Dieting and stress go hand in hand. I don’t think that anyone would disagree with that. If you’re a woman who’s ever been on a diet, you know that if you’re on a weight loss program, then you feel pressured to do it perfectly. Don’t you?
There’s just no room for mistakes, right? That’s what I thought too.
I started my first diet when I was 11 years old. In 1973, my Pediatrician, Dr. Zucker put me on a 1000 calorie a day diet. He gave me a list of foods to avoid that was probably as long as my arm. It crushed my little soul having to think of never being able to eat those foods again.
Like so many other women, the concept of good and bad foods has followed me around for years. I was taught that when I eat the foods that are on the ‘good’ list, then I’m entitled to feel virtuous and proud of my accomplishments. On the other hand, when I eat the foods from the ‘bad’ list, I tend to feel awful about myself, almost as though I’m a thief or a criminal.
In an attempt to cradle my aching heart after years of being abused by my alcoholic stepfather and many other nameless, faceless men as a kid, I ate in secret, hiding my guilty shame and evil deeds from others.
When I moved in with my Dad and my step mother, Rosie, I’d steal money from my dad’s money clip when he wasn’t looking and stick it in my jacket pocket so that I could buy candy and pizza after school the next day. I took babysitting jobs so that I could raid the cabinets and refrigerators of the women who entrusted me with their children. Yessirre. I would do almost anything for food. I was what you’d call a food floozie.
Today I finally declare my independence from food thanks to a process called Intuitive Eating, a term first used by registered dieticians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole. Intuitive Eating is a permission based approach to food. Nothing is off bounds. You can eat anything you want as long as you eat in response to your hunger.
Last August when I first tested out this process, I was astonished by how my tastes for food were changing without even trying. All of a sudden pototo chips tasted too salty and chocolate sometimes tasted too sweet. I knew that this was incredible and that it really could work. Yet I couldn’t get a handle on this thing called hunger. I just always felt physically hungry. Now, as a trained Certified Energy Coach, I know that our bodies can fool us into thinking that we’re hungry when we’re not. Despite a tendency to continue to overeat, I was slowly learning to eat differently. I was beginning to realize that I had control over foods.
Nonetheless, my independence cost me a weight gain of 25 pounds in order for me to truly discover that I actually could control myself around food. Today I continue along on the road back down to my normal weight. As I do, I take pride in knowing that I can handle any former temptation. Although I am a fierce advocate of Intuitive Eating and I love it passionately, I wouldn’t recommend it to be used alone for any woman who has a history of abuse. It’s like being handed a loaded gun.
As a coach who teaches women how to reclaim their power over food, you’d naturally ask yourself, “Andrea, who the heck do you think you are teaching me to lose weight if you can’t do it yourself.”
Good question.
As a woman who has had more than her share of adversity, the gift that I bring to the table for you is a marriage of two methods, Intuitive Eating and energy coaching. I don’t propose to teach you how to lose weight, rather I guarantee that I will help you to make peace with all foods so that you will gently lose weight on your own, loving and respecting yourself more than ever throughout the entire process.
You see, I don’t want you to have to make the same mistake I did and gain massive amounts of weight because you struggle with always feeling hungry. If you’re a woman with a history of abuse, the hunger you feel is not coming from your body, it’s coming from your heart. I can help you deal with that and free yourself from the pain of your past.
Before deciding to say goodbye to dieting, I had successfully achieved and maintained a weight loss of over 40 pounds for nearly 5 years. It made me cocky and sassy, thinking that I had it all figured out. I may have been good at playing the game of dieting, but food had complete control over me. Everytime I felt stressed, I would eat, I’d pick at food all day long and avoid parts of my life by eating. As a dieter, successfully losing the weight, the games became more intense. In order to keep my weight loss, I had to follow a grueling schedule of workouts. I ate like a pigeon when I was preparing to eat like a vulture. That never changed through all my years of dieting.
Because my background was filled with abuse, I have had and still sometimes continue to work on many insecurities around my body and my abilities to trust myself around food. I was taught that I had no self control. On the smallest of scales, my M&Ms were counted and I was made to feel small if I ‘cheated’ on my diet. All that baggage and more joined the party when I began to test out the process of Intuitive Eating.
Believing that I had no ability to stop eating and that food controlled my every waking moment, I was pulled to eat everytime any stress popped up in my life. I found myself eating every hour on the hour, grabbing something just to feel safe and satisfied.
I’m a hard head. It took me 25 pounds to realize that for a gal with serious issues around security and safety, Intuitive Eating was taking too darned long. That’s when I realized that it needed a kick in the pants that could only come from energy coaching.
Years prior, I had been taught a technique called Emotional Freedom Technique and it did for me what 18 years of talk therapy failed to do. It freed me from many painful memories that haunted me night and day.I even learned how to apply it to whacking down cravings.
After gaining the weight, I realized that I had to combine the two processes. Since I’ve done that and created a program for women, I’ve been astonished at the results. Women with abuse histories like my clients have achieved weight losses of up to 40 pounds and more using this combined process. To learn more about how you can safely and confidently end the turmoil of yo-yo dieting, read a few chapters of my upcoming book “Say Goodbye to Dieting”, and discover new hope that will lead you to know that you too can lose weight without dieting. Come see what all the buzz is about.