are a huge part of being human. And we can’t have the positive feelings in life, without the balance of the negative ones. The best feelings in the world feel as good as they do because we have the awful feelings to compare them to. We can’t and won’t get through life avoiding ever feeling uncomfortable.

None of your feelings are wrong and you are not wrong for having them.

Don’t take any action right now (feeling feelings is not an action – it’s a way of being, of allowing). We can take action later (starting with how we treat each other).

All you need to do right now is feel.

Express yourself if you need to (talk to a friend or write!). Cry if you need to. Hug your loved ones. Eat nourishing and comforting food. Get some fresh air and some blood pumping exercise. Be present. Feel what you are feeling.

Acknowledge it.

Accept it.

And when the feeling is dissipating (it may take a few days), think about how you want to feel going forward. What do you want to see in the world? How do you want others to view the US? How do you want to view the US? What do you wish was more common in our political system? And what you do wish there was less of? What qualities do you wish our fellow citizens possessed more of?

Then go out and be those things.

Live your life as an example of what you want in this world.

Treat people how you want to be treated.

Spread love. Kindness. Tolerance. Authenticity. Empathy. Grace. Charm. Beauty. Knowledge. Understanding. Honesty. Dignity.

That’s your homework for this week – feel your feelings and embody the things you want to see more of in this world.

HUGS!!

Andrea

Need more like this? Check out this earlier post on feeling your feelings.

Then download your free copy of Healthy Eating Shouldn‘t Be a Workout: Real Life Strategies to Take the Confusion Out of Healthy Living (includes recipes, snack and meal ideas, ways to save money and more!).

Common Mistakes We Make When Trying to Halt Emotional Eating

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Don’t set the world on fire while you’re changing your relationship with food.

This blog post was supposed to go out early Thursday morning but when I went to put the finishing touches on it Wednesday (last minute, of course!) we had a local internet outage that lasted several hours and by several hours I mean from about 12:30 until 6pm!! I love how easy technology makes our lives most of the time, but I really hate how much we’ve come to require it. So many aspects of my job depend on it and most things come to a halt when it’s not working. And when things aren’t working for me, I tend to have a total meltdown. I’m not very mature when things don’t go my way or according to plan. I didn’t know what to do with myself (luckily, there is always something that needs doing around the house! I took a forced break to house clean after my last client!)

This behavior translates into other areas of my life.

When things get tough, when I don’t understand something, when I hit a wall, I flip out and give up. I essentially set my emotional world on fire. Emotionally I’d just say “No way, not going to do this, feel this or experience this!”. I do this when I’m learning something and struggling with it. When I discover I’m wrong. When I don’t like an outcome. You name it. And in the past, I would turn to food to cope with whatever I didn’t want to feel. Whatever obstacle I encountered would be attempted to be climbed over with food. It was how I soothed bad feelings.

I don’t do that anymore. Or at least, I rarely do it now. And if I do catch myself reaching for food when I don’t want to feel something, I’m aware of it and can bring my attention to the feeling.

If you’re an emotional eater, I know you can relate to this. You probably have a bit of an “all or nothing” mindset yourself. If a little bit of something will help, then a lot will really cure it! Right? Let’s burn it all down and start over! Because of this kind of thinking, and an inability to deal with uncomfortable emotions, emotional eaters tend to fall into several “traps” of the same nature when they are trying to stop eating emotionally. Instead of viewing it as a staircase where we make changes step by step on the way up, we try to leap from the bottom step to the top step without touching on the steps in between. We want to skip over the hard parts. We want to get from A to B without feeling uncomfortable on the way there. But that’s not possible!

I want to share a few of the most common mistakes people fall into when they are trying to halt their emotional eating in the hopes that you can avoid getting stuck in them like I (and so many others) have. Watch out for these!

Common Mistakes We Make When Trying to Halt Emotional Eating:

We equate getting better with being perfect. Healing from emotional eating does not mean you’ll never have another moment where you put food in your mouth for reasons other than hunger – it just means you’re making a concerted effort to eat thoughtfully and while fully present most of the time. Some days it will look really great, other days it’s going to be ugly. Don’t make too much of it. The day to day is really is no big deal.
We get too dogmatic about the rules, tools and which teachers that can help. Some people need to eat mindfully 100% of the time to stay on track, others do better when they eat every 2 hours whether hungry or not. Some only listen to what Geneen Roth’s ideas or only Kay Sheppard’s or only Ellen Satter or only their Yoga teacher and are distrustful of anyone but their preferred “guru”. There are lots of teachers, tools and rules that can help you have a better relationship with food. You don’t have to subscribe to one and one only. Try to remain open minded and be willing to listen to the experiences of others, even if they’re different from your own. You never know when you might learn just another way to peace. And different tools and teachers will make sense for us at different times in our lives. It’s ok to change with time.
Avoiding social situations that center around food. Don’t you dare kill your social life. If you want to heal your relationship with food, you have to be able to manage food in all settings and that includes socially. Consider each social situation with eating as a component as practice in figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. Maybe you need to eat a snack before the event so that you don’t go overboard during. Maybe you need to eat cleanly and thoughtfully during. Maybe you need to eat exactly what you crave during so that you don’t go home and binge. Go to events. Eat. Be thoughtful about it. Let yourself be human and enjoy human things.
Automatically banning the scale. Yes weighing ourselves obsessively doesn’t help and if weighing yourself causes you to feel bad or virtuous depending on the number that appears, then yes, you should try reducing your use of a scale (and dumping it completely in some cases). But if you’re one of those people who can weigh themselves and it’s entirely neutral for you, then it’s ok to keep using it as a guide. I find weighing myself several times a month gives me feedback that tells me if I’m on the right track in listening to my hunger signals and stopping when I’ve had enough. When it moves up or down a few pounds I don’t worry (normal fluctuations) but if I see if trending too far in any direction, I know that means I’ve gone off track and helps me bring my attention back to where it should be. When I’ve stopped weighing myself completely, I tend to go back to old eating habits and it has on more than one occasion resulted in unhealthy amounts of weight gained. So I keep the scale in my arsenal of tools. That works for me. It does not work for others. The only way you should keep using the scale as a tool is if it is no more upsetting than taking your temperature would be. When we take our temp, we either have a fever or we don’t. It doesn’t affect how we feel about ourselves or our body. Can you be that neutral with the scale? You need to decide what is the most loving thing to do for you.
Thinking that it’s not worth doing if you can’t do everything. You may have great success when you first start implementing different tools and strategies to conquer your emotional eating. This is the “honeymoon” phase. Things will go well, you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world, and then because this is real life, something will happen that throws you off your game. You’ll find yourself back at square one, resorting to all your old habits and when you get sick of it and want to get back at it, it won’t feel quite so easy to implement those tools back into your life. You’ll feel resistant and even resentful. You’ll wonder why you ever thought you could do this in the first place. You’ll think everyone who claims they healed their relationship with food is a fucking liar. Slow down. Take a step back. You don’t have to get yourself back to where you were when you slipped. That’s a huge hurdle! Just pick one tool or one strategy that was working for you before that seems doable and go from there. You will get to where you were before, but not by skipping any steps along the way. Just pick up the pieces one at a time!

You didn’t become an emotional eater overnight. It’s not like one day you were eating normally, competently and the next day you turned to food for comfort. It was a coping strategy that you adopted over time in response to certain situations. In many cases it developed over many years. We have to have patience in changing it. We have to accept that we’re going to stumble a little, slip a little and that it might be uncomfortable, sometimes painful and often ridiculously slow! Be cautious of falling into these traps, take your time and don’t judge yourself for wherever you are in YOUR process. This is your journey and you need to do it however makes sense to you.

How are you doing with you own emotional eating or chronic dieting struggles? Could you use some support? If so, contact me to set up a Discovery Session. It’s free.

Like this? For more, download your free copy of Healthy Eating Shouldn‘t Be a Workout: Real Life Strategies to Take the Confusion Out of Healthy Living (includes recipes, snack and meal ideas, ways to save money and more!).

Why Self Care is So Easy to Preach but Hard to Do

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Finding it hard to make time to write in your journal? Sometimes self care practices can feel isolating because we are already spending too much time on our own.

Self care is the big thing these days. It’s replaced eating kale and drinking smoothies as to what clues everyone else into the fact that you’re into “wellness”. Everyone is doing it! Or everyone means to do it. Everyone is at least thinking about doing it.

Yeah, you know you should meditate, exercise and write in your journal. And healthier eating is definitely something you want to do. And someday you’ll have time for epsom salt baths and dry brushing too. It’s been a zillion years since you connected with nature and last time nature connected with you it left a welt the size of a quarter and you had to take benadryl for 3 days. Self care is totally on your priority list!

But no matter how many times you think, “I’m totally going to start doing that” (Tomorrow. Ah, Monday! Um, maybe next month?), another big chunk of time passes without you having made any time for self care practices.

What gives? Why is self care something we preach often but so hard to do in reality?

Two reasons come to mind for me.

Because it’s not really a priority for us but we think it should be a priority because according to the media and all the women who actually go to the yoga classes you wish you could drag yourself to, it’s basically what’s going to keep us sane and healthy and not making time for self care is tantamount to to giving the middle finger to your health.Along the same lines: YOU aren’t a priority in your life. Your job, your family, your volunteer work or school obligations, your DVR queue, heck, even social media comes first. There’s no room for self care because you are not high enough up on your priority list. The only way you’re going to start making room for it is if you move something else further down the list.The only way to have self care find a way into your life is by changing your priorities.How to change this. Make a list of how you spend your time. Account for every hour or half hour of every day for a week. Laundry, dishes, preparing meals, time in the car, staring out the window etc. put everything down on paper. When you see where all your time goes, it might make it easier to find something you can stop doing (or get help doing!) or something you can do less of and that is where you can make room for self care. But first you have to acknowledge that you deserve a place at the top of your priorities. What can you stop doing? What can you do less of? Is there anything that is taking up a big chunk of time that you are surprised by? Can you change that? Are you willing to change that? Compiling a list like this and analyzing what can be changed can help you find a spare 30 min to an hour to add in some form of self care. Start there and when you see the benefits of that small bit of time, you may be motivated to look for more.
Meditation is a powerful tool to connect to your higher power, but can sometimes be a lonely place to be if you are feeling disconnected.
You’re going through a period of isolation or disconnection. As beneficial as self care stuff is to our lives, most of the stuff we do for self care is a solo practice that gets us deeper into our heads and sometimes that’s the opposite of what we need!Maybe you work a lot of hours in a private office, spend a lot of time in your car, work from home, spend all day caring for others, or have very limited social time. All of these things can start to make you feel isolated and doing self care practices that bring the focus on “you” can make you feel even more so. The last thing you want to do when you spend a lot of time alone is sit quietly in your own head space! That’s sometimes why we turn to food, drink or our electronic devices more than we want to – we’re seeking the comfort and the “feeding” that human relationships and interactions can give us and we are trying to substitute it for other things. We just can’t feed disconnection with those things and they will keep getting in the way of a self-care practice until we get some true self care by interacting with others!In this case, the only way to make yourself want to do solo practice self care stuff is by starting with one of the most basic self care needs – and that is social interaction!How to change This. Go have some fun and conversation with other humans! What is your soul hungry for? How connected to others to you feel? Do you have several people in your life that you connect with regularly? Go out and connect with them. Schedule time with your girlfriends. Have brunch with your siblings. Find an event that interests you in your area on meetup.com and meet some new people. Maybe you want to connect in a way that gives back to others? What about volunteering at a soup kitchen or senior center, or becoming a Big Sister/ Big Brother? You could also become a mentor for someone in your field. Friends don’t live nearby? Try video chat.
When you connect to others deeply and regularly, you’ll find meditating, journal writing or exercising is something you’ll start to look forward to (and you’ll actually be able to do it).

I’ve gone through both of these myself – as a solopreneur the isolation one comes up regularly! I’ve found it really hard to stick to a meditation practice lately (even my doctor suggested I use an app and set a timer, but I just couldn’t get myself to do it). I know the benefits of meditation and I’ve had success doing it regularly during different periods in my life, but lately, asking me to sit down and meditate felt worse than going to the dentist! I finally realized it’s because I’m already alone in my own head too much! How and why would I want to spend even more time there? Haha! I’ve been making an effort to have more time with other people during the week, whether it be a networking event or a walk or lunch with a friend and it really helps me feel better (and more interested in doing other things that are good for me).

What is your experience with self care? Do you find it challenging to stick to a routine? Are you making yourself a priority and is self care truly a priority for you or just something you “think” should be a priority? Have you been spending too much time alone lately? Is isolation or disconnection something you have been feeling? What is something you can do this week to feel more connected to others?

How A Coach Can Actually Help You

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Think of coaching as a tool you can learn to use on your own to navigate through life – like using a compass or celestial objects in nautical navigation. You don’t need a coach forever – but you might need one to get you going.

If you’re on social media at all today, odds are you’ve seen a million shiny posts and advertisements from coaches telling you they can change your life, help you reach your full potential and if you’re a coach, they’ll help you have your first 6 figure year (cue the eye roll from my fellow coaches!)! If you see these posts regularly, odds are you are someone who is interested in the self-help genre (which is why these ads and pages appear in your feed) and you are probably, at the very least, a little curious about what coaching is and what it can do for you.

The way these big coaching gurus talk in their ads and videos would make you think that they have some major secret, some big piece of the missing puzzle that you don’t have. The profession of coaching is a little shrouded in mystery. But what exactly do coaches do???

There are a lot of different types of coaches out there: career coaches, life coaches, health coaches, nutrition coaches, accountability coaches etc. They’re all a little bit different because of what their focus is, but assuming they’ve gone through a coach training program of some kind, they are going to work from similar tenets of coaching. You should know that coaching isn’t a regulated profession in the US and that means someone can call themselves a coach without any type of training or education. On one hand, this is a good thing – there are many career and life paths that can make someone an incredible natural “coach” without a specific training. But on the other hand, there are wackos out there who are trying to sell products that could be harmful or they are calling themselves a “coach” but operating far out of the scope of practice of coaching by trying to diagnose or treat clients like some highly regulated professions do. Please know that a coach who has been trained properly and who has your best interests in mind will not and can not diagnose, treat or prescribe. I’m getting a little off topic but just know I’ll get into that in more detail below!

I really want to talk about how as a “coach” I can actually help you reach your goals because every so often, I get an email from someone who is having certain symptoms and want to know my thoughts about it. Or they want to drop 20 pounds and want me to create a meal plan for them. And I have to tell them that I’m not the right person to help them with that stuff. I can help you understanding your emotional eating and help you move away from chronic dieting with targeted lifestyle changes and support. I can’t provide therapy and I can’t “fix” you.

My value as a (health) coach isn’t to diagnose you (I can’t do that), prescribe a treatment plan (I can’t do that) or give you detailed meal plan (I won’t do that). It’s not even to fill you up with knowledge about getting healthier or about how you should change your life. And it’s not about giving advice (believe it or not, I rarely give advice to my clients).

Before you wonder why in the world you would hire someone like me, let’s go a little deeper here.

You already know what to eat, you already know what you “should” be doing to feel better, have more energy and live a longer, healthier life. You probably are already aware that you are eating emotionally and that you need to feel your feelings to stop it. You probably already know that the non-stop diet you’ve been on since you were 11 is making it impossible to eat normally as an adult. But knowing all these things (that we are bombarded with daily) is not the same as actually being able to put them into practice. You can know things on an intellectual level and still feel like there is a missing piece.

Sometimes we need an outsider to help us see what that missing piece is.

My value as a coach is helping you change your habits. I can show you how to actually fit these things into your life. I can help you understand and navigate past your self-sabotage. I will help you transform one small step at a time. I can hold you accountable when you’re not being accountable to yourself.

I’m not a doctor, dietician or personal trainer. And I’m not trying to be (and no other professional coach will pretend to be either!). I am a master of implementing lifestyle change. I’m a master of adapting habits.

Many people see their doctor, a dietician and a personal trainer to make life style changes – yet often they still lack a piece of the puzzle to get where they want to be. Your doctor tells you what you need to do to get healthier. Your dietician tells you what macros you should be eating and how many calories and then your personal trainer will work your body in the right way for your goals. But if you don’t do what your doctor suggests and you don’t buy and prepare the foods your dietitian recommends and you don’t show up for your personal training appointment, you’re going to be exactly where you were when you started. A coach is the missing piece that helps you actually do these things.

A coach is also someone who can help you learn to listen to the voice inside you. That voice that you or others have shut down again and again to the point where you aren’t even sure that’s “you” anymore. A good coach helps you figure out your own answers instead of giving you the easy answer. I’m not here to be your best friend. I’m here to help you get out of your own way.

And how do we do that? Not with meal plans (remember, you know what to eat), pills or workout plans. But instead with:

Support (both the loving and tough love kind).

Accountability (ever notice it’s a lot easier to get something done when someone else is depending on you to show up?).

Guidance (I may not dole out advice left and right but if you are on a dangerous or unhelpful path I’ll let you know).

As an objective Sounding Board (I’ll help you weigh pros and cons without inputting my own opinion)

Ideas and solutions (for fitting it all in, getting out of your own way and dissolving excuses).

Provide tools and exercises to help you understand why you work the way you do, help you get unstuck and see the potential possibilities (yes this will often include writing!).

That’s how I can help. Not with diagnosing, treating or prescribing. Not with telling you how to live your life. Not with putting ideas in your head.

If you need an analogy (and we all know I love analogies), think of it this way: You have a ship loaded with supplies ready to cross the Atlantic (we’re time traveling here – this is before modern GPS!). You may even have a crew on board, ready and willing to sail with you. But you don’t know the first thing about navigation (and your crew is too busy to help you with that). I’m the one who can teach you how to navigate using celestial objects. I can teach you to use a compass. I’m the one who can give you the tools necessary to get yourself from A to B over and over again, on your own. You don’t need me to make the trip – that’s all you. But I can give you the support and tools to make it a reality.

One of the things that was most appealing to me when training to be a coach was that in coaching we believe that people have all the answers inside of them already and our job is to help bring that out in them. People are already whole, complete and sometimes just fall off track because they have lost the ability to hear and see themselves fully. Coaching can help you connect to yourself again so you always know the right answer for you.

Still interested in coaching but afraid to pull the trigger? Keep your eyes open for a special offer coming soon! In September I will be making a special (limited quantity) offer to those of you who are new to coaching, that will make trying it more affordable! Make sure you are on my email list so that you don’t miss this offer when it’s ready! Joining this list automatically means you receive my free eBook Healthy Eating Shouldn‘t Be a Workout: Real Life Strategies to Take the Confusion Out of Healthy Living (includes recipes, snack and meal ideas, ways to save money and more!).

What if We Focused on What We Want as Much as We Focus on What We Don’t Want?

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Notice how much attention you give to thoughts about what you don’t want or don’t like about your life. What might happen if you turned things around?

A few years ago, I walked into my job after a long weekend and gave my notice. I had spent the previous 6 months dreading almost every day, not sleeping and finding myself in tears both at work and at home, way way more than normal. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Looking back at it now, I wish I had spent my energy differently during those last 6 months there. I was so unhappy (managerial changes, layoffs etc) and so vested in my own misery that I couldn’t see anything other than my own unhappiness. It was like this massive grey cloud that obstructed my senses, so thick and impenetrable, I walked around with it held out in front of me, assuming that the grey cloud I saw everywhere was confirmation that everyone around me at work was also miserable. Some of them had their own clouds for sure (it was an ugly year for the company), but I was coloring my entire world with the way I had chosen to think about my situation. And I thought that the second I walked out those doors that that grey cloud would be gone forever.

When I embarked upon starting my own business, those same grey clouds would appear every so often, not as dark and thick as before, but certainly enough to make me question what I was doing (do I know enough? am I good at this? was I insane to quit?? etc). I realized that my situation wasn’t fully to blame for my unhappiness – a huge chunk of it was because of how much time I spent thinking about how bad things were at work. I was basically growing my unhappiness by cultivating thoughts about how deeply unhappy I was, all day long, over and over – with every interaction I had.

I am not unique (though I’d like to think I am, haha!).

Most of us spend big chunks of time focusing on what we don’t want in our current situation. It’s easier to think about what’s not going well, what we don’t want, or how we don’t want things to be.

Maybe it’s your job that you hate. You get up each morning, dreading the day ahead. Even going to sleep is challenging because you are thinking about how much you don’t want to go to work tomorrow. How much of your day (or night) is spent thinking about how much you don’t want to be where you spend most of your day?

Maybe it’s your weight. You weigh yourself first thing in the morning and feel instant disappointment. You’re still fat! (side note: your weight is not indicative of how awesome you are and you don’t need to change it.) You go to get dressed and have a meltdown just going into the closet. You know most of what’s in here doesn’t fit your “chubby” body. You take one last look in the mirror before you leave the house and wonder how you let yourself get this heavy? How much of your day is filled with thoughts about what is wrong about your body?

Maybe it’s where you are living. It’s too far of a commute to work. It’s too far in the woods. Your house is too big. It’s too small. You don’t like how it’s decorated. You don’t want to stay there but don’t want to deal with a move either. How much of your day do you dedicate to thinking about where you don’t want to be?

Maybe it’s the people you spend time with. Your husband annoys you or he’s not emotionally available. Your friends aren’t available enough or you have that one friend who is too available and you need more space. Your family is too nosy or they’re too distant. How much time do you spend thinking you’d rather be with someone other than the person or people you are currently with?

Maybe it’s your car. It needs some work or it’s too expensive.

Maybe it’s your local grocery store. They don’t carry the brands you like or they do, but it’s always too crowded.

Maybe it’s how you spend your free time. What free time? Or too much free time?

I think that’s probably enough examples to illustrate the point. We spend a ton of our thinking time in thoughts about what about our lives is “wrong” or “too much” or not “enough”.

How many times has doing that actually changed your situation?

Does a new job materialize when you spend all day stewing over how miserable you are?

Do you suddenly start to love your body after you’ve assaulted it with the 8th “You’re wrong in ______ way” message in one day?

Does your unhappiness in your current home help you find your dream home in your dream town?

No. None of these thoughts about what we don’t want in our current lives serves to bring us what we do want. Sure, some of us can argue that if we’re happy, we’re unlikely to make changes – and that a glimmer of dissatisfaction can be what sparks motivation to change. But there’s a difference between wanting more in life and finding all that is wrong in it.

If anything, spending too much time in these thoughts about what we don’t want, can make us feel even more down, even more stuck, even more unhappy and less likely to take steps towards changing our situation.

What do you think would happen if we spent more time thinking about what we do want in our lives, where we want to be, what we want to create and who we want to be? What might happen if we spent time thinking about all the things that are right in our world?

When we put our focus on the things we do want in our lives, it makes us feel gratitude, appreciation, love and even joy. When we feel more of those things, we take actions that bring us more of what we want and it can cultivate more patience, tolerance and even appreciation in the areas that we do want to change.

How do we get there? How do we stop thinking so much about what we don’t want?

Here are two exercises that can help turn your thinking around (you’ll need paper and pen or pencil for this):

Think about a time when you felt super pumped up, ready to create something new, go after something big or otherwise make major changes. What was going on in your life? What were you thinking about? Who with, and how were you spending your time? Write down the thoughts that you recall made you feel the most motivated. What thoughts in your current life are most like those thoughts? How can you have more of them?
Each morning or evening (whichever is more convenient for you) write down 5 things in your life that you already have that you want. We spend a ton of time thinking about the things in life that we want but that we don’t yet have. That creates feelings of drought, lack – scarcity! I’m asking you to spend some time creating desire for the things you already have. What do you have in life that you truly want? Try to list 5 different things each day, even if it’s a variation on something you’ve listed before.

For exercise #2, here are a few examples from my own life: I want my husband and I want to be married to him. I want fulfilling and meaningful work. I want my sweet cat. I want my empathy and my sense of humor.

It may seem silly to list out things that seem obvious that we have that we “want” – and it’s certainly way easier to come up with a list of things we don’t want! There are some days I get stuck in thinking about how I’m tired of living so far away in the woods or that as much as I love the freedom of working from home, it gets lonely and I feel like I’ve gotten extra socially awkward since I started (haha!) but while those things are true – there are not the only “truth” in my life. There are plenty of things in my life that I do want – exactly as they already are.

We think of “wanting” as something we do when we are going without. But wanting is also desiring what we have already and even if there are things in your life that you don’t like and do want to change, I am sure there are things that you are blessed with that you do want and you do desire. Putting your focus on those can help get us out of focusing on the stuff we don’t want – and it will release our energy to be able to be put to use doing something more constructive.

One area that this has really made an impact on for me is my relationship with my body. Someone asked me recently how I made a switch from such a negative body image to a more positive one and one of the things I shared with her was that I indulged thoughts about what my body could do more than I indulged the thoughts about what my body was lacking (in my opinion). Both types of thoughts pop in my head and there’s no controlling what thoughts we have – but we do have control over what we do with those thoughts. I started to put more energy (intentionally) into thinking about all the amazing things my body does for me every single day – breathing, heart beating, feet supporting me when I want to take a step, every muscle, bone, tendon, ligament, organ and everything else in my body serving a function every day that enables me to do really cool things. Being able to ride a bike, take barre classes, walk, run, jump, lift weights, carry groceries, think, cook, love etc. (This doesn’t mean that if someone is not able to do these things that they should not take the same joy in their body. I think we should celebrate what we can do even if it doesn’t look like what another person can do.)

My whole life is possible because of the body I’m in and all that she does, every day for me.

Doesn’t that deserve more attention than what is “wrong” about it?

It does and so I started putting more energy there. And the cool thing about that is that it fuels my decisions about what to eat or what kind of exercise I do that is more supportive of a body I love (rather than as a way to punish my body). I put more focus on what I do want about my body than what I don’t want – and that has revolutionized my relationship with her.

In the same way, we can revolutionize our entire life with how we direct our thinking. What if we focused on what we want as much as we focus on what we don’t want?

That’s not to say that if you’re unhappy in your job, your marriage, your lifestyle, your health etc that you should just ignore it and focus on the happy stuff. I’m not suggesting sweeping anything under the rug. I’m just suggesting that we put in an equal amount of time and energy thinking about the stuff in life that we do want as we spend thinking about the stuff we’d like to change.

This is your life and you get to make of it what you want – so do it!

How to Go on Vacation without Gaining 10 lbs (but still be able to enjoy vacation foods)

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Finding a way to get some form of daily movement each day is one way to prevent vacation weight gain.

Years ago, when I would go on any type of vacation or “girls trip”, I would find myself scrambling in the weeks leading up to the trip to lose a few pounds, regardless of where my weight currently was. I’d get ready by trying to eat as little as I could “safely” get away with before a trip. I even did this in 2011 when John and I eloped in California, though since we hadn’t planned on getting married on vacation until just a couple of weeks before, I only had time to drop a few pounds.

You may be thinking that the reason for the last minute weight loss before a trip was so that I would look my best during it. Well, sure, who doesn’t want to look their best on vacation? But that wasn’t really the reason. The reason I always had to work off a few pounds before vacations was really to balance out the weight gain that would definitely come during a trip!

I always saw vacations and nights out a nice restaurants as a reason to go crazy and eat and drink whatever and how ever much I wanted (probably because of my constant yo yo-ing between dieting and gaining weight). The problem with that was that a 10 day vacation became more about the food I would get to eat than about getting to experience a new place or doing fun things with my man or my friends. Inevitably, I would eat terribly all vacation long – eating foods that make me feel bloated and sluggish and eating far too much of them at every meal.

Vacation would start off fun, but by the last few days, I’d be feeling so uncomfortable in my body, that the clothes I brought with me would feel too tight and I’d be looking forward to going home just so I could have relief by “working it all off”. But not before I ate another ice cream sundae, plate of fried clams, some pastries and lots of beer. “Gotta enjoy myself, you know! Because after this trip, I won’t be allowed to eat these things again for a long time”.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve learned that letting myself go crazy and eat everything under the sun when I’m on vacation is the perfect recipe for me to A) feel horrible all vacation long, B) gain 10 lbs in a short period of time and C) set me up for messed up eating and restriction when I get back.

None of that sounds like fun or even remotely vacation-like or relaxing to me!! Yet I did it over and over. I finally realized that I don’t have to do that.

Vacation should be awesome and it shouldn’t be a free for all and it also shouldn’t mean automatic weight gain. Ok, but that brings up a lot of questions, like: To avoiding feeling terrible on vacation and after, does that mean I have to eat super cleanly all of vacation? Isn’t life for “living”? And doesn’t that include delicious indulgent food sometimes? How can I enjoy food on vacation without causing myself discomfort, pain and emotional ups and downs but still enjoying myself? I’m a foodie, how can I go to fun places and not eat the local foods they are known for?

I’ve been doing things differently when we go away the last couple of years and I feel like I can now enjoy going to new places which includes eating delicious food, without feeling compelled to eat everything in excess and without feeling deprived and without gaining a ton of weight. In fact, when we went to Martha’s Vineyard two summers ago, I actually came home 1 lb lighter than when we left (without trying to). Not saying any of us should try to lose weight on vacation but I know it’s possible to enjoy amazing food and relaxation while on vacation without coming home 10 lbs heavier.

How do we do that?

How to Go on Vacation without Gaining 10 lbs

Start your day off with something really nutritious.

High protein breakfast in Kapaa, HI means I’m nourished and able to enjoy the whole day.

The first meal of the day sets the tone for the rest of the day. For me personally, if I start the day off with a bagel or a pastry, I will be hungry again in 2 hours and I will crave sugar and other carbs all day long. This makes it really tough for me to make choices that make my body feel good and by the end of the day I will probably have eaten enough food for two days and yet still be itching for more. On the other hand, if I start my day with high protein foods that I digest well, I have energy for hours and cravings don’t control me, which makes it a lot easier to enjoy myself. I love to start vacation days with eggs and sauteed veggies or fresh fruit. If that’s not an option, a protein bar and some fruit works great (and travels well). For you it might mean cottage cheese and some bacon or Ezekiel avocado toast. And don’t tell me you can’t get something nutritious for breakfast at restaurants. Even the greasiest diner in the world will make you scrambled eggs with vegetables or a side of oatmeal.

Make the best choice you can make at every meal.

Eating Whole Fried Trout at The Loon Lodge in Rangeley, Maine. Don’t worry, I didn’t eat the head.

Sometimes that means I have lots of really healthy options and sometimes that means the healthiest option isn’t so healthy. Let’s say I’m at the airport and food options are severely lacking (and I didn’t pack anything). Even at Starbucks, I can grab a piece of fruit and their protein sampler (or something like it). Just because they mostly serve pastries, doesn’t mean I have to choose a pastry. Use your common sense. I try to find whatever option seems to resemble “whole” foods the most (less ingredients is usually a better choice). And if the best option isn’t that great, don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s just one meal.

Eat food that you actually like.

Your nutritious choices can also be foods you like!

It has to be said that just because you are starting your day off with something nutritious and making the best choices you can at each meal does not mean that you need to eat food you don’t like. You may have read the two above and said “but I don’t like eggs (or can’t eat them)” or “I don’t like cottage cheese”. That’s fine. You don’t have to eat the things that I personally choose! You can make great choices and start your day on the right foot by eating foods that work well in your body AND that you also like. Part of our problem in this society is that we think healthy food = bland / gross food and that’s not the case. If you go into your trip trying to gag down egg whites and kale juice and you hate those things, you are going to be be miserable. Nutritious doesn’t mean going without good stuff!

Eat whatever the heck you want a few times during the trip.

You can bet I am eating baguettes and local cheeses in Paris.

I am a foodie and half the reason I like to visit new places is to try new restaurants and eat amazing delicious creations. This may seem to be diametrically opposed to being a health coach but I swear it’s not! One of the core teachings of the school I trained to be a coach at is that real health comes from making sure we are nourished in several areas of our life. Eating well won’t do much for our health if we are also not well fed spiritually, emotionally, creatively etc. and for me, enjoying indulgent creative food on occasion feeds my spirit. On vacation, I allow myself a few meals where I can eat as indulgent as I crave with no regard for the health or nutritive purposes of the meal. I am not going to go to New Orleans without eating a beignet. I am not going to visit Paris without enjoying a baguette and local cheeses. You probably want to know how many times during a trip I let myself eat like this and to be honest, I don’t have a set number or restriction on it. I have to go by how I’m feeling on that particular trip. It might be 3 times on a 7 day trip or it might be 5 times. It depends on where we are and what sorts of things have me salivating and how much joy I get out of it. Sometimes the “healthy” food in a location is just as amazing as the unhealthy stuff. Kauai, Hawaii was like that – fresh mangos, coconuts, avocados and the most amazing fish I’ve ever had and available at every meal. And they tasted nothing like it does when I’m at home. I aim for a balance of feeling amazing and satisfying cravings during an entire trip. I want both, so that means listening in to my body and seeing what makes the most sense. Trust yourself (the only way to grow trust in yourself is by using it sometimes).

Get some exercise or movement daily.

Going on a biking winery tour in Calistoga, CA was a blast and a beautiful way to see the area.

I have learned that I feel best during and after a trip, regardless of what I’m eating, when I get some activity every day. This doesn’t mean we need to focus on burning off the calories in the beignet or those cocktails, calorie for calorie. It’s more about keeping digestion running smoothly (which often slows on vacation) and finding ways to enjoy life that is a change from our American couch and screen lifestyle (here’s to hoping you can bring home new active pursuits you love!). Some days that might mean just walking around local shops and parks while sight seeing, or renting bikes and ditching the car (we had no car in MV only bikes!). I might spend 30 minutes in a hotel gym or do some bodyweight exercises in my room if the weather is bad or if John isn’t feeling up for exercise. I’ve dragged John out for a sunset walk on the beach. We’ve rented kayaks and spent several hours paddling and exploring lakes. I’ve spent hours swimming and lounging in a salt water pool. We did a winery tour in Napa on bikes. We hiked to a waterfall in Rangeley. The beautiful thing about making daily movement a goal while you’re on vacation is yes, you’ll burn some calories sure, but you will also be doing things that “feed” your soul. These new experiences, with people you love are sometimes the most memorable of a trip and will last so much longer than that so-so fish and chips you thought you wanted. The key to getting activity on a trip is to think how it can add to you enjoying your day and not how it can help you eat more or burn off more. You will not enjoy your vacation if the entire thing is a mathematical exchange of calories and time.

Relax. Really

Relax and make food less of a big deal and it will be less of a big deal.

Let’s say you go overboard and do gain a few pounds on your trip. That’s ok. It happens. But there’s a limit to the amount of real weight gain that can happen in a week or two and freaking out about it is going to do you more harm than good. If you do gain weight or if you are worried about gaining weight on a trip, the best thing you can do is to not make a big deal about it and focus on eating in a way that makes your body feel good and doesn’t make you feel deprived or crazy when you get back. The more we fight with ourselves and view our bodies as a battle to be won, the more casualties there will be. Practice putting down your need to control this stuff to a T and you’ll find that weight ups and downs are actually reduced. Try to view mealtimes as a time to refuel and not as something to fear and you’ll gain trust in your body.

That’s really it. I focus on taking pretty good care of myself but also leave room for some extras while on vacation. This way, I enjoy myself and my body feels good, instead of weighed down, bloated and uncomfortable. I can have both! An awesome and unexpected side effect is that now that I have done this a few times successfully, I have less stress as a vacation approaches and during it. I am able to focus on life more before I leave (rather than how much weight I can lose first) and enjoy it more during. I’m more present. I’m more me. And the food I do eat tastes even better because I’m not ruining it with calorie calculations before the first bite even goes in my mouth.

The key to not gaining a ton of weight on vacation is to go into it trusting yourself and choosing to eat and do things that will make your body and your soul feel amazing, the whole trip. You have to decide what those things are and how much feels like enough and not too much. You are in charge of you and you fully have it in you to enjoy your vacation and all the food that comes with it in a reasonable and enjoyable way.

An Exercise to Try: Take Regular Inventory of your Food, Body and Activity Habits

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Take inventory of your habits that help or harm your progress. If twice a week happy hour is working for your goals and life then there’s no reason to change it. But if it’s preventing you from being where you want to be, it might be worth changing.

Sometimes we get stuck in routines, or how we’ve just always done something and in doing so, we limit our progress, because it’s much easier for our brains to let us do what we’ve always done, than it is to interrupt the pattern and try something new. The problem with this is that it sometimes means we get stuck doing things that actually aren’t helping us move forward. We think they’re working just because they used to in the past or because it’s what we’re comfortable with. We also sometimes get really scared of doing things differently and this rigidity can keep us unwell.

I have an exercise that can help you loosen up the hold some of your habits have on you – especially if they’re not helping you get where you want to be. It’s taking inventory every few months of all the things that I’m doing (and not doing) in regards to food, body/body image and physical activity – and then adjusting when needed.

This has become one of the most important things I’ve done while rehabbing my own relationship with food. I frequently take inventory of what I’m doing in relation to it.

Doing an inventory like this is important for a few reasons:

It prevents me from doing things that are dangerous or unhealthy (ex. regular bingeing or excessive restriction of calories).
It limits how long I’ll spend doing something before I change direction due to ineffectiveness (ex. doing the same exercise for years).
It keeps me honest with myself (lying to ourselves is common with overeaters/undereaters).
It helps me move forward instead of getting stuck in an unhelpful place.
It helps me break out of rigidity thinking and absolutes that keep me unwell.

So what do I mean by taking inventory?

Well, I sit down with a pen and notebook and answer a bunch of questions around my eating habits, my body image or composition concerns and my physical activity routines to assess what things are going well and I should keep doing and what things might need to be tossed out. I want to stress that there are no “right” answers to these questions – it’s really personal and totally normal for the answers to change over time. Your honesty and openness is what will make this the most helpful thing.

Here are the questions in my inventory:

Food

What motivates my decision to eat?
How am I determining what and how much to eat? And is this working for me?
Do I feel energized with the quantity and quality of food I’m eating?
Am I eating foods that are both good sources of nutrition and enjoyable?
What foods have I been eating too frequently?
What foods am I not eating enough of?
What foods am I eating that make my body feel great?
What foods am I eating that make my body feel not so good?
What changes with food can I make so that my body feels better and has more energy more often?
Is the environment I choose to eat my meals in a benefit to my relationship with food? (rushed? relaxed? etc) Is there anything I can do to improve the environment that I eat in?

Body

How satisfied am I with my physical body (size, shape, composition etc)?
What am I using to determine this level of satisfaction? (ex. scale, measurements, clothing etc). Does this tool feel like a positive or negative part of my routine?
How satisfied am I with my body image?
What actions am I taking that make me feel good about my body or think positive thoughts about it?
What actions am I taking that make me feel badly about my body or think bad thoughts about it?
What needs to change in order for me to live more harmoniously with my body?
What do I love about my body today?
What parts of my body could use more love and gentleness?

Exercise / Movement

What is my motivation to exercise?
What physical activity am I doing?
What results am I after?
Am I making progress towards those results?
Does the movement / exercise I do make me feel powerful and energized? Or drained and exhausted in a bad way?
Does my body “like” my physical activity of choice?
Does the amount and type of exercise I’m doing fit in with my life and the type of life I want to have?
Is my activity interfering with the life I want to have?

Other Questions to Wrap Up

What tools, materials, thoughts and habits are serving me well at this time?
What tools, materials, thoughts and habits are not serving me (or possibly harming or hindering my progress)?
What have I been doing for months or years that will continue to make me feel good and reach my goals?
What have I been doing for months or years that is not helping and may need to change, be adjusted or dropped completely?
Are there any habits or actions that I’m doing that I feel like I need to hide from others? If so, does this feel like something that will help me heal my relationship with food or my body? If not, how can I change this action or get support to remove this obstacle?
What changes do I want to make that feel scary or overwhelming?
What changes do I want to make that I feel resistance towards making?
What changes do I want to make that I am actually looking forward to?
Where do I need support? And who could help provide that support?
When will I do another inventory? Schedule it in your calendar and re-answer these questions for your current situation.

One final thing I wanted to share about doing this type of inventory is that chronic dieters, emotional eaters etc tend to get themselves stuck in a land of absolutes. You know what I’m talking about (I can’t eat full fat foods. I must exercise 10 hours a week. I must eat less than 1300 calories a day etc) and I want you to use this type of self-questioning to knock that stuff on it’s butt.

What I mean by that . . there are some people who believe people with a disordered eating history should never weigh themselves, or they should never count calories. There are others out there who think you should never eat bread, cake or anything else that we could label as “bad”. There are some who think you can’t desire changing your body and also have a healthy relationship with it. But none of these are always true for everyone who has ever struggled with their eating or body image. There are certainly people who have a rough relationship with food who can use a scale without going into a tailspin. And there are people who can count calories without being too obsessive. The key is knowing who YOU are and what makes you well or unwell and using that to guide you.

I want us to throw all the “shoulds”, absolutes and inflexible ideas out the window. I think that kind of rigidity is part of what keeps us unwell. If we’re so attached to an idea or habit that we are unwilling to let it go even if it’s not working for us, we’re never going to get out of our own way. Answering these questions honestly and giving yourself permission to adjust or change where needed can be incredibly freeing.

I once thought that I had to count calories in order to lose weight. Then when I realized doing that never taught me to eat properly and I decided that not counting calories was the way to go. And that was working for awhile too. I went through a phase where I had to weigh myself every day, otherwise I would kind of turn a blind eye to how much I was eating and I’d gain and gain. Weighing myself let me adjust my behavior before it go out of control. Then I went through a period when I tucked the scale away and let how my clothes fit be a better indicator. For awhile I was using measurements. These days, my weight or specific size is not something I monitor closely. I’ve come to decide that it’s healthier for me to think less about that stuff and more about how I’m caring for myself, regardless of my body size. As far as fitness goes, for years it was about burning as many calories as I could, then it was being as consistent as I could be, right now it’s about getting and feeling as strong as I can be.

What feels good? What doesn’t make me feel obsessive? These things change over time.

I am always evolving and I am not afraid of changing. I’m trying to not be so dogmatic about this journey. It can be challenging, for sure! Sometimes I feel like something is the total truth, the bible, and I want to share – “I have the answer folks!!!” But really, that answer is usually only the right answer for right then – for that period of my life. I try to remind my clients that same thing, that it’s ok to change it up. If you’ve been eating oatmeal every morning for 5 years and find yourself wanting to binge at the end of the day, maybe the oatmeal gets to take a vacation.

We are ever-changing, growing and evolving beings. And it’s important to honor that in our daily choices as we work our way to healthier and happier bodies, minds and souls.

Please don’t be too rigid about what’s working for you or “what you’ve always done”.

It’s ok to change it. In fact, it may be revolutionary for your body to change it!

It’s ok to let it go.

It’s ok to try something you previously thought was silly or too hard or wrong.

It’s ok to change your mind.

It’s ok to readjust.

Lastly, in case it’s helpful, I want to share a couple of examples of my most recent inventory changes. I am always trying to break my own rigidity and habits and staying open to changing to what works for right now.

Example 1. For years I drank black coffee during the week and had cream & sugar on the weekends as a treat. Well somewhere along the last year or so of working from home, I had started to do cream and sugar all week long in my coffee. I noticed my allergies were creeping up on me and the daily dairy was probably the culprit (it kills my asthma!). I went back to drinking black during the week just last week and my lungs already feel better. I adjusted even though cream and sugar sure tastes good – it wasn’t giving me the results I’m after!

Example 2. For the last 4 months I’ve been getting plenty of exercise each week – probably 6 days a week of barre, weight lifting, walking, HIIT, biking etc. I’m getting plenty of heart pumping exercise and feeling great! But what I realized during my last inventory was that by working from home, I’m way way more sedentary that I want to be. I don’t have a huge building to walk through like I used to when I worked for another company. Other than trips to the bathroom or kitchen, I’m sitting on my bum in my office most of the day. In some ways, it makes me more tired! Because of that, I’ve been adding just 20-30 minutes of a casual walk outside a few days a week and it’s really helping my energy throughout the day. Plus it’s great to get a little sunlight and get off the computer. Yes I’m getting plenty of conditioning exercise but my daily movement was limited otherwise and it’s important to change that. Human bodies were made to move!

Example 3. I usually don’t eat wheat which works for me most of the time . . . but Sunday I had brunch with family and some old family friends and John ordered a donut with a caramel bourbon sauce. It smelled amazing and caramel is one of my favorite things. I ate some of that donut. And it was delicious. And it’s ok.

I’m not a bad person for eating something I normally don’t eat and my world isn’t going to explode for having it. There’s no morality in food.

I am fluid. I am malleable. I am pliant. I shift. I fluctuate. And you can too.

One of the largest benefits I see to taking regular inventory of your habits around food and body stuff is that it becomes much easier to let go of the rigid thinking that keeps us trapped in unhealthy habits. It forces us to question why we’re doing that stuff in the first place and when you see it on paper, it’s a lot harder to ignore. When we can’t bear to let go of a habit, when doing something differently brings up a lot of resistance or stress, it’s sometimes a sign that it’s no longer a healthy thing for us to do. Only you can really determine what is right for you! Try this exercise and let me know if you find it helpful!

How to Start Eating More Mindfully

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Eating mindfully means using all of your senses to experience each meal.

Look at the photo above. Let’s pretend we’re about to sit down in front of that plate and eat this meal. What is the first thing you notice before you even pick up the fork? For me, it’s that I’m already salivating at the thought of that crispy and buttery waffle hitting my tongue. I can actually smell the maple syrup and the toasty smell of the waffle browning in the waffle iron even though this is just a picture. I can feel the cool crisp contrast of the tart strawberries and the sweet velvety whipped cream in my mouth, and again, this is just in my mind. I can hear the crunch as my fork presses down to carve a bite out of the waffle. A clink as it hits the plate. The maple syrup has gotten onto the stem of the fork and it’s slightly sticky. Just by looking at this photo, all of my senses can anticipate what they’d experience if only this waffle was really sitting in front of me. This is how we begin to eat mindfully, by being totally present and using our senses to experience food.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 5 – 10 years, you’ve probably heard of the term “Mindful Eating” as a solution to weight loss. It’s an alternative for those who’ve tried diets and gained the weight back, for those who still struggle with their weight despite trying to eat the right things. I have had great success using it in my own life, after growing tired of the diet mindset that left my weight going up and down and I now help other women incorporate tools like mindful eating into their own life.

It’s not for everyone and it’s not easy (despite how the practices below may sound) but if you are exhausted from trying to lose weight and keep it off by counting calories, points, and fat grams, and you know that it’s not working for you – mindful eating might be something to consider.

Today I’m going to share two of the main mindful eating practices I use but first let’s talk briefly about why diets often fail us.

Diets Fail Us

Overeating is the most obvious cause of weight gain and diets are awesome at managing the physical component of this – the “what” part. What should I eat? How much should I eat? Most weight gain is due to taking in more calories than our bodies are able to use. The calories we don’t use end up being stored as fat. Diets take those math equations and assume we are robots who can and will do exactly as they prescribe forever without any obstacles.

The problem with diets is that they fail to address the emotional and mental components of overeating. You may understand on a mental level that you have gained weight because you have eaten more over a long period of time than your body needs but we rarely understand why we are doing that. Why are we overeating? Diets act as if this part of the equation doesn’t exist. Again, like we’re obedient robots, instead of humans who do things for a variety of reasons.

If we can address why we are overeating in the first place, we can reduce how often it happens. If overeating is less of an issue, weight gain is not going to be much of a problem anymore.

There are several reasons why we overeat, one of them I addressed in How to Feel Your Feelings. Another reason is because of how mindlessly we eat (and how mindlessly we go through life in general). We eat too fast, with too many distractions and we’re not present when we consume a meal. With our senses not taking in the meal and at the speed we eat, our brain doesn’t receive signals it needs (from our stomach as well as sensually) that we’ve had enough to eat. Living this way makes it challenging to ever feel satisfied after a meal – we’re always left wanting more, even if we are physically full. Mindful eating is a practice that can help bring us back to the present and quell the urge to overeat because it connects the dots between the brain and our stomach, helping us to feel satisfied.

Now we’ll get down to it!

Two Big Mindful Eating Practices to Try

1. Start treating mealtimes as if you were meeting with a old friend you haven’t seen in years.

If you were super excited to see this friend, you would give her your full attention! Your eyes would take all of her in the moment you saw her (does she look the same? totally different?). You’d give her a hug and the smell of her perfume would bring you back to another time. The sound of her laugh would make you feel completely at home. You wouldn’t dream of multitasking, checking email or reading while spending time with her, would you? Omg, no that would be so rude!!! Do the same thing when you eat, every time.

Give the meal your full attention.

Be completely present with the food in front of you.

Don’t do anything other than eat – no multitasking. That means put your smartphone away, turn off the TV, don’t read the newspaper or a book, don’t eat in the car (unless it’s absolutely necessary).

Don’t distract yourself.

Use all your senses: Look at the food in front of you (is it colorful? textured?), Smell it (does it have a strong aroma? pleasant? pungent?), Does it make any sounds? Is your plate sizzling hot? Does the food crunch when you chew it?, Taste: Do you like how it tastes? Is it sweet, salty, sour, bitter or savory? Feel: How does the food feel in your mouth? Is it too hot or cold? What is the texture like? Smooth, silky, rough, crumbly? Other things to notice: when you see or smell the food, do you notice saliva forming in your mouth? Are you excited to eat this meal? Are you actually hungry? If you were going to describe this meal to an alien from another planet, how would you describe it to them?

2. Learn the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger, commit to eating only when you feel physical hunger and get into the habit of talking to yourself.

Physical hunger comes on slowly, emotional hunger feels urgent (gotta have it now!!).

Physical hunger can be satisfied with anything (you’re willing to eat broccoli or a salad), emotional hunger will only be satisfied by something specific (I want something sweet!).

Physical hunger goes away when you’ve eaten, emotional hunger hangs around even when you’re very full.

Eating to satisfy physical hunger feels neutral, while eating to satisfy emotional hunger will bring up feelings of guilt and shame.

Start practicing trying to eat only when you feel physical hunger. This will probably be the hardest thing to do – that’s ok, just start noticing the difference between the two and becoming conscious of the choice you make (no judgements).

Sounds easy enough to figure out which is which, right? But it’s not so simple when you’re in the moment. When you feel emotionally hungry, all you can think about is “how can I get my hands on something that will satisfy this?”. The way I work around that urge is to have a conversation with myself. I ask myself “What would make me feel best in this moment?” and then I really listen closely to the answer before I actually respond to the craving.

If it’s physical hunger, I have the consciousness to choose something that is nutritious for my body (hard boiled eggs, quinoa salad, a banana and peanut butter etc).

If it’s emotional hunger, the question leaves room for an answer that is something other than food. Notice I don’t ask “What do I want to eat?” If I did that and it’s emotional hunger, I am going to sabotage the shit out of myself with a bag of doritos. Asking what would make me feel best in this moment? opens the door for that emotional urge to be expressed in another way.

Believe it or not but most of the time, the true answer to this question will be something other than food – it might be a hug, a nap, a phone call to a friend, a walk, some time spent journaling, a long bath and a good book etc. Your emotions want to be felt and expressed and if they had the option, food wouldn’t be their first choice in expression, so help them out by asking them something that will bring out other answers.

Occasionally you’ll ask this question and even when listening closely for the answer, it will be an ice cream sundae or a piece of pizza. That’s ok. Sometimes those things are what would make us feel best but honestly those times are rare. If you get an answer like this and aren’t sure if it’s emotional hunger or truly what would make you feel best, how do you know? This part is actually easy . . . do you think eating that ice cream sundae will make you feel bad after you eat it? If you know it will, that’s emotional hunger and you should dig deeper for another answer to “What would make me feel best in this moment?“, because if it’s going to bring up guilt or shame, those are obviously not emotions that are going to make you feel best. If you know you can eat the sundae and feel neutral and at ease about it – you’ve answered the question thoughtfully and mindfully and you can go ahead and have it.

How To Start Eating More Mindfully

You aren’t going to go from a lifetime of using structured diets to seamless mindful eating in one go. It best learned slowly. You want to dip your toe in slowly like you would in a cold pool of water and then slowly move into the water a little by little as you get used to the temperature of it. Sure, you’ll get used to the water a lot faster if you just dive in, but you run the risk of wanting to get out of the pool immediately!

Choose one meal per day to practice this with at first. Which meal of the day naturally allows for the most time to yourself? Which meal will allow you to not feel rushed? Pick that meal and for 10 days practice mindful eating with that meal only. Again, pretend you are seeing an old friend for the first time in years – treat the meal the same as you would her, with your full attention. At this daily meal:

Eat while sitting down (not in the car) and without distractions or multitasking.
Chew each bite slowly and thoroughly.
Notice the food with all your senses. How does it look, smell, taste, sound and feel? Your mind will naturally want to wander to your to do list, if you want to give it something to do, bring your attention back to your plate and experience the food with all of your senses.
Take deep breaths and relax into the process.

When you start to feel like being mindful at this one meal per day is totally doable, see if you can do it for two meals per day or for one meal and when you have a snack. This will take time. Do not become discouraged if it’s not easy!

Begin a meditation practice. I know, it may seem like another subject entirely, but one of the biggest struggles with people just beginning a mindful eating practice is that they’re not used to being alone with their thoughts and it is uncomfortable not “doing” anything else while eating. One way to flex this muscle so that being present while you eat becomes the norm is to get used to meditation. All you have to do is find a quiet place where you can shut your eyes and take deep, slow breaths for 2 minutes a day. If you can do 2 minutes easily, try to do 3, if that’s easy do 5 minutes. Notice how long you can go before you start to feel restless and practice relaxing into this time for yourself. I found this really hard to do at first because I’m not very good at relaxing naturally – but working on this has made mindful eating much easier for me to settle in to.

Keep coming back to it. If you start a mindful eating practice and notice that 4 bites into the meal you automatically picked up your phone to browse the internet. Just bring your attention back and try again. If you notice that you are eating fast while standing at the sink because you’re in a rush, sit down and try again. No one learns to play the violin in a day and gets to Carnegie Hall. We have years of habits to correct – be patient and unrelenting in your persistence. It will get easier the more you do it.

This is just a small taste of how you can start to use mindful eating as a tool for weight loss and preventing overeating. If you’d like to see if it’s something that might work for you, I’d love to support you in doing this. I’m passionate about helping women connect the dots in their relationship with food! This stuff is much easier to do when you have support along the way. Contact me and we can set up a time to discuss.

If you’re not ready for a consult with Andrea but you like what she has to say, then please download your free copy of Healthy Eating Shouldn‘t Be a Workout: Real Life Strategies to Take the Confusion Out of Healthy Living (includes recipes, snack and meal ideas, ways to save money and more!).

How to Feel Your Feelings (so You Can Stop Eating Them)

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How to Feel Your Feelings instead of eating them

If you’ve followed this blog for awhile (or are on my email list), you’ve heard me say many times that a huge cause of emotional eating is from us not being willing to feel our feelings. We feel the first twinge of something uncomfortable – something we think we can’t feel – and our first response is to push it away and stuff food in our mouths as a barrier to keep those feelings at a distance. We think we won’t survive if we let these uncomfortable feelings in, if we allow them space, they’ll take over and we’ll be stuck feeling terrible forever.

But that’s not how feelings work. Feelings come and go. They pass just like clouds on a windy day. They come over us in in waves, and yes, sometimes they are quite strong, but they’re not deadly. You will survive them.

Toddlers and Cats are Skilled in Feeling Feelings

I have two examples I like to use when describing how feelings really work and how easy it is to actually survive them. Hopefully you can relate to one of them! The first is that of a cat. One minute, your cat is purring happily on your lap, enjoying you petting her. She might even lick your hand and drool – that’s how much she’s loving the attention. This might last for 2 minutes or it might go on for a half hour or more, but eventually, she’s going to decide that she’s had enough and she’ll jump off you and go do her thing elsewhere, and then look at you like she doesn’t even know you. If you get up and go try to pet her now, she’ll probably walk away again, almost recoiling from your touch. She’s totally over it. Her reaction to you is so changed that it’s almost as if she has no memory that she was begging for your attention just a moment ago. The other example is that of a toddler. Think of a toddler in the grocery store. One minute, he’s happily babbling and playing with a toy he brought from home. All is well in the world. The next minute, a colorful snack in the store catches his attention and he has a complete meltdown over it. He must have it but the parent is unaware of what specific object of his desire is. He can’t communicate verbally what it is that he wants so his only tools are crying, screaming and stomping until hopefully the parent figures it out. By the time the parent has gotten through the checkout line and back to the car, the toddler is calm again and happily playing with his toy. Except for a few drying tear streaks on his cheeks, you would never know that anything dramatic had just occurred.

Toddlers are good at feeling their feelings. You can be too.

Toddler’s feelings change in just an instant and they feel them deeply. One minute they are happy and peaceful and the next it is a total meltdown, and back to being peaceful all before you can catch your breath. Their feelings are felt deeply and they come out of it ok. You will too!

Our uncomfortable feelings act the same way as the cat and the toddler – they come on strong and may feel overwhelming but suddenly they’re gone and we’re still the same person we were before they happened, and a new feeling is in it’s place. You can get through this. You don’t have to eat to deal with it.

Feeling your feelings can take a little work to get used to doing regularly, but it’s actually surprisingly simple.

How to Feel Your Feelings

How do you feel your feelings?? You just feel them.

That’s really it. Step 1: Feel them.

You let them happen. You let them be. You let the awful, the uncomfortable and the stressful feelings come over you and then you don’t react to them beyond letting yourself feel the way you feel.

Feeling your feelings almost feels like you’re not doing anything. There’s very little action and doing and for some of us, this is what makes it so challenging. We are used to “doing” – eating, avoiding, restricting, resisting, distracting in every area of our lives.

Feeling uncomfortable feelings takes practice because we’re not used to letting ourselves feel that way. Most of us do better with feeling good. Have you ever just sat outside for a few minutes and enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine? You feel good doing this. It’s easy. You don’t have to work hard at feeling that way. We know how it feels to just be, for a few moments and enjoy the peace and quiet and be with our thoughts in those moments. After a few minutes in the fresh air, you feel renewed, empowered and ready to go back to your day. But your mood can change quickly even after a nice time outside – you might get a phone call you didn’t want to get, your boss may throw a huge last minute project on your desk or you may run into someone you really don’t like. Really our feelings change all the time due to our interactions with others and thoughts we’re having (conscious ones and unconscious ones). The good feelings pass and the bad ones pass too.

When a feeling you don’t want to feel comes up, think of a time when you were sitting outside enjoying the day and how easy it is to feel your feelings in that moment. You can feel your less comfortable feelings just as easily if you get into the habit of doing it.

Step By Step “How to Feel Your Feelings” For Those Who Can’t Believe that “Just Feeling Them” is All There is To It.

When a feeling you don’t want to feel makes you want to run to the kitchen, go to a quiet place where you can be alone, without food and without your phone, ipad or TV.
Just be with your thoughts and feelings. There is nothing to do but feel whatever way you are feeling.
Notice that you’ll probably repeatedly feel the urge to get up – and you might keep feeling like you have to do something but not remember what that was (that’s your autopilot reaction to go comfort and distract with food). Notice that that is what you are doing (going on autopilot) and just consciously bring your attention back to your feelings.

Most of us need something to “do” when we’re first starting out with this stuff. We’re so not used to just allowing ourselves to be that we will feel like we’re wasting time or that we’re doing things wrong if there isn’t a clear linear path to progress. There isn’t one so you can stop looking.

4. If you need something more concrete in the beginning stages of this work, here’s a writing exercise to help you feel your feelings and pull your attention back to them:

Get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil.
Write down exactly what you are feeling. Describe it as best you can. What does it feel like? What does it make you want to do? If it had a color, what would it be? Where in the body are you physically feeling the feeling? Describe any physical sensations and where you feel them. Is the feeling heavy? Does it vibrate? Does it give you energy or take your energy away?

Flesh out as much as you can about this feeling. Doing this will help you start to recognize this feeling the next time you feel it, and it will also help show you that it’s something that is harmless. By the time you finish describing it the feeling will probably have just about passed.

What Not To Do When Feeling Your Feelings

I’ve already mentioned that when we’re feeling our feelings it’s important to not avoid, resist or push away the feeling (which we often do by “doing”). Another thing that we have to do when learning how to just “feel” is to not find ways to distract ourselves. Obviously distracting ourselves with food is how we got into this situation to begin with and so distracting is something we’re really good at.

If you look at advice articles on how to stop eating too much, the advice is almost always full of things like have a glass of water, chew on something crunchy and low calorie like celery, go for a walk, call a friend, read a book etc. Now, I think those things can sometimes be helpful overall when learning new habits that don’t include eating junk food – but they’re not helpful to someone who has spent years not feeling their feelings and is trying to learn how to do that. In those cases, going for a walk or drinking water just serves as a temporary filler or distraction which will defeat the whole purpose of this. Sure, going for a walk when you don’t want to feel uncomfortable will probably make you feel better (and it’s good for you), but for today’s purpose, we’re not trying to make ourselves feel better. We’re trying to learn how to be ok when we feel badly. Teach yourself that you don’t have to “fix” your feelings, you just need to be able to feel it and food will becomes less of a coping mechanism (because there’s nothing you have to fix – nothing went wrong and this will pass!).

Don’t do anything right now. Just feel. Your job is to get comfortable with being with yourself and not do anything other than that.

If you find yourself resorting to avoiding, pushing, resisting or distracting yourself – planning your next vacation, thinking about cooking dinner, reaching for your smartphone (which is supposed to be in the other room, remember?) come back to the writing exercise above. Start writing again. See if your feeling has changed from when you first started to write.

Am I Better Now?

That’s really it. I know, you might have expected a complicated process but really feeling feelings is something simple that we innately know how to do. We’ve taught ourselves to not feel them and it’s just a matter of relearning how to feel.

As with most things I write and teach my clients about, this is not something you do once and then are suddenly great at. It takes a lot of practice, vulnerability and a willingness to embrace your fears. You will occasionally resort to old habits of trying to comfort yourself with food when you feel bored, frustrated, angry, sad, confused etc even when you think you’ve mastered this skill. But keep coming back to it over and over. Be willing to feel your feelings always, no matter how terrible they are and no matter how badly you don’t want to feel that way. You have no choice really. You can either feel the crappy feeling now and have it move on (like the cat or the toddler above) or you can avoid the feeling and eat instead, only to still feel crappy later anyway!

Just like with all the other peaceful eating skills I talk about, feeling your feelings is just one of many things we need to do for ourselves to be well. It’s a practice that you can develop and customize and make your own, so that you can have the relationship with food that you’d like to have. This alone won’t make you better, but it’s absolutely necessary if you’re an emotional eater.

Can you feel anything without turning to food? That’s the goal. When the day comes when you are willing to feel any feeling, not because you like feeling bad (no one does), but because you know they’re just feelings and you can handle anything, that’s how you’ll know that you are beating this stuff. What’s the worst that will happen if you let yourself feel what you’re feeling (instead of turning to food)? Nothing. I know you can handle any feeling. Now it’s your turn to convince yourself of it.

Do you want help putting this practice in your own life? Contact me to set up a free consult and let’s see if we’d be a good fit to work together.

Download your free copy of Healthy Eating Shouldn‘t Be a Workout: Real Life Strategies to Take the Confusion Out of Healthy Living (includes recipes, snack and meal ideas, ways to save money and more!).

Andrea Quigley Maynard

Holistic Health & Lifestyle Coaching

Category Archives: Tools

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Common Mistakes We Make When Trying to Halt Emotional Eating

Common Mistakes We Make When Trying to Halt Emotional Eating:

Why Self Care is So Easy to Preach but Hard to Do

What gives? Why is self care something we preach often but so hard to do in reality?

How A Coach Can Actually Help You

What if We Focused on What We Want as Much as We Focus on What We Don’t Want?

How to Go on Vacation without Gaining 10 lbs (but still be able to enjoy vacation foods)

How to Go on Vacation without Gaining 10 lbs

Start your day off with something really nutritious.

Make the best choice you can make at every meal.

Eat food that you actually like.

Eat whatever the heck you want a few times during the trip.

Get some exercise or movement daily.

Relax. Really

An Exercise to Try: Take Regular Inventory of your Food, Body and Activity Habits

Doing an inventory like this is important for a few reasons:

Here are the questions in my inventory:

How to Start Eating More Mindfully

Diets Fail Us

Two Big Mindful Eating Practices to Try

How To Start Eating More Mindfully

How to Feel Your Feelings (so You Can Stop Eating Them)

Toddlers and Cats are Skilled in Feeling Feelings

How to Feel Your Feelings

Step By Step “How to Feel Your Feelings” For Those Who Can’t Believe that “Just Feeling Them” is All There is To It.

What Not To Do When Feeling Your Feelings

Am I Better Now?

Is it okay to weigh yourself?

Should you throw out your scale if you’ve struggled with body image issues or disordered eating?

Share this:

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Common Mistakes We Make When Trying to Halt Emotional Eating:

Share this:

What gives? Why is self care something we preach often but so hard to do in reality?

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

How to Go on Vacation without Gaining 10 lbs

Start your day off with something really nutritious.

Make the best choice you can make at every meal.

Eat food that you actually like.

Eat whatever the heck you want a few times during the trip.

Get some exercise or movement daily.

Relax. Really

Share this:

Doing an inventory like this is important for a few reasons:

Here are the questions in my inventory:

Share this:

Diets Fail Us

Two Big Mindful Eating Practices to Try

How To Start Eating More Mindfully

Share this:

Toddlers and Cats are Skilled in Feeling Feelings

How to Feel Your Feelings

Step By Step “How to Feel Your Feelings” For Those Who Can’t Believe that “Just Feeling Them” is All There is To It.

What Not To Do When Feeling Your Feelings

Am I Better Now?

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