There was a statement that caught my attention in a recent article from the Washington Post's "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy" column. The author of a new book "Fat Boy, Thin Man" (2010) told about his success in overcoming emotional eating. He said that once he became serious about breaking the emotional eating habit, he had to acknowledge that his own personal development was suspended when he started to use food for relief and reward. He decided that if he was to sustain his weight loss success, he would have to pay just as much attention to his personal development issues as he would have to do work on nutrition, new eating habits, and exercise.

In all of my experience with the Shrink Yourself program and with the patients that I treat I find this principle to be absolutely correct and essential. I see it every day.

Just yesterday I saw a patient who was suffering great anguish about her binges. At the same time she was so ambivalent about accepting help. I insisted we talk only about her ambivalence until we understood it. In an obvious way she was simply looking for magic, the old kind of magic that a child might look for by letting a parent know how much pain she was in and hoping that the parent could fix it. More accurately, the child believes the parent can fix anything, so she was really hoping that I would fix it.

Of course, I cannot. I can not tell her cravings to go away and I can not stand by her side every moment of the day to make sure that she eats the right things. Almost everyone who comes to the Shrink Yourself program is hoping for the magical fix. That's human nature. But that's really only a cover-up for something deeper. I saw it clearly in my patient. She insisted on the magical fix because she did not trust herself to follow through and do what she needs to do to understand and master the emotional eating habit. She was afraid of success. Her greatest fear was that she would lose weight and try again to have a fulfilling romantic relationship. Of course there's nothing wrong with that. But for her there was something wrong since she was predicting that every romantic relationship that was possible for her would end in failure. She was sure she would suffer such great hurt that it would take her months or years to recover. Her catastrophe image was in full bloom.

That's the personal development issue. She starting emotional eating because of her disappointments. She stopped trying and stopped learning. Now she has to pay attention to this piece of development. She has to learn how to have a successful romantic relationship. If she is not willing to try to do that, then her pain and loneliness and emotional hunger will not go away, and eating to soothe that pain and fill that gap will be something she has to live with.

I tell this story so that you may find your own story. Think about your ambivalence about success. Trace your ambivalence to your fear of success. Try to identify the personal development work you need to do but are afraid to do. If you have read and followed the material on this site you probably know what you need to do. If you can't remember it for very long or put it into practice then you can be sure that you have ambivalence about succeeding.

Ask yourself why you are afraid to succeed. Explore your ambivalence. Ambivalence will set off a binge. Ambivalence is the source of the self sabotage that makes you so angry at yourself. Ambivalence will stop you from even starting a program like this.

Are you ready to identify your personal development issue?

We all make New Year's resolutions, and often these resolutions involve weight loss. However, many of us quickly lose traction before we achieve our objectives. In this week's blog I will answer the following 5 questions that will help you stay on track and reach your goals.

1. What are the psychological and emotional reasons behind these failures?

2. What is the biggest mistake people make when making a resolution?

3. How do you set reasonable, healthy expectations when you resolve to lose weight or shape up at this time of year or any other time of year?

4. What kind of support should you seek to help you achieve your goals?

5. What's the most important thing you can do to improve your chances of success before you make a healthy lifestyle change?


1. What are the psychological and emotional reasons behind these failures?

The biggest factor by far is emotional or stress eating. If you are in the habit of over using food as a form of self medication when you're in distress (overwhelmed, anxious, angry, bored or lonely,) then you are emotionally dependent on food to regulate your emotions. The instant you make your New Year's resolution you are in conflict with yourself. Your resolve may be absolutely serious and very real at the moment but when the stresses of everyday life throw you into a tailspin, even the greatest motivations will be sacrificed in favor of restoring your emotional equilibrium. You think forward with your head but respond in the moment to your feelings.

Think of it this way. For most parts of your life you can simply do what you intend to do. You brush your teeth, go to the store, keep your appointments. There is little or no distance between the mental intention and the act of doing. When you resolve to lose weight, you are making a simple clear healthy choice. There aren't any valid reasons not to do it, so you expect and hope that your intention will carry the day. It doesn't work that way. When you begin to put that choice into action you discover that changing an eating pattern is a psychological piece of work.

There is another, probably hidden, part of you that does not really want to go along with your New Years resolution. Because food is so deeply rooted in family dynamics, when you change your eating habits, you disturb these early associations. Since food is every one's first form of love and safety, you can see how familiar eating habits can provide comfort even when they may not be healthy.

What unhealthy eating habit did you "inherit" from childhood?

2. What is the biggest mistake people make when making a resolution?

The biggest mistake people make is ignoring the emotional eating factor. You hope to override it with good intentions and strong motivations and a new program that is guaranteed to work this time. You may be embarrassed about your weight or worried about your health or just want to look better or move with more grace. These are all strong powerful motivations that will drive you for a while. In the commonsense world, these motivations should prevail and take you all the way to your goal.

But there is this other force inside you that will throw up a smoke screen of a thousand excuses in order to justify going back to those eating patterns that make you feel safe, patterns that have probably existed for decades, and maybe since childhood.

When you make a New Year's resolution to lose weight, you are setting yourself up for failure if you don't recognize and take into account the fact that your overeating habits are the adult form of a child's security blanket. The security blanket made the child feel safe, but it didn't make the child safe. The same with food.

The safety and psychological hiding place that over eating or binging provides is only an ILLUSION. Once you really understand this, you can change your eating habits and reach your weight goals. This is why 95% of diets fail. If you don't deal with it, your chances of being successful for very long are slim.

How does food make you feel safe?

3. How do you set reasonable, healthy expectations when you resolve to lose weight or shape up at this time of year or any other time of year?

You have to pay attention to reality, which means you'll need to start eating healthy, making sure not to put yourself in the position of feeling deprived which only sets up for the next failure. Don't think of losing weight as a contest to win, because that means you are sure to lose. Think of it as a decision to be healthy, and that it is your responsibility to create a program that works for you, and that you are the expert. Don't set an artificial weight goal to meet some event deadline.

Remember you are losing weight for you because that is the healthy thing to do, not to please others or to impress others. If you keep all that in mind, you'll be happy with a modest weight gain in the beginning that is tied directly to conscious healthy decision making. Once that is established, the weight will come off much faster than you can imagine. And don't rely on exercise to lose weight. You can undo an hour of vigorous exercise in two minutes eating junk food. You should exercise to be healthy and enjoy your body. To lose weight, you need to focus more on what you put and let into your body... physically, emotionally and mentally.

What negative emotional or mental energy are you currently "binging" on?

4. What kind of support should you seek to help you achieve your goals?

Surround yourself with people who support healthy eating, who enjoy eating right, and are proud of making good food choices. A good weight loss partner who thinks the way you do can be very useful. The most important support people are those who respect your need to be the one who makes the decisions, including indulging on special occasions without feeling guilty or like a failure. Stay away from those who want to tell you what to do.

Do you have a family member, friend or co-worker that will listen compassionately to your "story" as you experience the challenges of changing your eating habits?

5. What's the most important thing you can do to improve your chances of success before you make a healthy lifestyle change?

The most important thing you can do is be honest with yourself. If you are too distraught, scared of attempting to change your eating habits, just wishing and hoping but secretly sure you are going to fail, don't do it now just because it is a new year. But if you are tired of yo-yo dieting, and tired of being obsessed and controlled by food, and are really ready to start a new part of your life by understanding rather than avoiding your emotional life, then make a serious commitment to a program that can guide you safely, step-by-step, to that goal. When you decide to make a commitment, then stick with it by seeing it as a psychological growth adventure which just happens to give you the added benefit of getting rid of your cravings and compulsive eating.

How would you like to grow personally as an adult?

These are hard times for everyone. Even though there is a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the country, it's still time to celebrate with family and friends. It's not just foreign affairs that challenge us, it's issues much closer to home. "Modern Families" the T.V. show, says it all with humor. There are more modern mixed families than traditional families. What's Christmas like when your children go to your divorced spouse's celebration and you go to a friends house? What's it like when you don't have enough money to buy presents? And all the other challenges that come with the territory this time of year.

We created a short program to help you create a four part plan that helps you face this season's difficult challenges. We want to help you face something rather than hide in food. We want to give you a gift, a better opportunity to have a joyful Christmas season. Holiday times can be joyful but they can also breed depression, and depression leads to over-eating, and over-eating or binging causes self-contempt, and self-contempt leads back to depression. There's the potential for a vicious cycle, and here's one way to make sure you don't go there.

The plan you create will help you identify and face your anticipated challenges, prepare yourself in advance, and give yourself time to create an adaptive strategy. With this readiness, you can be more effective and start to build a strong base of confidence in yourself!

The best thing you can do for yourself is to start working on your emotional eating pattern right now, before the New Year when you usually make your resolution to really do something about your weight. Beginning to have control now and knowing that you are doing something about it, will give you that extra momentum and confidence that just might make the difference for next year.

You can still eat plenty at Christmas. Even if you eat a little too much that will be okay, as long as you are making a conscious decision to indulge yourself on this special occasion. If you can begin to trust yourself by starting to be more conscious about what's going on within you, you'll probably be able to prevent some or all of those awful blazing binges that make you hate yourself and rob you of the opportunity to enjoy the holidays.

Why not give yourself the gift of self confidence and self control?

To access our Free Tools go to the Shrink Yourself site.

I think I have established clearly in previous blogs that there is a known pathway to break the emotional eating habit. It requires you to march through 10 specific insight steps, one by one, until you convince yourself, by your own experience, that you can handle whatever is stirring in your mind without using food as a form of medication.

It's easy for me to describe each of the insights. It is probably clear to you what each means. But understanding them is not the same as putting them into practice.

So how do we help you convert an intellectual understanding of the insights you need to an actual real-life experience that can serve you well for the rest of your life?

Think of it as a massive attitude change. If you are an emotional eater your working attitude is that food is a medication that is absolutely essential for your emotional equilibrium. The attitude change you want to arrive at is that food is simply food to be used for health and enjoyment.

Have you ever changed your attitude in a big way before?

Of course you have although you may not have thought about it in this way. There was a time when you worshipped your parents as gods who would protect you for a lifetime from all harm. You were totally dependent on them for your safety, which meant that you would never really have to take care of yourself. When you were eight or nine years old you thought that members of the opposite sex were weird creatures you could not imagine having babies with. Those are just two of the massive attitude changes that everybody goes through.

It’s hard to remember exactly how you felt before these attitude changes. The same will be true for your attitude toward emotional eating once you reach your goal. You will look back and hardly believe that you considered food, overeating, or binging as an essential way of maintaining your emotional equilibrium.

The technique we use to help move from an intellectual understanding of each of the ten insights into a life experience you can trust is simply to ask you to pause at the critical moment that you are feeling a strong urge to eat in response to an emotional stimuli. The pause gives you a moment to reflect. If you don't pause but simply respond to the urge there is no opportunity for insight because the thinking in your mind is shut down. The pause must take place in the midst of a strong urge in order to have a corrective experience that retrains your brain.

When you pause you will be in touch with what is being stirred up inside your mind. I can tell you that whatever it is you will be able to handle it. If you are an emotional eater you do not believe me. What you need is evidence that you can rely on. That can only come from your own experience.

What we do is we take you through the exercises in the Shrink Yourself program that allow you to gather your own evidence based on your own observations. You have to experience that you can handle whatever is coming up in your mind or in your life. You have to re-learn this is true many times before you will be confident enough in your new skills.

That's why the sequence of the 10 insights is important. You have to rebuild your confidence on a strong foundation. You have to prove to yourself that you have a strong, capable adult mind before you can let go of food as a safety valve.

So what is being stirred up in your mind that is so disturbing that you want to hide in food rather than understand and deal with the messages your brain wants to deliver to you?

The range of issues that can trigger an emotional eating episode is vast but most people have a limited and familiar personal list. That makes the task of learning how to cope with these things much more manageable.

Sometimes it's the feelings and thoughts that remind you of a difficult life problem that you don't want to face or have been facing but don't know what to do.

At other times it may be your perfectionism. There is a critic inside that can be harsh and persistent and you don't know how to effectively talk back to that part of yourself.

Sometimes it's not a problem or your critic but simply a feeling that is emotionally loaded because of your past life. Your sore spot might be that you're feeling misunderstood or unappreciated or overworked or being controlled by someone at work or at home. When those contemporary experiences ignite a painful relationship experience from the past, this threatens to flood you with confusion, and you turn to food to shut down your mind.

Whether it's a problem, your critic, or a sore spot, you can learn better ways of handling it than shutting down your mind with food.

That's the lesson that you have to totally absorb and integrate into your life experience in order to end emotional eating and control your weight.

There is no quick cure. Making a large attitude change requires time and effort. All we can offer you is a map of how to get there and exercises designed to help you have the critical experiences you need to get there as fast and as surely as possible.