Emotional Eating Solutions: Five Things You Can Do to Control Your Cravings, Eat Less, and Thrive More

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Are you fed up with struggling with overeating, starting another d-i-e-t that you know will probably blow up on you, or wishing your pants were not so tight?

Here are five simple things you can implement today to control your cravings, eat less, and thrive more.

1. Sleep. Don’t keep working harder and harder. Play it smart. Women who average five hours or less of sleep per night weigh more, gain weight more easily, and crave more carbohydrates and fattening foods—and it’s not in their heads! Sleep deprivation leads to chemical changes in your body that cause overeating and weight gain (even if you don’t overeat). Aim for at least seven and a half hours of sleep per night. Not only will you be less hungry, your productivity, focus, and creativity will probably improve. You may even find yourself accomplishing more than when you were burning the midnight oil. Additional bonus: you’re likely to feel a whole lot better.

2. Pay attention to your feelings. Emotional eating—eating as a response to feelings—is a major cause of overeating and packing on the pounds. Stress eating, comfort eating, eating out of frustration and even eating out of boredom or happiness can all sabotage your weight loss plans. Develop strategies to check in with yourself and with how you are feeling so that you can respond to your emotions in ways that don’t involve food. Added bonus: when you address your feelings instead of feeding them, you will be taking charge of your life and responding to what you really need. When you do this, life gets better.

3. Carve out time for you. Stress and overload can be a direct path to weight gain. If you’re feeling time crunched, you’re likely to make the all-too-common mistake of cutting out the activities that are actually the best for you. Me-time helps you relax and unwind. It also gives you an opportunity to pay attention to yourself and what you need to function and flourish. When you meet your needs and care for yourself in quality ways, you are less likely to find yourself using food as a “special treat” or a “band aid” to help you get through the day. Practice giving yourself a five or ten minute time out a few times a day. The bonus: these short breaks help you get perspective on your day. You’re likely to feel more organized and relaxed as a result.

4. Feed yourself quality food at regular intervals. If you are trying to eat less, it can be tempting to cut back too far and allow yourself to get too hungry. Big mistake. While depriving yourself with strict diets may initially seem to create results on the scale, in the long run, eating too little leads to stronger cravings (usually for foods that will spike your blood sugar levels quickly), overeating, and binge eating. Do you find that your healthy eating plan always gets blown in the afternoon or evening? Try eating smaller, more frequent meals during the day and make sure that you are including some protein each time you eat. Bonus: when you feed yourself well, both your energy levels and your mood are likely to improve.

5. Savor. You might be surprised to find how little of what you eat you actually allow yourself to savor and enjoy. Eating on the run and multitasking while you eat mean that your attention is divided between food and your hunger and whatever else you are doing. When you eat without giving it your full attention, you are likely to eat more and not feel as full. Impose a ban on multitasking when you eat. Take your time and practice eating mindfully—paying complete attention to your food—the taste, smell, even the texture. Notice how full or hungry you are and allow yourself to enjoy the act of eating. Bonus: savoring is a pleasant activity and it tends to be relaxing. Practicing enjoying your food in this way and getting in the habit of doing one thing at a time is a great strategy for reducing stress. If you apply the concept of not multitasking to other areas of your life, you’re also likely to see an improvement of the quality of your results.

These tips may sound simple, but they are powerful steps towards helping you curb your cravings and thriving in your life.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition. Bariatric professionals: Customized patient materials and programming are available for bariatric practices.

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Dangerous Myths About Willpower and Weight Loss

(An important post about overeating, willpower, and beliefs that may be sabotaging you)

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Change is not a one-shot-deal, especially as it relates to emotional eating. Are you letting new tools in? Are you struggling to be tougher, have more willpower, or resign yourself to deprivation? Your choices are powerful. You can set yourself up to succeed by making decisions that support your goals.

She called me to schedule a consultation to discuss coaching for emotional eating. Her overeating was causing her to regain weight she had worked extremely hard to lose–and she had lost a lot of weight. Like many of the high-achieving women who seek me out, she is an incredibly determined woman with a lot of willpower. She’s known for setting a goal and sticking to it. She’s been an example and a mentor in her local weight loss community—in great part because of her smarts, her get-it-done attitude, and her perseverance. But now, her weight has begun to creep back.

It’s an all-too-familiar story. The plot has different turns and twists each time I hear it, but essentially, her willpower and determination ran out. Life happened, she hit some extremely gnarly patches, and she relied on her sole strategy of toughing it out and staying the course. We all have our limits, and eventually she hit hers. The willpower and self-control weren’t enough to make her do what she didn’t really have the resources to do. And she began to falter.

She’s a lovely woman. But she has relied on herself for so much that she’s not very good at asking for help. In fact, she’s pretty skilled at turning the tables and helping you instead of letting you know what’s going on. She started to get scared and stressed and worried as she saw herself losing control of the number on the scale and of her eating. Her stress makes her overeating worse and her confidence shaky. Reaching out to me to ask about getting help was a very big deal for her. But she was still fighting a bigger battle about letting the help in in her mind.

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is the kind of thing she tells herself. She’s come to see me about coaching for emotional eating, because a part of her knows she’s really not sure what to do with her feelings and because the weight is steadily coming back. But that voice in her head is still whispering about how she just needs to get tough again. She’s focused on that, she’s following her plan rigidly. She’s getting tougher because she is afraid. But she still doesn’t have the tools for dealing with reasons that she overeats. She has toughness, but for all of us, toughness has its limits.

We talk about emotional eating and overeating. We talk about coaching. We talk about how uncomfortable this whole conversation and asking for help may be for her. We talk about the investment that coaching for emotional eating is—what she hopes it will help her achieve and the costs if she doesn’t do something to make a change. It’s hard for her to think about what weight regain may cost her–because she feels too afraid to think about it. We talk about how hard it is without tools to help her with her feelings. “Yes,” she says, “That’s why I eat.”

But that voice in her head keeps whispering—it’s getting louder—and even I can hear it now. It says she just needs to be stricter. More disciplined. She needs to get on track. Get working out. That will do it. Except, I know that this is not true. Perseverance and discipline are great strengths, but they are not enough.

And then I hear the lie. The lie that so many people tell and so many people believe. As she explains why her self-discipline is so important, she says, “I guess I’m just not like a thin person who can eat whatever they want without thinking about it.” And, I’m pretty sure, with that statement, she decided that for now, what she needs, is to just keep focusing on being strong and tough.

I can’t be certain, I’m not her after all, but I’m pretty darn sure that she’s missing a piece of the puzzle—and I’m worried about her. The story she is telling herself is that thin people eat without awareness and without making deliberate choices. And that she is different because she needs to have self-discipline.

Here’s what’s dangerous about that. The piece of the puzzle she’s not acknowledging in this conversation includes the strategies and tools and resources that people use instead of overeating. This includes tools for comforting yourself, strategies for responding to stress, relaxing, dealing with conflict and anger and disappointment, celebrating, treating yourself, coping with boredom or disappointment or a broken heart or any other feeling or situation that may be your personal trigger to overeat. It also includes feeling alright about letting help in.

While I am sure there are exceptions, people who are thin and who don’t overeat do not mindlessly eat whatever they want AND they don’t all possess ungodly amounts of willpower. People who don’t rely on food (or other substances, etc.) to cope with life, usually have a whole extra skill set that many people who struggle with overeating haven’t developed or have underused, or maybe don’t even know exists.

This is good news. It means that if you struggle with overeating, there is HOPE. It means that you don’t have to spend your life struggling harder, getting tougher, and depriving yourself MORE. It means that with help and learning to do it DIFFERENTLY (that means getting more tools for emotional eating), your relationship with food can actually be easier and a whole lot different—maybe better than you ever imagined.

I haven’t heard from this bright, high-achiever since we spoke. My guess is that she has gone back to try willpower one more time. My hope is that she starts to shift her focus to the reasons that she overeats—so her life can get better. And that she lets some help in.

Change is not a one-shot-deal and it’s good to assess your progress along the way. Are you letting new tools in? Are you struggling to be tougher, have more willpower, or resign yourself to deprivation? Your choices are powerful.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition. Bariatric professionals: Customized patient materials and programming are available for bariatric practices.

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Three Nice Ways to Say “No” so You Can Stop Using Food for Comfort and Self-Care

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Emotional eating happens when you aren’t getting or giving yourself what you really need. Food becomes a way of trying to cope with feelings—to numb them, change them, or to try to comfort yourself when you have feelings that you don’t want to deal with directly. Many busy women trace their emotional eating to time issues.

“I take care of everyone else and there is nothing left over for me. I end up comfort eating.”

“I don’t have time to take care of me—so I eat.”

“By the time it’s my turn to get what I need, I’m too tired to do what I should do—so I eat.”

“I have so many responsibilities and so many people counting on me. I can’t begin to figure out how to fit myself in.”

The truth is that self-care and making time to respond to what you feel and need are critical ingredients to making lasting peace with food. However, when life feels so full and complicated, it’s easy to experience analysis paralysis about how or where to begin.

The place to begin is often carving out some solid space for you. You can’t get better at taking care of you unless you have the time and energy to do so. And since none of us can make time, you are probably going to have to get better at saying, “No” in some areas of your life so that you get to claim some space.

Want to know something? Some of the most capable, most professionally assertive and successful women don’t feel comfortable saying, “no” in situations where they really should. Instead of saying, “no,” they do more work. And they often find themselves at the bottom of their priority list. If you’re nodding your head, please know that it’s not just you.

Here are three nice ways to say, “no” so that you can claim more time and stop using food as a way to take care of you.

1. “I’d love to but I can’t.” Notice that this is short and sweet and includes no long explanations or justifications. This is key. An effective “no” does not open the door to negotiation and arm-twisting or to discussions of any guilt feelings that you might have.

2. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for me. I won’t be able to participate but thank you for thinking of me.” Again, you are expressing regret, being very pleasant, but keeping the conversation loop closed.

3. “I’m not available to do that/participate/attend.” The essential key is remembering that commitments to you count as much as commitments to anyone else. If your calendar says “go to the gym,” then you have a prior engagement. It’s not a flimsy excuse. Self-care commitments aren’t lightweight propositions that deserve to be brushed to the side to make room for important stuff. They are the important stuff that allows you to show up as your best self to take care of everything else.

And that’s the final and most important key to saying, “No” effectively. Once you start seeing what feeds you (and I’m not talking chocolate) as essential, you’ll feel more empowered to defend the space for it. I’m guessing you always make time to brush your teeth in the morning, right? Same concept. We do what we know we have to do.

Practice saying, “No.” Start with smaller, easier stuff.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition. Bariatric professionals: Customized patient materials and programming are available for bariatric practices.

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Emotional Eating Solutions: 3 Tips for High-achievers Who Overeat

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Many smart women struggle with their weight and many busy, successful professional women resort to food to cope with the stress, uncertainty, and other emotions that occur in a full, high-pressure life.

Unfortunately, for many, these battles with food become vicious cycles that look something like this:

“Fresh starts” and plans that don’t work or don’t last, followed by feelings of defeat and inadequacy, followed by overeating and a period of trying to generate motivation (again), followed by another “fresh start.”

This vicious cycle leaves women feeling bad about themselves and ineffective. It also often leads to weight gain instead of weight loss.

If you are a high-achiever—a woman who is successful in many areas of her life who finds herself stuck in this cycle—there is a way out.

Here are three tips to start breaking the yo-yo diet emotional eating cycle:

1. Let go of the belief that you are alone and the only one struggling like this. If you are caught in this cycle with food and overeating, you’re in some great company. One of the most self-defeating actions you can take is to continue to struggle alone, heaping on self-blame and even shame. Find someone to talk to. Open your eyes to the possibility of support. Ask other women what they do when they struggle. Consider investing in yourself the same way you invest in your career and your family and your home and pursuing emotional eating solutions that can help you.

2. Take control of perfectionism. You’re human and you’ll never be perfect. Perfectionism or all-or-nothing thinking is common among women who expect a lot of themselves. It can get you stuck in a pattern where making a poor choice is interpreted as “blowing it.” Women trying to lose weight fall for this all the time. Instead of continuing forward and allowing the next choice to be a better one, the tendency is to cash in all your chips and start down a road of overeating because you’re upset with yourself and you “failed.” Plan for imperfection. Train your mind to notice your progress and not just your missteps. Try the “Three Things That Went Well” strategy.

3. Stop relying on willpower. This is a biggie. You are a high-achiever. You probably have a lot of willpower and stick-to-it-ness in other areas of your life. You may be lost in a mindset of beating yourself up over this cycle you are stuck in. If so, you probably tell yourself things like:

*“What’s wrong with me that I can’t get a grip on this?”

*“This should be easy.”

*“I’m just not trying hard enough.”

*“This is an embarrassment and I need to stop being lazy and just take a tough line with myself.”

This is not a Success Soundtrack™. Go back and read my first two tips again. The truth is that you’re stuck because your method isn’t effective. You’re missing something. Start with compassion for yourself for how big and deep and exhausting this struggle is. Try holding yourself in the same positive mental light that you’d hold a dear friend.

Take a deep breath and allow yourself to treat this issue as a legitimate problem. Allow yourself to respect that you are in a tough spot. Instead of blaming yourself, give yourself permission to take the situation seriously.

Now ask yourself what you need that you don’t have that could help. You may be tempted to choose some kind of judgment (“I’m lazy”), but instead, focus on identifying the outside resource or concept that could help (“I’m overloaded and I’m at a loss about how to feel better without overeating. I need some new tools.”).

I find that high-achievers who are stuck in this overeating cycle hesitate (or don’t even think to) ask for:

*Help with finding motivation

*Help with creating time for themselves

*Help with accountability

*Help developing new skills and strategies

*Help with getting to the root of what’s triggering their overeating

*Help. Period.

Approaching the problem with respect and allowing yourself the resources you need to be effective can make a world of difference.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition. Bariatric professionals: Customized patient materials and programming are available for bariatric practices.

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Emotional Eating Solutions: How NOT to Swallow Your Feelings

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Emotional eating is a powerful force that can become a deeply ingrained, almost automatic response to certain feelings. Breaking free of emotional eating (and most overeating) means honoring the reality that you have feelings and learning how to approach them in ways that help you feel authentic and cared for and responded to—even if sometimes you are the one doing the responding. Here are some tips to help you in break free from emotional eating.

If you don’t address the root cause of your overeating (especially emotional eating) you’ll keep on overeating. If you stop, or gain control for awhile, it will come back. True story. Emotional eating is a powerful force that can become a deeply ingrained, almost automatic response to certain feelings. The idea of taking control of emotional eating sounds good, but I frequently hear from women trying to wrap their minds around the reality of looking their emotions squarely in the eye.

“It won’t help. What’s the point?” “Why should I be angry, that’s just unpleasant and it feels awful.” “He’s not going to change so why get upset about it.” “There’s nothing I can do about it so I just eat. How do I stop?”

We’ve come full circle.

Breaking free of emotional eating (and most overeating) means honoring the reality that you have feelings and learning how to approach them in ways that help you feel authentic and cared for and responded to—even if sometimes you are the one doing the responding.

The beliefs that you can simply decide not to feel the way you feel or that you can make your feelings go away simply by not thinking about them are myths. While there are some exceptions, feelings shift, transform, and evolve when you respect them, acknowledge them, and address them in a purposeful way.

“Eating your feelings” may temporarily soothe, numb, or distract you, but in the big picture, it doesn’t address the real problem, won’t make you feel better, and the emotions or the situation that triggered them will still be real.

HOW DO YOU START FACING YOUR FEELINGS IF YOU ARE USED TO BURYING THEM WITH FOOD?

Remind yourself that feeling and doing are two different things.

Even in the most powerless situations, it’s important to acknowledge and respect your own reality. When I acknowledge that I’m scared or nervous or feeling hurt or angry or misunderstood, I can start looking for ways to take care of, soothe, or respond to myself in some kind of helpful way—even if I can’t change the actual situation. When I have the flu, I can’t fix it, but if I acknowledge that I don’t feel good and do nice things for myself, I feel better. It’s the same with feelings. If I drown my feelings in ice cream, my fear or helplessness isn’t really being addressed. It’s just covered up and not really tended to at all.

In a related vein, know that expressing yourself and creating change are both important.

Just because you can’t have one, doesn’t mean you should deny yourself the other. Yes, some people and situations are difficult and they aren’t going to ever be what you want them to be. That’s no reason to deny how you feel. And sometimes, simply expressing that feeling is important, validating, or empowering—even if the other person doesn’t hear you. Yes, sometimes it’s not prudent or helpful to share your feelings, but it’s always a helpful option to consider.

You don’t need an audience to express yourself.

Maybe you aren’t ready. It might feel too scary, or you’ve got so many pent up feelings that when you start to speak it turns into a gloppy emotional scene that you aren’t comfortable with. If you aren’t used to respecting your emotions, it’s pretty common to feel self-conscious when you are in the middle of them. That’s okay. Give yourself permission to be where you are with your feelings. Practice being your own audience. Express yourself to you. Write, talk, and think to yourself about your feelings. And remind yourself, “This is hard for me.”

And be proud of yourself.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition. Bariatric professionals: Customized patient materials and programming are available for bariatric practices.

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The Real Way to Break Free from Overeating

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Have you checked out a newsstand recently? You won’t be surprised that there are dozens and dozens of tips, plans, and miracle programs being promoted just this month to help you slim down, lose a pant size, make your butt smaller and lose your midlife muffin top.

More and more women—many of you–are struggling with the scale than ever before, and it’s not just concerns about appearance that motivate you. Many of you have concerns about heart disease, diabetes, and losing your energy and vitality. You want to feel good about yourself—you want to feel like yourself again and you’d love to take all the energy that gets spent on struggles with food and your body and put it somewhere more productive and fun.

Concerns like this can lead a woman to pursue all sorts of craziness. I won’t ask you about the weirdest plan for weight loss you’ve ever pursued. Just about all of us have stories that make us roll our own eyes.

The truth is that most of you have read, tried, witnessed, and researched more approaches to slimming down or ending overeating than you ever, EVER wanted to. And you are well aware that you still don’t have the answers that you need. Because even if you feel one hundred percent certain that you know what you need to do, if you haven’t been able to make it happen, something is missing.

Food plans, calorie counting tools, and fat burning tricks don’t do you any good if you can’t or won’t stick with them.

Women do break free of overeating and emotional eating, they do achieve a size they love and maintain it, and they find out how to make food a much smaller part of their lives. There isn’t one way that works for everyone, but there is one thing that all the successful women I know have in common. This includes women who’ve battled obesity and eating disorders, women who’ve had weight loss surgery and women who’ve dieted their entire lives.

The real way to break free of overeating must start with understanding why you’re doing it.

Until you’re clear on what’s behind your constant hunger and what triggers you to reach for more than your body really needs, you won’t be able to effectively address the biggest source of your struggle. Here’s the other—brilliant—side of the story. Once you discover how to tune in to what your appetite and cravings are really about, you’re empowered to take care of those needs in ways that are going to take you places that the bag of chips never will.

It’s really not an exaggeration to say that creating peace with food changes lives.

Where ever you are in your journey with food and eating, if it’s not a happy, successful place, I challenge you to try this. For a few hours, stop thinking about what to eat and allow yourself to focus on why you eat. What’s the pull that eating has for you? What gets you craving the snack you don’t need and what makes it hard to stay on track? Stop and write down everything you know about what your overeating is about. This simple exercise can be an eye-opening starting point and a great way to identify your next best step in breaking free.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition

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Emotional Eating Help: Indulge is NOT a Four Letter Word

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If you are like most busy women with too much on their plates, one of the most important things you can do for yourself is to practice indulging—really indulging. Interestingly, most women who really need to indulge more will tell you that they believe they ought to be indulging less.

What’s this about?

Let’s get really clear about what indulging is.

From my perspective, to indulge means to allow yourself to experience something really wonderful. Indulging comes from a place of compassion and kindness and respect. It’s a gift, freely given. Indulging means to allow yourself to enjoy fully. It means to thoroughly experience something and soak up and savor the experience. An indulgence is not a candy bar from the vending machine that you shove into your mouth while driving to your next appointment. It’s your favorite food on a beautiful plate in a setting where you can truly savor it.

Indulging isn’t just about food, but it’s something that feeds our senses in a wonderful way. You might indulge in a bubble bath or a foot massage or a solitary walk in the woods. Your indulgence might be your favorite CD played in your car or fresh flowers on your desk or a glass of red wine enjoyed on your deck.

Indulging is a full-body-use-all-your-senses experience.

It fills you up, brings you joy, refuels you and adds color to your life. Indulging feeds your soul and is a necessary ingredient for thriving. Your inner champion, or what you may think of as your “best self” absolutely purrs when she is indulged.

So why does indulging have such a bad rap? Why do so many women think that indulging is selfish or nonproductive or just plain wrong?

I’d like to bust some myths about indulging, and while I’m at it, let me remind you that many bad habits such as overeating, procrastination, and spending too much time online or “not doing” what you really need to do, happen because you aren’t indulging enough.

When your spirit and soul aren’t being fed, you will grasp at straws (or potato chips or chocolate chip cookies) to try to make up for it. When you don’t allow yourself to truly indulge, you will find yourself reaching for poor substitutes that might help you feel better temporarily, but that don’t make anything better in the big picture.

Here are some more truths about indulging:

1. Indulging is not about greed or sloth. Indulging isn’t about excess. It’s about allowing yourself something wonderful or special and allowing yourself to really experience and savor it–without guilt or shame. It’s not eating the whole box of cookies or bingeing on clothes at the mall. It’s about allowing yourself just the right amount of what you really crave and fully enjoying the experience. Indulging is not about gulping, it’s a melts-in-your-mouth experience.

2. Indulging is not laziness. Indulging is a way of feeding an important part of yourself and adding dimension to your life. Some women worry that if they start to indulge they’ll “lose control.” The truth is, when you really allow yourself to indulge, you tend to be more satisfied with less.

3. Indulging does not have to be earned or “deserved.” Some women believe that they haven’t “worked hard enough” or “accomplished enough” to indulge. When you don’t allow yourself this kind of self-care, it’s easy to become caught in a cycle of working harder and harder and feeling more and more behind and burnt out. Again, indulging yourself is a way of refueling. It actually enhances your productivity.

4. Indulging does not decrease your productivity or make you fat. I’ve already addressed this, but this is such a common myth, it’s important to restate. Allowing yourself truly indulgent experiences, ones where you are completely present and savoring the moment, satisfies you. Real indulgences don’t leave you hungry and craving more—they rejuvenate you and fuel you to be your best. What does leave you primed for a binge of food or laziness is the feeling that your special treat is forbidden or undeserved. The message that you are never going to be allowed to rest or feel like “enough” or eat chocolate again will almost certainly create a craving for the forbidden that can be almost impossible to resist.

My challenge to you:

Start indulging. Make a list of things that you experience as special treats. Keep it somewhere where you can add to it as new ideas occur to you. Begin scheduling these into your life on a regular basis and enjoy.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition

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Emotional Eating and Overeating: Five Triggers to Avoid

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In the battle to lose weight, stop overeating, or break free from emotional eating, it’s important to pay attention to the things that trigger your eating to go awry. Simply focusing on what to eat misses an essential point–Your eating choices may be strongly affected by your emotions and your environment. And your food plan is useless if something is preventing you from following it.

Here are five common overeating triggers that you can take control of by taking some smart, proactive action before they sabotage your weight loss efforts.

1. Getting too hungry

Do you stick to your plan through breakfast and lunch only to find yourself irritable, craving carbs, and ready to eat everything in sight by the time late afternoon or evening rolls around? The end of the day tends to be stressful for many. The transition between work and home, mealtime decisions, and other peoples’ hunger or tiredness can push a busy woman over the edge. When I start coaching a new private client, it’s not unusual to hear that this is THE most difficult time of day.

The key here: take control of what you can. This means doing what you can so that you don’t arrive at the end of the day feeling exhausted and starved. Too many women who are trying to lose weight, eat too little in the middle of the day and, as a result, lose control and overeat before, during, or after dinner (or all three). Make sure you are eating a balanced lunch (with protein) and then calculate the hours you are expecting yourself to last before eating again. Most women do well with a small snack midafternoon. Again, adding in protein can make all the difference.

2. Evening eating

Evening (and late night) is a strong overeating trigger time for many busy women. If you are working hard all day long, it’s easy to come to see the quiet of evening as your reward. And if you are too tired and depleted to really enjoy it, food and emotional eating can become a big part of the evening ritual. “I eat in the evening because I want to treat myself.” “It’s my me-time.” “It’s the only time of the day where no one expects anything of me.” Women also overeat in the evening because they are tired (but don’t want to go to bed because this is the only alone time they have).

Breaking free of the evening overeating triggers can be challenging, but it’s essential. Start by creating a policy for yourself about eating after dinner. Be realistic but be firm. Now, identify the bedtime you need to honor so that you are getting a minimum of 7.5 hours of sleep a night. This alone can make a huge difference in your overeating. Trust me. Create a new wind-down ritual that includes some nice things for you but that doesn’t include food. Finally, start carving out some me-time (even ten minutes) on the front-end of your day. You might need to get up earlier, but you’ll be focusing on you when you have the energy to do it.

3. Snacking on treats at work

Are you overeating or grazing at work on the sugary treats that your coworkers leave all over the office or the break room? Make it easy on yourself by making one decision instead of hundreds. Set a policy with yourself about your eating at work. Make sure it’s a policy you can stick with. Sometimes something as simple as “I’ll only eat homemade food that is truly a treat that I can’t easily have any time” will do the trick. Spend a bit of time strategizing how you will avoid temptation and how you will reward yourself for doing so. And don’t forget to enlist support. If you are putting on pounds at the office, I guarantee that you aren’t the only one being haunted by the food.

4. Stress eating and overeating

Emotional eating—using food to cope with feelings—is one of the biggest causes of overeating and weight gain. Smart women take this one seriously! Take the time to check in with yourself before you eat. Try to identify how you are feeling. Become aware of patterns. Are you a stress eater? Comfort eater? Boredom eater? The key to taking control of emotional eating is to create better strategies—ones that really address the emotions you are having. Start creating ways of addressing your feelings that you can use INSTEAD of turning to food.

5. Too much on your plate

When you are too busy, stressed, and overloaded, overeating can seem like an easy way to sneak in a reward, some comfort, or a much-needed energy boost. The problem is that any benefits tend to be short-lived and the costs and negative consequences aren’t. If you want to take control of your weight, your eating, and your relationship with food, you MUST take control of your life. Learn to say no, cut back your schedule, carve out time that’s just for you and start practicing the art of asking for help.

The best part of addressing overeating triggers is that when you take charge of what drives your overeating and emotional eating, you are almost always fixing a problem that’s bigger than food. When you get to the root cause of your overeating and address it head on, the triggers often lose their power. When you find strategies for dealing with stress, overeating, and overload, you are also creating strategies for living a better life.

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How do you Cope with Anger? Thoughts for Emotional Eaters

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Is anger a feeling you are comfortable with or is it an emotion you go to great lengths to avoid? For many women, angry feelings are some of the toughest to acknowledge and cope with effectively. Before you tell me that it’s not a part of your world, here’s the truth: everyone gets angry. And contrary to what some women may have learned growing up, it isn’t pointless or unkind or impolite.

Anger is a fact of life.

Anger is also a feeling. It’s not a behavior.

When we feel anger (which we will, because we are human and everyone feels anger from time to time), we have two choices:

-How we handle the feeling

-How we choose to behave

Lots of people, especially women, are afraid of feeling angry. One of the reasons may be that the distinction between the feeling and the behavior has become blurred. It’s not uncommon to associate anger with “reacting” (that’s behavior). So a client who is uncomfortable with anger might say something like, “I don’t want to be angry. I don’t like to shout.” Or, “What’s the point of being angry, it will just cause trouble.” (Actually, she is assuming that her behavior—what she decides to do as a result of feeling angry—will cause some kind of trouble.

Anger is not a bad thing. Our anger is a signal that something is wrong. In a relationship, when one person gets angry, something isn’t working smoothly. It’s a sign that something needs to be corrected. Injustice has fueled a lot of anger and that anger and some of the behaviors or responses that were chosen have created powerful change—in families, in communities, and in the world.

So what do you do with the feeling of anger?

Do you stuff it down, try to distract yourself? Do you breathe into it and feel its power? Do you let it grow, maybe thinking about past anger to really get it simmering? Have you ever been able to not judge your anger and simply stay with the feeling?

Do you know that you are bigger than your feelings and that no feeling will wash you away? That even the biggest feeling of anger will eventually crest like a wave and then recede?

Most people skip past the feeling and get really busy trying to figure out what to DO with the anger (that’s the behavior.)

What do you DO when you are angry?

Do you cry, yell, or stamp the floor? Do you attack and look for someone to blame or to be angry AT? Do you write like hell and let your journal have it all?

Or do you try to get away from the anger? Do you eat when you are angry or sleep or escape into something to avoid your anger? Do you try to distract yourself or do you simply decide to “not be angry?” If you do—how much work does it take to keep it tamped down? Does it seep out around the edges?

Do you choose behaviors that you don’t like when you feel angry? Does it happen too fast? Do you feel out of control when you feel angry or do you feel strong and powerful?

Have you ever tried to work your anger out physically—by sweating or dancing or kickboxing or walking really fast?

Or do you find yourself directing your anger at yourself so that you feel guilty and self judgmental for feeling the way that you do?

How do you wish to attend to your feelings and behave when you feel angry?

Please note, not feeling angry is not an option here. It’s a guarantee that from time to time, you will feel pissed off.

Not knowing what to do with feelings can be a major source of stress. Start by giving yourself permission to be angry, and next time you are, experiment with separating your feeling from the behavior. The more you can have compassion for your angry self, the more you will feel able to step back and make choices about how to tend to your feelings and how you want to behave.

Are you a smart, busy woman struggling with stress, overeating, or overload? Claim your free audio set: ”5 Simple Steps to Move Beyond Overwhelm With Food and Life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, Emotional Eating Solutions specialist, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and stress. She is the author of the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) 28 Day Program and the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ Weight Loss Surgery Edition

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How To Implement All Those “Best Life” Tips

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There are so many good tips and tools and strategies that can help us live a fuller, more authentic and meaningful life. Tips that can lower our stress, help us lose weight, prevent overwhelm and improve our relationships. But learning about these tools and ideas and strategies just isn’t enough. These gems are only helpful to us if we are able to figure out how to implement them and allow them to be useful in our lives.

There is an ingredient that is essential for metabolizing good information. It’s necessary for creating a plan for implementation. It’s a crucial factor in reducing stress and overwhelm. And, it is in very short supply in many of our lives. I’m speaking about good, quality, quiet time.

What I see in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, is that many of the things we can do to increase our happiness, productivity, success with weight or health, or whatever it is that we want to do, only really happen if we allow ourselves enough quiet time to listen to ourselves and discover the how and when and why of implementing. When we have quiet time we can hear what we need. We can think about how to address the need, and we can plan and schedule the actions we are going to take.

Do you get enough quiet time? When you have an opportunity for quiet time, do you allow yourself to take it?

It’s interesting about quiet time. Many of us—especially women with a lot going on—have a tendency to avoid quiet time—to fritter it away or to distract ourselves from it—to fill it with things like the internet or TV we don’t really care about. Or to fill it with food and nibbling or overeating.

It sounds so simple, but truthfully, taking more quiet time isn’t always an easy thing. For someone perpetually on the go, the beginning stages of quiet time can be uncomfortable. Listening to ourselves or discovering what we need can be difficult. And sometimes we don’t like discovering that we have questions or needs that we don’t know how to answer or address. But here’s the real truth. If we don’t take the time to listen and hear what we feel or need or want, we won’t be able to match those things up with the tips and tools and strategies we know about or are capable of acquiring.

Do you get enough quiet time? What does ideal quiet time look like for you? I encourage you to choose a regular “quiet” activity—walking, writing or journaling, quiet contemplative or meditative time—maybe a gentle yoga workout. Consider how you could add some quiet time to your week and make a commitment to stick with it for at least a week. It’s the kind of action that really pays off.

Melissa McCreery, PhD, ACC, is a Psychologist, ICF Certified Life Coach, emotional eating expert, and the founder of www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com, a company dedicated to providing smart resources to busy women struggling with food, weight and overwhelm. Find out more, read tips and articles, and pick up her free audio series: “5 simple steps to move beyond overwhelm with food and life” at www.TooMuchOnHerPlate.com

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