1. We believe healthy people come in all shapes and sizes.
2. Diets don’t work for Emotional Eaters. Diets only address the symptom, the weight…not the underlying problem, emotional eating or the use of food to manage mood, to stuff down feelings.
3. People use ”food thoughts”, food, and/or dieting behaviors to take care of emotional needs. When you fill your head with a food (or diet) thought, you temporarily push all other thoughts or feelings from your present consciousness. When we’re bored, stressed, angry or lonely, even when some of us get excited…to avoid the intensity of feeling, we obsess about food instead. Emotional overeating happens on a continuum. At the far end of that continuum, this can become a person’s primary coping strategy…a person’s only way to self-comfort and regulate their moods.
4. We recognize and respect the power of food when it is used as a coping strategy. It works…for a little while…then we feel like our best friend has betrayed us.
5. We respect the resilience of people who have come to use food to take care of their emotional needs. They have likely made it through some pretty difficult emotional times, by having food at their side.
6. We understand that emotional eating impacts a person’s ability to live their life to the fullest and to achieve desired physical and emotional health.
7. We honor the pain that results when this coping strategy seemingly takes on a life of its own…and robs a person of theirs.
8. We believe change occurs when the problem is approached with new insight in these arenas…emotional, physical, nutritional, and spiritual health.
9. We know, from experience, that working through the feelings that drive a person to eat can be a painful process…but, that process is nowhere near as painful as staying stuck in the problem.
10. We trust that with support and new understanding a person can come to view change as a relief…and as an attainable choice. We know it takes courage to ask for help!

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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 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