Are you bored?

Do you eat when you are bored? What is bored?

Sometimes clients tell me that they sit at home with a to do list three pages long, kids that are craving their attention, a book they have been trying to write, dinner to make and yet they feel bored.

Even with all the work they have to do and many people to share their life with, they sit on the couch feeling dull and lifeless. This is when Spicy Cheetos sound exciting. This is when a lucious tub of chocolate chocolate chunk fudge brownie cookie cake ice cream sounds amazing. When life is dull and our thoughts are boring-food all of a sudden seems like entertainment.

I can't remember right now where I heard it, but someone once said, "There is no such think as being bored, there is only being boring." Ouch! You mean bored doesn't happen to me, it is something I do? Clients never like it when I inform them of this. They want to believe that boring is something that comes over them-something they can't control. But that is simply not true.

The first thing to do when you think you are bored is to ask yourself, "Why?" Wait for the answer. What do you hear yourself saying? Do you think you are bored because
"there is nothing to do" or because "everything is always the same?" Notice how these descriptions are passive. Notice how you have made yourself something that things happen to instead of someone who happens.

The truth is you can create excitement in your life and you can create joy. These are things you can actively do. They are choices. The more you listen to what you want to do and do it in your life the less boredom you will feel. The less boredom you feel the less exciting a bag of Cheetos will seem.


Get your excitement and joy from fulfilling your desires-not filling your stomach with unneeded food.

What if Food Had No Calories?

Seriously think about this question. What if you could eat whatever you want and never gain weight? Yes, really, never gain a pound. You would still have to feel the effects of overeating like bloat and fullness and the ick of too many sweets-but you would not gain one pound.

Think about it.

How often would you eat? Would you eat all day long? Why or why not? Would you eat candy? French Fries? Burgers? Steak?

Or would you carry bags of food around with you and eat only when you had a break? Would you have two lunches? Three dinners? How many desserts? Would you wake up in the middle of the night to eat for sport or fun? What would you order at your favorite restaurant?

Let yourself ponder this and answer honestly.

Then ask yourself, "Why?'

What do you notice? Does it lose its luster when you can't use it as a weapon against yourself and your body? Does it lose the negative belief-proving qualities when you can't use it as the reason you are unworthy? Does it sound boring and dull to eat all day long? Or does food seem like a logical choice for joy? Does getting pleasure from food on such a consistent basis seem like a good idea?

Is this really what you want to do with this one precious life? Just Eat?

Imagine you’re thin. You can eat whatever you want, whenever you want.

Now what?

Never Settle

Think about all the areas of your life and which areas you know deep down inside you are settling when you deserve better. For some of you it is your job, for others it is the state of your relationships, and for most of you it is your body and health. In these areas you know you want more, but you have accepted bad or good instead of great. In Jim Collins' book, "Good to Great" he explains that good is the enemy of great. I love this idea. It the recipe for a mediocre life, when you know you could have a fantastic one.

My longest, dearest friend recently realized this about her life. She looked up from her daily routine of work, kids, husband, house, and body and realized she was settling. She was going through her days on automatic pilot with "no complaints." She knew that things weren't as good as they could be, but she had settled for "good enough."

So she decided to do something about it. She decided that if she wasn't moving forward toward the life she wanted, she was moving away from it. She learned the lesson that there is no standing still. You are either actively creating the life you want or you are taking what you "get." She started connecting with her body and doing her emotional work and lost 20 pounds in a few months. She started looking for a new job, found one and gave notice to her current employer. To her surprise, her current employer came to her and offered her to name her price in order to keep her at the company. She is now doing the same job for almost twice the amount of money! And finally, she decided to more actively engage in her relationship with her husband to make it better than just good and it became full of compliments, not just absent of complaints.

I saw her in person recently and she was glowing. She was alive and awake in her own life. She seemed proud and full of self-respect. She wasn't settling. She was moving forward into the life she wants and deserves.

What are you settling for in your life? What do you want to move towards instead?

I Agree to Disagree

I had a very interesting radio interview this morning. The show I appeared on is hosted by another Life Coach who is strong and action oriented. I loved her bold style and thought it would be very fun to appear on her show to coach a caller. The prearranged caller was someone who wanted to lose weight and because I am the weight loss coach, I was going to coach her live with some input from the other Life Coach.

I am always a bit reluctant to do radio and TV because of the way the shows are produced in "sound byte" segments. I find it difficult to coach someone or convey a weight loss tool in such short bursts of time, but I hadn't done one in a long time and was willing to try it out with two coaches, one client, and two six minute segments. It was challenging to say the least.

The best part of the experience was that the Life Coach and I had many different ideas about how this caller should approach her weight loss. As many of you know, I believe we need to uncover the cause of the overeating at the same time we are taking action to lose the weight. It is my belief that the weight is the symptom of overeating, which is a symptom of the thoughts and tapes playing in the head of the client. This Life Coach told me she thought I was much more empathetic in my approach than she. This might have something to do with the fact that I have struggled with my weight and she hasn't-but it could also just be a difference in our coaching styles.

So the caller comes on and tells us that she wants to lose 20 pounds. She is an actor and because of her profession has to face rejection on a regular basis and believes life would be easier if she were thin. She said her body image came from her profession. At this point, I had to interrupt her and remind her that her body image comes from her thoughts about herself and not from an "industry." I told her that I thought she rejected herself in her own mind long before she entered the audition room. She agreed.

But here is where the Life Coach and I disagreed. The Life Coach thought she should take ACTION and go on a diet and exercise and lose the 15 pounds so she could feel empowered. I thought she needed to unwind her negative thinking so she could feel empowered and from there find the motivation to exercise and eat less. I have been doing this long enough to know that if you take action without unwinding the cause of the weight in the first place, you will only end up gaining it back. If action were enough, the failure rates on diets wouldn't be so high.


So who's right? Well, we both are. There are people who can take action, get results and this will cause them to change their thinking. I guess I am the girl you come to when that approach doesn't work. I help my clients change their thinking first. I like this approach for my especially miserable feeling clients, because this approach can change how they feel immediately. They can't change their weight fast enough when they have 100 pounds to lose, that takes time; but I can help them change the way they are thinking and feeling immediately by showing them how much control they do have over their emotional experience.

So, for now, we can agree to disagree. The debate made for good radio, but I am going to stick to helping my clients from the inside out. I know, for me personally, that is the only thing that worked long term.

But I Deserve It!

“I deserved to eat it.” I have heard this reason for overeating more times than I can count. Clients will eat at a meal even when they aren't hungry, they will eat dessert when they are already at 4, or they will eat at a party after a long week all in the name of "deserving it."

But let me tell you what you are really saying when you say you deserve food you don't want or need:

I deserve to be uncomfortable.
I deserve to feel guilty.
I deserve to jeopardize my health.
I deserve to be disconnected from my body.
I deserve to not really enjoy or taste my food.
I deserve to live heavier than my natural weight.
I deserve to struggle.

You do not deserve any of the above. It is punishing and unkind. Eating past fullness or when you aren't joy-eating is like turning your back on yourself and looking over your shoulder at yourself and saying, "Too bad, you deserve this." YOU DON'T DESERVE PUNISHMENT. Whatever messed up belief you have pulled from your childhood that you blame yourself for has no relevance in your life now. Punishing yourself for something you THINK you did in your past is useless.

Here is what you deserve no matter what you think you have done:

You deserve to be happy.
You deserve to stop eating when your body doesn't need more fuel.
You deserve to enjoy each bite of a joy food.
You deserve to say "no" to food when you aren't hungry.
You deserve your own love.
You deserve your own protection.
You deserve kind thoughts towards yourself.
You deserve to live in a healthy, strong and lean body.
You deserve the feeling of lightness and freedom.

So please don't eat some chocolate concoction in the name of "deserving it."

You deserve better.

I Don't Have to Worry About My Weight

Either do you.

Worrying about anything is a choice.

As many of you know, I am a Law of Attraction freak. I think Esther, Jerry and Abraham rock. Everything I read of theirs resonates with me on the deepest of levels. It compliments the work I have been doing with my clients for years.

The basic premise/truth that I teach my clients is this: Your THOUGHTS create your FEELINGS- which create your ACTIONS- which create your RESULTS, and your results will always prove the original thought whether you like it or not. So basically if you believe that you will always be fat, you will feel fat, you will eat too much, and then you will gain weight proving your original thought.

The Law of Attraction says the same thing but uses different words. It states: Your FOCUS creates your VIBRATION -which is what MANIFESTS- which attracts more of what you are focused on. Same truth. Different words.

So, going back to worrying about your weight- the FEELING is worry. I teach my clients to find the feeling and feel it. Then, I suggest they find the thought causing it. (Remember all feelings are caused by thoughts.) In this case the thought may be, "I will never lose this weight and my health will suffer." (You may think this is a fact, but really it is just your thought.) The good news is that if you want to stop the feeling of worry, all you have to do is change the thought.

Easy, right?

Well, this is where the law of attraction may help me explain. The Law of Attraction basically states that we attract to us what we are vibrating outwardly. And if we stay with the idea that feelings are really the vibrations in our body, then you can imagine what the vibration of "worry" might attract. More worry. More things to worry about. Because, as Abraham would say, "When you push against what you don't want, you are giving it your attention and attracting it."

So worry is focusing on the worst. Worrying is actually thinking about what you don't want. If you are worried it is because you have a belief or a thought that is not serving you.

Ok, so what should you do?

It is actually quite simple. Focus on changing your thoughts. Unwind the crappy ones and think about what you genuinely want. You will know when you have a great thought because it will make you FEEL amazing to think it. The more you think about it, the better you will feel and the more of it you will attract into your life.

If you find yourself thinking the thought and you feel icky, it is because you are thinking about not having it. Reword the thought so when you focus on it, you imagine yourself having it and feeling amazing having it.

The thoughts and the feelings come first. Remember, you may think you wan the result (thinness) so you can stop worrying about your weight. But the truth is, you have to change your thoughts to stop worrying so you can take inspired action, manifest, or attract the result.

If you feel good, you are doing it perfectly!

The Beck Diet Solution

Have you guys read this newer book by Judith S. Beck? She is the daughter of Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy. How cool would it be to have such an influential Psychologist as your dad? And not only is she an amazing cognitive psychologist in her own right, but she has applied it all to weight loss! Lucky for us!

I don't agree with everything she writes, and some of her exercises I plain disagree with completely, but it is still a worthwhile read. She talks about how our thoughts (cognition) are really the arena we need to be playing in if we want to end emotional eating for the long term. If you change your thinking permanently, you change you behavior permanently. This is the mantra that I wholeheartedly agree with.

What Dr. Beck does so well in this book is identify common sabotaging thoughts that many dieters have when trying to lose weight. Thoughts such as: It's okay to eat this; It won't matter if I eat this; I can't waste food; and I can't stand being hungry.

As a coach in this field, these are the recycled thoughts I hear from many of my clients. I help my clients identify and question and ultimately change their thinking. Although Dr. Beck has a useful 7 questions technique to change the sabotaging thoughts, I prefer using the work of Byron Katie to turn our thinking around. It is the same idea, and ultimately may yield the same outcome of belief change, I just happen to believe Byron Katie is the master in this area.

The other part of this book that I found interesting is the section, "Practice Hunger Tolerance." Although I disagree that you should tolerate hunger because you need to stay on some diet schedule, I do agree that learning the physical sensation of hunger is not an emergency is important. I agree with her premise that if you are afraid of getting hungry you will eat constantly to avoid the sensation.

In my work, this would mean that you would not get to the point of -2 and knowing what that sensation is like in your body. Allowing yourself to feel that slight hunger is imperative when learning how to connect to your body.

There are many other gems in this very professionally written book. I do think it is worth a read if you have the time. I hope you find some tools that resonate with you that can be added to what you may already be doing.

As always, and with everything your read, keep what resonates with your true self and leave the rest.

I have nothing but respect and admiration for Dr. Beck and the Diet Beck Solution even with my differing opinions on some issues.

You can pick up her book at amazon.