Last week I wrote a post about one of my coaching client’s challenges with travel and emotional eating. In that post she spoke of a friend who is still a yo-yo dieter. We’ll call her friend Jill.

Jill has dieted and lost and gained over a 100 pounds several times. Following one of those 100 pound losses, she had surgery to remove and tighten her skin and then regained all of the weight and then some.  I’ve heard this painful story many times from emotional, compulsive, and binge eaters.

Next week Jill is going on a trip with a group of women friends who are also chronic dieters.  Several of these women are currently on a very restrictive well known fad diet.  Jill told my client she may try to follow that same diet while she’s away. 

But just in case, she’s planning to take two sets of travel clothes. The first includes her more fashionable clothes, more fitted with coordinated belts, etc. The second wardrobe consists of black leggings and her black big shirts for dress-up nights, sweat pants and other black stretchy pants for everyday wear. Which clothes she ends up wearing will depend on whether she sticks to the strict diet plan…or careens out-of-control with food. It doesn’t sound like she allows for any other possibility in between restrictive dieting and being out-of-control.

My heart aches for Jill and everyone else who is constantly, obsessively, exhaustingly either on a diet…or feeling and eating out-of-control. I have so been there, done that!  And I choose NEVER to be that miserable, again!  I don’t believe that’s the way life has to be, even for people who struggle with emotional, compulsive, or binge eating! 

What do you think?  We hope you’ll share your thoughts and feelings with us in the Comments Section below…

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Ellen Shuman is a Life Coach who specializes in emotional and binge eating issues. She is the founder of A Weigh Out & Acoria Eating Disorder Treatment, Vice President of the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA), and Co-Chair of the Academy for Eating Disorders Special Interest Group on “Health at Every Size”, ellen@aweighout.com

Last week, one of my west coast coaching clients told me she was heading east for a family wedding.  She is still away…currently struggling…so today’s coaching call focused mainly on the challenges she’s experiencing on this trip…

“Always, the first thing my mom and grandmother do is look me up and down.”

She has been doing some amazing work; taking better care of herself. As a by-product, her weight has gravitated down to a more natural weight for her body. And EVERYONE who hadn’t seen her in a while commented on that fact. And people say the dumbest things!

“One person said, ‘It’s like hugging half the person I used to love.’ Another said, ‘You’re taking up so much less space’.  Space? I thought to myself , I guess I have reduced my ‘body footprint’ on this earth. Is that a good thing?”

She relayed an encounter with someone she described as having “just ballooned back up” after losing a lot of weight on a diet.

“She came running up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you look amazing!  You have to tell me everything you’re doing. Don’t leave anything out!’  As I started to explain what we’ve been working on; living in the moment, practicing self-care, reducing emotional eating, eating intuitively… she got this look on her face as if she were thinking, ’What? Have you joined a cult or something?’

“Part of me liked the new attention. A bigger part of me felt very self-conscious that everyone was looking at my body. No one ever commented on my body before…this all made me very self-conscious and uncomfortable.”

Why?

“Oh, it opens me up to all sorts of new possibilities.”

Like what kind of possibilities?

“Being out in the world and participating, instead of hiding in my house…”

“Next thing I knew I was eating a whole loaf of bread at Buca di Beppo and every greasy cheesy thing I could get my hands on.

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“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.” ~Anne Lamott

“Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.” ~Salvador Dalí

A search for perfection is always a search for fault. And once we find the inevitable faults, perfectionism sets up the expectation that all faults can and should be eliminated. Inescapably, our scrutiny will reveal that how we are, how we look, and how we perform is not good enough, is not perfect.

It’s easy to see why diets, with their rules of how to behave and promises of getting the body and life you want, are so seductive. Diets prompt us to focus on a perfect, idealized end result instead of focusing on and valuing the process of self care that creates true change.

In focusing on a perfect end result, we move away from knowing and trusting that, no matter what,

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I received the following email from Audrey, a Member of our A Weigh Out Members’ Circle, in response to my post about the Insanity of Weight Loss Contests.  Just when she’d freed herself from the tyranny of the scale, a Biggest Loser Contest sucked her right back in. Read about the choices she is making now…

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Dear Ellen,

I have been very focused on practicing my PENSO skills, feeling great even, and happy with my new skills. My productivity, well-being, concentration is all improved. I’m enjoying my life in every aspect. Then a friend asked me to partner with her in one of those Biggest Loser contests.

Now,

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