2008-11-25T08:56:48Z urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6 CoalEngine CoalSpeak urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-11-25T08:56:48Z

Sleep and emotional eating: some food for thought By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly If you are working to take control of overeating and emotional eating, or if you are trying to lose weight, making sure that you are getting enough sleep is critical. We know that a lack of sleep plays havoc with your appetite-regulating hormones and will cause you to be extra hungry and crave carbohydrates and high fat foods. There is also research suggesting that a lack of sleep can predispose us to emotional eating. A study, conducted by the University of California Berkley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, and published in the journal Current Biology examined the effect of sleep deprivation on the emotional processing centers of the brain. The brain imaging study suggests that a good night’s sleep helps regulate your mood and cope with the next day’s emotional challenges. When the brain is deprived of sleep, it is less able to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, reasoned responses. In fact, in the study, the emotional centers of the brain were over 60 percent more reactive under conditions of sleep deprivation than in subjects who had obtained a normal night of sleep. Put another way, if you aren’t getting enough sleep, the study suggests that you will be physiologically predisposed to react emotionally rather than choose a deliberate response to emotional situations. You are less likely to stop, think, and choose your response. So, if your goal is to curb stress eating, stop the nervous eating, or no longer reach for chocolate when you are feeling down, a lack of sleep is going to make it a lot harder to be successful. Take good care, Melissa http://www.emotionaleatingsolutions.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-11-14T14:31:28Z

Three Steps You Can Take to Avoid Stress Eating By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly Do you turn to food when you feel stressed or overwhelmed? Does a bad day at work send you off track with your eating or exercise plan? Does an out-of-control to-do list leave you craving chocolate? There are ways to avoid the stress eating/emotional eating trap. Here are three straightforward strategies you can try. 1. Know that you ARE a stress eater This one sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s an important tip. If you are someone who turns to stress in response to food, it’s an important fact to respect about yourself—because it allows you to understand what might be going on and once you understand and take it seriously, you can intervene. If you know that stress leaves you fantasizing about a trip to the office vending machine, then the next time that urge hits, you have the opportunity to work backwards. Instead of heading off, quarters in hand, on auto pilot, you can stop and examine what might be going on that is leaving you feeling—not really hungry—but stressed. As you get practice at asking yourself this question, you might even find that you start to refine the word “stress” even further. Over time, you might find yourself asking really specific questions like, “What feels out of control right now?” “Why am I feeling overwhelmed?” or “Is anything going on that would contribute to my feeling anxious?” 2. Put some other tools in your toolbox The benefit of step one is that it allows you to ask different questions. Instead of asking yourself, “How can I stop eating these cookies?” you are able to target the real trigger for your hunger and ask yourself about what you really need to address the stress. For this, you are going to need a different set of tools. Emotional eaters use food as a strategy to cope with emotions. While this might work as a temporary band aid, eating never solves the real problem. Focusing on what and how much to eat doesn’t address the stress you are feeling at all. As you get clearer on what the situations are that lead you to stress eating, you can begin to ask yourself what you can do instead of turning to food. Know that at times of overwhelm, our ability to problem solve is not at its best. Make a list in advance of as many strategies you can think of to help you with stress or overwhelm. Keep it handy. It’s one thing to know that you want to eat in response to stress. It’s another to have some ideas about what to do INSTEAD. 3. Be prepared Too many of us take the ostrich approach to stress and overwhelm. Sticking our head in the sand, or “not thinking about it” never keeps the stress from happening. Practice identifying the potentially stressful situations before they hit. Make a note of upcoming events or times that have the potential to be difficult and spend some time on the front end strategizing about how to handle them. If you are truly facing a situation that is out of your control, identify some strategies (in advance) that you can use to comfort yourself, distract yourself, or to cope with the difficulty. Take good care, Melissa PS: You can pick up free tips and strategies for taking control of emotional eating and stress eating at http://www.emotionaleatingsolutions.com. Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-10-17T12:54:57Z

The Holiday Season: Food for thought and a plan for action By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly Although it’s only October, the stores are already beginning to stock inventory for the holidays. No matter your religion or the holidays you observe, your winter season likely includes extra celebrations, festivities, obligations, and assorted “things to do.” It’s a season that can be filled with expectations–real heartfelt wants and dreams–and also expectations of how we “should” feel and things we “should” do. During the holiday season, many people fall into a trap by assigning a low priority to their own personal goals and needs. Sometimes attending to those needs falls off the radar screen entirely. Gym attendance declines. Many groups and social organizations cancel their meetings. I’ve even heard of corporate wellness programs that don’t operate during November and December because “the employees aren’t interested.” I understand why this happens. I scale back on things too. It’s a busy time with lots of demands and the calendar tends to get very full, very fast. Sometimes we cut back because we feel there is no alternative, or because it seems like our schedule or our energy level or our budget demand it. Often we tell ourselves that not going to the gym or making the weight loss support group or scheduling that coffee date with a friend will actually reduce our stress. If this sounds at all familiar, I want to challenge you to think about that mindset very carefully this year. If this is what usually happens for you, is it really your best choice? Does cutting out the “personal stuff” really create the desired effect? Does it reduce your stress level in the bigger picture? Do you really enjoy yourself more when you do things this way? Are you truly more present for the traditions or experiences that are most important for you? Or are you (like many) cutting back on the very things that feed your soul and prime you to approach the season with the resilience and positive attitude you desire? Are you eliminating the habits that help you be the very best that you can be? Here’s one possible sign of this trap: do you ever regretfully find yourself looking forward to January, when things “will get back to normal?” Here are some questions to ask yourself: * What would it take to be proactive this year? * How could you improve the way you honor your own needs and priorities without adding to feelings of overwhelm? * If these questions seem unanswerable, it doesn’t mean they aren’t helpful. Think small and think specific. What are the small rituals, routines, appointments with yourself that you benefit from keeping? My Challenge to you: Think about one change you’d like to make in your approach to the holidays this year. and post a comment sharing what you’ve chosen to do differently. If this topic is of interest to you, you might want to listen, it was discussed in depth in my October free teleseminar. You can access the recording here. Take good care, Melissa www.emotionaleatingsolutions.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-10-08T13:21:12Z

Is the economy leading you to overeat? By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly It’s a stressful time and it seems like we can’t turn on the TV or radio without hearing somebody whose job it is to fill the airwaves with repetitions of all the bad things that are happening or might happen in the future. People are worried and frustrated. Many feel out of control. The global stress level is pretty high. The American Psychological Association released their 2008 report on stress in America)today. The survey clearly reveals that the declining economy is taking a physical and emotional toll on people nationwide and that it is women who are bearing the brunt of financial stress. Of those surveyed, 83 percent of women and 78 percent of men said that they are stressed about money. More people reported physical and emotional symptoms due to stress than they did in 2007, with nearly half (47 percent) of adults reporting that their stress has increased in the past year. More people report fatigue (53 percent compared to 51 percent in 2007), feelings of irritability or anger (60 percent compared to 50 percent in 2007) and lying awake at night (52 percent compared to 48 percent in 2007) as a result of stress, in addition to other symptoms including lack of interest or motivation, feeling depressed or sad, headaches and muscular tension. Women were more likely than men to report physical symptoms of stress like fatigue (57 percent compared to 49 percent), irritability (65 percent compared to 55 percent), headaches (56 percent compared to 36 percent) and feeling depressed or sad (56 percent compared to 39 percent). Almost half of Americans (48 percent) reported overeating or eating unhealthy foods to manage stress, while one in four (39 percent) skipped a meal in the last month because of stress. Women were more likely than men to report unhealthy behaviors to manage stress like eating poorly (56 versus 40 percent), shopping (25 versus 11 percent), or napping (43 versus 32 percent). Almost one-fifth of Americans report drinking alcohol to manage their stress (18 percent) and 16 percent report smoking. What to do When life feels out of control, here are things that help (and no, chocolate chip cookies are not on this list). 1. Control what you can Be clear on what you can and can’t control. Don’t let fears about finances paralyze you into dropping your good habits. Identify the things—little and big—that help you feel solid and in control. Whether it’s cleaning the kitchen, balancing your checkbook, maintaining your walking routine, finishing a project or making sure you take your multivitamin every day, keep it up. Don’t minimize these habits and keep doing the things that keep you feeling strong and capable. 2. Don’t dwell Set limits on your exposure to the negative stuff. Limit the time you spend watching the television reports. It’s good to be informed, but watching the same news over and over again doesn’t make us smarter—and it can leave you feeling powerless and overwhelmed. 3. Focus on self care When we’re stressed, we all benefit from compassion and nurturing. Identify the things that comfort you and make you feel cared for (again—things that aren’t chocolate) and make sure you do them. 4. Find a place to vent I’m not suggesting you make your fears and worries your primary focus, but it’s a mistake to try to suppress or ignore them. Give yourself a time-limited way to focus on your worries directly—10 minutes of daily journaling, a time-limited conversation with your spouse or a friend. Allow yourself to focus on your concerns. Then, go do something else. Unfortunately for many, the stress is real and it isn’t something we can avoid. It is important to remember though that we do have control over how we manage it. Take good care, Melissa www.emotionaleatingsolutions.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-10-01T16:53:28Z

Taking Control of Emotional Eating Means Taking Up Space By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly What will it take for you to take the time you need for yourself? The answer I heard in one of my coaching groups today was “getting really sick.” That’s what it took for this participant to start to learn to say “no” to the demands of others so that she had some space to say “yes” to her own needs. It was only after she bent over backwards making incredible sacrifices, AND after her health and her life suffered dramatically, that she was able to assert her need to take care of herself and prioritize her own wants and needs. Emotional eating can be a really “convenient” strategy for quieting our needs or attempting to satisfy them indirectly. It doesn’t take a lot of time—we can even multitask while we do it. Emotional eating doesn’t require us to say “no” to anyone else. The problem is, it doesn’t really work. In the end, we still need whatever it was we needed, we’ve eaten food we didn’t really need to eat, and we are likely mad or upset with ourselves for having done so. What will it take for you to take the time you need for yourself? How can you do things differently? How can you start to expand the amount of space and time you allow yourself? If you’ve found some solutions I’d love to hear about what has worked for you. Please share your comments and ideas! Take good care, Melissa www.emotionaleatingsolutions.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-09-23T09:19:30Z

Take Control of Emotional Eating and Overeating: Another Free Teleseminar! By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly It’s only September, and yet at my local warehouse club, the Halloween candy is displayed right next to the December holiday goodies. I’ve recently talked to two clients who want help with their emotional eating but are feeling like they need to put off taking action until “after the holidays.” I’ve seen it too often—people losing their course, getting off track, and dropping their helpful routines over the holiday season–then arriving at January 1 feeling stressed and defeated in their relationship with food. It really doesn’t have to be this way. This year, I’ve been inspired to develop some powerful new resources for taking charge of the holidays. Over the next few months, I’m going to be sharing important ways to create holiday experiences and routines that work for you so that you can stay on track and keep moving in the direction you want to go. I’m going to kick things off with a free teleseminar: Emotional Eating and Overeating: Three tips to help you stay on track over the winter and the holiday season. During the teleseminar, I’ll share three of my best tips for managing your eating and your stress so that you can keep moving towards achieving your goals this holiday season. I’ll cover: * the list you should make before you even start shopping * tips and a strategy to help you avoid mindless overeating (hint: it DOESN’T involve filling up on carrot sticks or water) * one of the biggest (and most common) mistakes dieters make over the holidays The teleclass takes place Wednesday October 15, 2008 at noon Eastern, 11am Central, 10am Mountain, and 9 am Pacific time and it will last for an hour. If you can’t attend, don’t let that stop you from registering. The call will be recorded and registered participants will receive access to the class recording after the call. If you’ve never attended a teleseminar before, it’s easy. You’ll just dial in on the phone number you will receive when you register (you are responsible for any long distance charges) and when prompted you’ll be given an access code to enter. You can go here to sign up. Hope to see you in class, Melissa Melissa McCreery, PhD is a psychologist and life coach. You can find out more about her at www.enduringchangeafterwls.com Her blog is www.peacewithcake.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-09-10T09:38:17Z

Food Journals and Emotional Eating By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly Last week, over one hundred weight loss surgery patients registered for my free teleseminar on taking charge of overeating and emotional eating after bariatric surgery. The class consisted entirely of addressing questions submitted by class members. It was an amazing hour. We didn’t begin to get through everyone’s questions, but we covered some very important topics. Here’s a sampling from the class: One of the hot issues that people had questions about was about how to use a food journal to help with emotional eating. Joyce asked, ”I try to journal what I eat, but seem to stop in a very short time. I have tried every size of notebook from purse sized to 8X11. I just can’t seem to make it second nature. I want to write food and feelings, especially when snack attack hits. Any suggestions?” This is a great question. We hear so much about how helpful journaling and especially journaling around food can be, and yet, I can literally count on my two hands the number of people I’ve encountered in the last 14 years of practice who have kept food diaries and stuck with it consistently. Many people hate to keep food diaries—and do you know why? Most of us start to feel like we have the food police breathing down our necks when we start writing down everything we put into our mouths. Writing down the food we eat does keep us accountable and that CAN be incredibly helpful, but for too many people, writing down each bite also gets our negative and self-judgmental voices stirred up. Many people end up feeling bad or guilty or uncomfortable with the idea of food journals. They avoid them or even find themselves not being truthful with their entries. Not only is this NOT helpful, it compounds feelings of guilt and shame that can sidetrack us even further. Here’s my suggestion. If your efforts to keep a food journal keep getting off track, try a different approach. Journal about your eating, but put the focus on the emotions, not the food. Use the journal to help you investigate what’s going on before, during, and after you eat—NOT the calories or specific amounts that you eat. Use the journal to be curious about your hunger level or your emotions or your stress level around eating. This kind of journaling is a really powerful tool for targeting emotional eating. I include a specialized journal in my Emotional Eating Toolbox™ program that asks specific questions that really target these areas. It’s very specific. In general, what you want to do is take the focus off the food. When you focus on tracking the food you eat, that’s a nutrition journal. While this might be helpful, it won’t get you anywhere with emotional eating. What you want to do is take the focus off the food and ask yourself about any feelings or emotions that are involved in your desire to eat. If you missed the class, and would like to hear more of what we covered, it’s not too late. The class was recorded and you can go here to listen in: Take good care, Melissa Melissa McCreery, PhD is a psychologist, life coach, and the founder of Enduring Change Coaching. She is the creator of the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ 28-day Self-guided Daily Action Plan. Dr. McCreery is a columnist for WLS Lifestyles magazine where she is on the Editorial Advisory Board. Find more about the resources and programs she provides to weight loss surgery patients at www.enduringchangeafterwls.com and visit her blog Peace With Cake: Ending Emotional Eating. Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-08-14T08:55:21Z

Free Teleclass on Emotional Eating After Weight Loss Surgery By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly After taking a summer break, I’m happy to announce that my free teleclass series is starting up again in September. The next free teleclass is on a specialized topic: Emotional Eating, Overeating, and Success After Weight Loss Surgery. If you are someone who has had weight loss surgery or is considering it, this call is for you. The teleclass takes place Wednesday September 3, 2008 at 3 pm Eastern, 2 pm Central, 1 pm Mountain, and noon Pacific time. If you can’t attend, don’t let that stop you from registering. The call will be recorded and registered participants will receive access to the class recording after the call. If you’ve never attended a teleclass before, they’re easy. You’ll just dial in on the phone number you will receive when you register (you are responsible for any long distance charges) and when prompted you’ll be given an access code to enter. You can go here to register and when you do, you’ll have an opportunity to submit a question that you would like addressed. I’ll try to get to as many as I can on the call. Hope to “see” you in class! Take good care, Melissa My blog: Peace With Cake www.enduringchange.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-08-01T12:44:08Z

Emotional Eating: Top Ten Reasons For Getting Stuck in the First Place By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly A few weeks ago I was sorting through school work and papers that came home in my fifth grader’s backpack at the end of the school year and had been left in a pile. In his math folder I found this great handout: ”Problem-solving Top-ten List.” It’s intended to help students who are stuck on a math problem, but I found it to be great life advice and very applicable to eating and weight loss battles. What do you think? Top Ten Reasons For Getting Stuck in the First Place: 1. You tried to rush through the problem without thinking. We are often great at rushing into new weight loss programs and diets hoping each one will be the magic answer. Clients often tell me how they’ve picked programs in the past that weren’t compatible with their tastes or their schedules or their preferences and that they probably knew from the beginning they wouldn’t want to continue long term. 2. You didn’t read the problem carefully. We don’t just run into this difficulty with math problems. In many life situations, if we don’t clearly understand the problem, we might choose a problem solving approach that isn’t going to meet our needs. In my emotional eating programs, I encourage users to take the time to understand their unique situation. Taking the time to understand your reasons for overeating and the types of solutions that will work for you is essential to not getting stuck further down the road. 3. You don’t know what the problem is asking for. Again, this doesn’t just apply to math problems. If we’re working to solve the wrong problem, we aren’t going to get anywhere. If you are struggling with emotional eating (stress eating, boredom eating, or eating when you are lonely or upset), no food plan or diet in the world is going to fix that—because it’s not about the food—it’s about figuring out what to do with the feelings. 4. You don’t have enough information. I often tell me clients that if they feel like they aren’t getting anywhere, or if they feel like they are beating their head against the wall, odds are that there is a part of the problem that isn’t being addressed. The program I use with my clients devotes a significant amount of time to showing you how to collect information about yourself, about your hunger, and about your unique relationship with food so that you can solve the eating problems once and for all. 5. You’re looking for an answer that the problem isn’t asking for. If you overeat because you are bored or stressed or anxious or angry (or any other emotion), the problem isn’t about food choice. The answer the problem is asking for has to do with finding new or better ways of responding to your emotions, your stress and your needs. The weight loss industry spends billions of dollars convincing us that if we follow a certain diet we will be beautiful and happy. Food plans don’t create happiness and diets (or weight loss) don’t help us cope with stress (or anxiety or loneliness or boredom). A schedule of when and what to eat (a diet) doesn’t prepare us for what to do when we stop using the schedule, and it doesn’t help us figure out what to do INSTEAD of eating or overeating. The truth is that diets aren’t the answer for this problem. Enduring change and enduring weight loss happen when we make changes that work with our lives—not when we try to maintain behaviors that leave us hungry and grumpy and feeling like we are missing out. 6. The strategy you’re using doesn’t work for this particular problem. I’ll say it again. Diets tell you what to eat. Often, being on a diet will increase the amount of time and energy someone spends focusing on food. Diets don’t teach you how to change patterns of emotional eating or overeating when you aren’t hungry. They don’t teach you how to feed yourself and expand your life in ways that won’t leave you feeling deprived. Users of my program and participants in the groups I run are often surprised at first by how little time they spend focusing on food. The programs I offer don’t count fat grams or calories or carbs because I feel it is most helpful to target the reasons you feel hungry and the reasons you eat even when you aren’t. My focus is helping you GET OFF the diet rollercoaster and put food in a much smaller place in your life. 7. You aren’t applying the strategy correctly. If you’ve been dieting for years, it can be hard to move out of the mindsets of deprivation and of blaming yourself when the diet doesn’t work (even though the diet was probably doomed to fail in the first place). Using the right tools takes practice. I find that clients initially have a hard time looking at their eating patterns and their emotions without feeling the old self-blame, shame and guilt. One of the biggest benefits that clients in our emotional eating programs and groups note is being able to stop feeling guilty and bad all the time. That’s huge! 8. You failed to combine your strategy with another strategy. If we try to fit ourselves into a strategy or a program instead of finding a strategy that fits and works with our specific individual situation, we’re likely to get stuck. Cookie cutter eating plans and programs are problematic because we are all different. For instance, my Emotional Eating Toolbox™ program guides you to your own answers and strategies through the work you do and the answers you provide about yourself. You are encouraged to explore a variety of strategies and choose the solutions that will work for you. 9. The problem has more than one answer. There is no ONE magic cause of weight gain and there is no ONE magic answer for weight loss. People’s paths for taking control of their emotional eating will be different. Once you have the basic set of tools, you will be more successful if you learn to use them in the way that complements your personality, your strengths, your struggles, and your life. 10.The problem can’t be solved. This one is tough—both with math problems and with life. Emotions and tough times are real. We might not like them but we can’t just wish them away. Trying to ignore or bury emotions doesn’t work well in the long term either. The truth is that there is no diet or food plan that is going to help us cope with tough emotions. If we forget about the emotional part of our eating and simply focus on the food, we’re going to get stuck and we’re likely to fail. And then we are likely to blame ourselves—which isn’t helpful either. There ARE powerful tools that can help anybody get through the emotions and situations that they struggle with. When we learn them and practice using them it’s easier to put food in its place, make choices that feel good about eating, and put more energy into creating the lives we really want to be living. Originally published in Peace With Cake Sign up for a free WLS teleclass Contact Melissa at:www.enduringchange.com Printer Friendly

urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a 2008-07-01T17:39:33Z

Creating Enduring Change With Emotional Eating By: Melissa McCreery, PhD Printer Friendly The most consistently neglected part of the weight loss process is the phase of “maintenance.” Without solidifying our ability to maintain, our chances of creating lasting change in our relationship with food or enduring weight loss are slim. Change is not a one shot deal. Just as quitting smoking involves a lot more than throwing your cigarettes in the trash, conquering emotional eating is something we do over and over again, in big and little ways, as we build new patterns and tools for coping and new ways of being in our worlds. Many of my clients come to me after significant periods in their lives when they’ve walked on the road they want to be on. They’ve taken charge of their relationship with food. They’ve found the groove of eating the way they wanted to eat. They’ve lost the weight and felt the excitement and the satisfaction. And then something happened. Their focus on food and eating increased. The activity level decreased. The cravings changed. The weight came back. And now they are feeling defeated and tired and they have a bit (or a lot) less hope then they did before. They’re usually feeling pretty guilty and mad at themselves which makes things even harder. Change is not a one shot deal. You probably know how it works. You’ve made a successful change. You feel proud. You feel like celebrating. Or you decide you really don’t need to be quite so disciplined anymore. You start to slack off or you loosen the reins a bit. Is this a bad thing? Haven’t you earned it? How do you know? Maintenance is not something that happens automatically—AND maintenance is the stage where all the hard work can pay off, or can start to unravel. Most of my clients are very clear that they know HOW to make changes. They know how to lose weight (if that’s their goal). What they struggle with is keeping it off. What they don’t want to do is lose the weight and then have to lose it AGAIN. Working at maintenance isn’t as dramatic or visibly rewarding as starting something new. Because “maintaining” is the goal, you aren’t seeing the motivating external changes or smaller numbers on the scale. Your clothes fit the same way everyday. But putting a firm foundation for long term maintenance in place is crucial. Sometimes this is the phase where extra support and accountability can pay off big. My advice to you: don’t hesitate to get the support you need to establish a solid foundation of maintenance. You’ve worked too hard to create the changes you’ve begun to put into place. What do you need to do to make sure that you don’t short change yourself? Take good care, Melissa www.enduringchange.com Originally published at Peace With Cake Printer Friendly