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“I am struggling with emotional eating. I really want to lose weight, but I find my emotions get the best of me and I eat to comfort myself. What should I do?”

Emotional eating can manifest in many ways. You have a wide array of emotions—you might eat when you’re bored, lonely, sad, joyful, happy, anxious, or every other emotion in-between. Food can play the role of friend, entertainment, stress relief, time out, and escape. 

I’ve personally struggled with emotional eating. I’ve also helped many of my coaching clients deal with it. One of the best tools I can suggest is to journal your emotional eating so you can start becoming aware of the what, when, and why of your emotional eating. 

What’s the context (what was going on around you or happening externally)? How were you feeling (resentment, anger, frustration, boredom, etc.)?

From there, you can determine the things you actually have control over:

• advocating for your own needs
• telling your loved ones and support system the best ways they can help you
• modifying the stories you tell yourself
• changing your expectations
• establishing your boundaries

Here are a couple more ways you can get control over your emotional eating:

Start to build emotional awareness. 

If you can’t communicate your needs clearly to others, you fall into the trap of expecting that other people “should just know what I need.” This expectation will leave you feeling disappointed and frustrated. 

Emotional eaters are “importers”. They import food into their mouth as a way to shove down their emotions and needs. Instead, of being an importer you need to become an exporter. 

As an “exporter,” you speak your truth. You become more self-aware. You care for yourself enough to advocate for your needs, just like you would do for your child, pet, or elderly parent. 

You will change your relationship with food when you start to understand your emotional needs and share them. 

And when you make this change, food can just be food again. Something you enjoy and that gives you sustenance, but is not a solution to your problems. 

Don’t make your problems worse. 

I call this compounding your problems:

• You are angry about work/ home/ school/ etc. (Problem A)

So…

• You eat to feel better, which actually makes you feel worse. (Problem B)

Of course, you haven’t solved Problem A and you’ve added Problem B. Making things that much worse for yourself.

Instead of soothing yourself with food as a way of dealing with Problem A, what if you spoke up for yourself? What if you told someone what the problem was and tried to seek solutions to fix it? What if you took positive action and felt empowered, speaking your truth, advocating for your needs?

Emotional eating takes time to get over. 

Even now, I have to remind myself to identify what my problem really is and how I can take positive action to overcome it without turning to food. It is a choice I make daily. 

If this is something you also struggle with, I have created the End Emotional Eating teaching toolkit for you. I made it to give you a framework and skills to determine your emotional needs. 

Following the lessons, you will learn how to communicate your needs to others and how you can view your life circumstances differently. 

Isn’t it time you felt free to eat food because you wanted to, and not because you thought it was going to fix or soothe your problems and emotions? 

If you would like even more help with this, please check out this webinar recording I did on ending emotional eating.

This question is the part of my job I find the most heart-wrenching. 

I get emails and messages from people all the time who have lost weight but then gained it back. 

And because they’ve gained some or all of the weight back, they share with me that they feel like they’ve failed. 

The truth is we are not guaranteed to keep off every pound of weight we lose. 

That’s why I encourage you to find a maintainable weight range you can live with. If you have gained back a substantial amount of weight after losing it, and you’re not feeling good about where you are, there is hope. You can get back to where you want to be! 

I’ve been in your shoes. I actually lost 80 pounds in high school. But then, throughout my early twenties I ended up gaining back all of the 80 pounds I’d lost and added an extra 90 pounds to my frame. 

It was a very hard pill to swallow. I’d done all that work. And then to have gone completely in the other direction. 

So, please know that if you’re dealing with weight regain: you are not alone. 

What we need to do is reflect on this as a learning opportunity. Ask yourself: why was your previous weight loss not sustainable? Maybe you’ve always picked diets and were able to adhere to them for a short time. Then, when life got difficult or you felt too deprived, you fell back on old habits. Or maybe you had some major life disruption that drastically altered your healthy habit behaviors in a way you didn’t expect. (I talk more about this in my “Which diet is best for weight loss?” blog post.)

Your habits constantly need fine-tuning. As our life evolves—we change careers, family members get sick, illness, or any other major change—our healthy habits are impacted. To avoid this, you need to evaluate what broke down in your weight maintenance system. This is what caused you to regain the weight.

Once you’ve lost the weight again, you don’t want to fall victim to those old behaviors. By understanding what caused the weight gain, you know what to watch for in the future. 

The next step is to stop approaching your weight loss the same way you always have. Often, people who have regained weight desperately want to get back to their goal. So they immediately start doing the same diet or program that helped them lose weight the last time. 

It’s understandable why someone might think this is the way to go, but it really makes no sense. 

Think about it: Whatever you did to lose weight did not prepare you for whatever caused your weight regain. You need to start to approach this situation differently if you want to get different results. 

Have you ever tried to maintain your current weight on purpose? Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you lost weight and got down to 160 pounds, But now you are 200 pounds. The knee-jerk reaction is to get back down to 160. But wait! Have you learned how many calories you need to maintain the 200 pounds on purpose? 

On purpose means you are not restricting your foods or binge eating. It means you aren’t only tracking and eating “on plan” Monday through Friday, but then eating whatever you want on the weekend. 

It does mean you should find a calorie amount that allows you to maintain your 200 pounds. Then, when eating at that calorie level, on purpose, and tracking your food every day, you’ll discover you can maintain your current weight.

But I can hear you now, “Heather are you crazy? I don’t want to maintain 200 pounds on purpose!” 

I get it. 

And when I was in my yo-yo dieting days I would have had the same response. But the problem is you are in a panic to get back to where you want. You are trying to rush back to what “worked”. But are you being honest about where you are now? Are you setting yourself up for success if you go down the same path you’ve gone down (many times) before? 

What happens on the day you can’t hit your weight loss calories? Do you have any other options for what to do? 

No, you don’t. And that’s because you don’t know your maintenance calories. If you’re going to lose this weight again, and keep it off, you have to take a different approach. 

Remember the definition of insanity? 

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

This is why I created the teaching toolkit Fight the Weight Gain. It’s an eight-step process to get you back on track losing the weight, but with a different approach than you did before. 

Let me help you the way I’ve helped others. 

Please know that this is possible, but you’re not going to be able to use the same methods you always have if you want to get the weight off and keep it off permanently. You’re going to need to learn from your past experiences and that’s what I want to help you do.

If you’d like to hear more about my teaching toolkit, Fight the Weight Gain, please listen to this episode of Half Size Me: Episode 385.

After attempting weight loss for so many years of my life, going on and off so many diets and failing miserably, I came to the realization that there is no one diet anyone should be on. 

Most diets require you to overhaul your life overnight. 

Anyone can make a massive change for a short period of time, but when your life changes (and it will at some point), or you have a disruption, you will revert back to your old habits.  

The behaviors you were doing for the past 10, 20, or 30 years will start to come back. The abrupt artificial changes you made so you could follow a diet will fall by the wayside. As you revert back to your old habits, the weight you lost will return. This happens because the life, and habits, you lived before starting the diet supported the weight you were.

Weight loss is a process of moving you from where you are now with your habits to where you want to be in the long-term. 

Think of it like a road map: if you are traveling to Florida from New Jersey, you can get accurate and clear directions that are specific to your current location and desired destination. However, if you just want directions to Florida and you ask someone for help without telling them where you are starting from, then they can’t tell you the best route to reach where you want to go.

Most diet programs and books have no idea of your starting point. 

They have designed their program for a generic person. Someone who fits a certain “type,” but one who doesn’t necessarily have the same background or needs as you do.

There’s so much the diet books and programs don’t know about you, including:

• your lifestyle
• your food preferences
• your cooking ability
• your economic situation
• your pre-existing knowledge
• your family or work obligations

So how can two people with completely different home lives, education, and skill sets both expect to succeed following a one-size-fits-all diet? 

Answer: They can’t.

I had a breakthrough moment when I realized not one diet book I’d ever read told me what to do when I binged. Sure, I could white-knuckle my way through adhering to a plan for a few weeks, or even a few months, but I always ended up bingeing. I felt so alone because the diet books never talked about binge eating. 

They never suggested binge eating was a potential problem, nor did they offer ways to deal with it. Instead, they assumed the reader did not struggle with binge eating. (Interestingly, I’ve met more people who’ve struggled with binge eating throughout the weight loss process than have not.) 

Now, I understand that those books and programs were not made to help us for the long-term. 

Anybody can adhere to a diet and make behavior changes for the short-term. But then, inevitably, they will rebel. 

And what happens when something unexpected occurs? All those changes you forced into your life start feeling artificial and forced, so you quickly abandon them to go back to what you’ve always done. 

If you’d like to hear more about how to implement permanent habit changes into your life instead of “one-size-fits-all” quick fixes, then please listen to Half Size Me episode 376.

How to be successful in the long-term: slow behavior and habit change over time

Just going on a diet and suddenly changing all of the things you’re doing is a recipe for disaster.

You need to strategically build in small changes to your life. These changes will allow you to lose weight, and will also help you keep it off in the long-term. 

Most of us could lose 20, 30, or even 50 pounds quickly by following any diet. However, for many, the weight loss never sticks. You don’t want quick weight loss; you want permanent weight loss. 

Losing 20 pounds in 30 days may sound great, but when you gain it back, those 30 days are really just lost. But if you lose 20 pounds over six months and keep it off for the rest of your life, those 6 months are an investment. If you are counting down the seconds until the diet ends, it’s probably not maintainable. What you do to lose the weight should feel livable, and you should be able to see yourself doing it for a long, long time.

What are habits and how can you implement them?

Habits are everything you do from the time you get up until the time you go to bed. 

Each day of your life is really just a string of habits, one playing off another. You know there are many good habits that can help you on your weight loss journey, such as eating more vegetables, eating on smaller plates, weighing your food, tracking your food, and getting in movement. 

There are lots of other habits that can be positive. But some are neutral or negative, depending on how you approach them.

These include:

• when you get up
• when and how you get ready for your day
• what you eat for your meals and snacks
• how you prioritize your time for work, yourself, and others
• what physical activities you do (or don’t do)
• how you commute to and from work and what you do during that commute time
• how you deal with stress
• how you plan, prepare, and eat your food each day
• how you give your time away to others and not yourself
• how you talk to yourself
• how you handle “fun food” or “treats”

This list can go on and on, but I think you get the general idea. Changing these habits to positively affect your life will help you lose weight. But it needs to be done slowly and precisely if you’re doing it for the long haul.

That’s why I created the Stop Dieting Start Losing coaching cast. It will help walk you through this process. 

Most people understand the ideas and concepts, but many struggle with the process and being honest about how much change they can do at once. 

This is why I’ve created my Stop Dieting and Start Losing coach cast. In this coaching cast, I share with you how to start building in changes to your life systematically, and how to test those changes so you can be sure you’ll stick with them for the long-term.

In Stop Dieting and Start Losing, I also break down the problems with diets and how the diet industry has contributed to us feeling like we lack the self-efficacy and self-esteem to lose weight without a diet. 

Know this: You are capable and you are strong. You can lose this weight and keep it off. 

Instead of continuously getting stuck in the cycle of losing and regaining, let’s stop dieting and start losing together.

Many people trying to lose weight struggle with compulsive eating, grazing, and out-of-control nighttime eating. 

I’ve been there myself. I understand how painful it is to have a goal of losing weight, wanting to make daily progress, but then finding yourself undoing all of your progress and hard work at night. 

There are often two reasons people struggle with the problem of compulsive night eating:

1.) Lacking good foundational eating behaviors. Foundational eating behaviors are daily routines like eating regularly and prioritizing sitting down and eating off of a plate. They can include making sure your calories and macronutrients goals are covered, such as getting in enough fiber and protein. 

In our hectic lives, we are on the go so much it’s easy to skip a meal or not have the right types of foods easily available (foods that actually satiate your hunger). When we skip meals or don’t eat things that support our goals, we, not unsurprisingly, often turn to some form of compensatory eating later. 

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff extensively covers the concept of compensatory eating in his book The Diet Fix, which I have frequently mentioned on the Half Size Me show. I would encourage you to read this book to help yourself establish some good eating foundations. 

2.) A negative relationship with treats and fun food. You may think you need to be strict with food while on a diet. You might even believe you shouldn’t have any fun foods, so you wind up being at one extreme or the other. 

Either you want to lose weight and force yourself to eat healthy food all the time, or you decide to give up losing weight and eat all the foods you want, without any self-regulation. 

But what if you could reject these two extremes? What would happen if you learned to find a balance between eating treats and nutritious, filling foods? 

When you tell yourself “forget it—I don’t care about weight loss and I’ll just eat all the food I want,” you create a cycle of beliefs and judgments about your actions. 

This struggle happens with nighttime eating: you have a small treat and feel you’ve done something wrong. Then you give yourself permission to continue eating more treats. You might tell yourself, “I messed up today and will start over tomorrow.”  However, you won’t really start over because you spiral back into the same cycle again and again and again.

This cycle is what keeps you stuck. Instead of learning how to balance fun food with nutritious food, you keep fun foods out of your life when trying to lose weight. That is until you cave in and give up. 

How might this pattern change if you planned to eat certain treats every day? What if you gave yourself permission to have a treat? 

What I learned was that as long as I thought certain foods were forbidden or “bad”, I’d eventually eat them. Then I’d feel bad about myself, but I wouldn’t stop. 

This belief cycle was not helping me. 

This process helped change my relationship with treats over time. Eventually I realized I wasn’t eating treats all day long, like I used to. Just like I don’t spend money on fun purchases all day long, I couldn’t spend my calories on fun food all the time. But that didn’t mean I could “never” enjoy treats either.

To me, the cycle of making certain foods “off limits” and then eating out of control was, in fact, a type of prison. And I couldn’t figure out how to pull myself out. I asked myself, “How can I be so prepared—have all my food planned and prepared—then feel so out of control later on in the day?” 

I slowly climbed out of this cycle by establishing healthy boundaries for myself.

I had to learn how to balance treats while losing weight. And now, I do it while maintaining my weight loss. 

I found I was much more successful at reaching my goals when I allowed myself to have treats every day. I had established healthy boundaries around my eating. I gave myself permission to eat treats and a time frame within which to eat them. 

If this is something you struggle with too, then I want to help you do it with my Escape the Food Prison coaching cast. 

In Escape the Food Prison, I will walk you through the process of creating the healthy food foundations and learning the process of delayed gratification so you can also stop this cycle. 

If you’d like to hear me discussing this coaching cast and more about nighttime and compulsive eating, please listen to Half Size Me: Ask Coach Heather Session 40: Getting Control Over Nighttime and Compulsive Eating.

I’m looking forward to going on this journey with you and really working on helping you find the balance you need to reach your goals.