Your relationship with food exists in the larger context of your life. Your eating style is a reflection of your internal state. If your eating is out of balance, so is your life. If your internal state is stressful and chaotic, your eating style will be reflect that. Or, in an attempt to feel in control of the internal or external chaos, you may try to control and restrict your food intake to regain a sense of control. This usually backfires. 

If your life is stressful, then you will often turn to food to cope with that stress. If your life lacks pleasure and excitement, you will turn to food looking for pleasure and excitement. If you try to control and restrict your food, you will become obsessed with food and overeat. When you're at peace and centered within yourself, you become at peace with food. How you do food is how you do life!®

Dieting is never effective for long because it doesn't address the emotional context of your life. This is why diets often fail, they don't teach you how to address your emotions, and if you're an emotional eater, it's your emotions that drive your food choices and how much you eat. 

Permanent weight loss is really about a complete life change: finding new ways of nurturing oneself, learning to manage stress, and finding new ways of being in the world that support one’s spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health.

As Zen teacher Cheri Huber wrote in her wonderful book with the same name, "How you do anything is how you do everything!" To make peace with food, you have to make peace with yourself.

For example, as a coach, I've seen time and time again, when people begin to feel a sense of peace, acceptance, and comfort in their own skin, and they feel centered and grounded; their emotional eating calms down; and they feel more motivated to take better care of themselves and they begin to lose weight.

Why?

Because they are no longer at war with themselves, they have much more energy to devote to themselves, and weight loss is no longer a struggle for them. The self-sabotage disappears, and weight loss becomes a loving act, instead of one more thing they must do because they are inadequate, defective, and unacceptable. 

With the right attitude weight loss can actually be a joyful experience; with the wrong attitude, it's a deprivation, chore, and punishment all rolled into one. 

Which approach appeals to you?

 I offer a free consultation. Contact Me! 

How you do food is how you do life! ®