Shrink Yourself Review on Emotional Eating

When I went to the Shrink Yourself website for the first time, I could not believe that there is at last a professionally run program that focuses on emotional eating!  From my years of experience helping patients, I have found that emotional eating is often the Achilles Heel in most people’s attempts at weight management.  The psychology of weight management plays a big role between success and failure.   Naturally, I was very excited and decided to recommend Shrink Yourself to my patients as an adjunct to the work that I was doing in my dietetics practice.  This is why I have decided to write a Shrink Yourself Review.

Emotional Eating Habits are Unconscious

As you know, eating is something most of us do unconsciously.  That is why they are called habits.  Habits are actions we take as if on auto-pilot and repeat without question.  In this Shrink Yourself Review, I would like to highlight that according to Dr Goul, when we use food as an opiate to overcome distress or difficult emotions like loneliness, anger, sadness, anxiety or depression, we are by definition emotional eaters.  Emotional eating is the primary cause of weight gain in first world countries today.

Shrink Yourself and Letting go of Emotional Eating

If you have tried losing weight numerous times without success and are tired and disappointed with yourself, do not despair.  I highly recommend Shrink Yourself to help you get some insights on:

1. what triggers your emotional eating
2. how to identify your own emotional eating pattern
3. how to interrupt these patterns
4. how you can set up a personalised structure to overcome it

In this Shrink Yourself Review, I would like to emphasise that you are in the best position to create your own personalised structure to overcome emotional eating.  What works for Mary or Mark may not work for you.  Everyone is different.  No one knows your problems better than you because you live them every single day.

Shrink Yourself Review

If you are ready to begin your journey of transformation and make some simple but profound changes to your relationship with food, now is the moment to seek professional guidance to keep you steadfastly in the straight and narrow till you get to the other side.  Letting go of the strong call of food will not be easy but it will be well worth it.

Shrink Yourself Online Therapy

In the Shrink Yourself Program, you get to embark on such a journey with hundreds of other people with the same issues.  From time to time, you also get webinars on the nuts-and-bolts-training on how to manage your psychology in weight management and exchange your thoughts with others through accessible and affordable online therapy and support groups.  Of course, the down side of this sort of interactive therapeutic learning program is that it lacks the personal touch that comes with intensive one-on-one consults with a psychologist or psychiatrist. What surprises me though is that the outcomes achieved through traditional therapy and online programs have been demonstrated in studies to be comparable.

Start Healing with Shrink Yourself

There are many ways to overcome emotional eating.  Hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, seeing a dietitian and joining a self-help group are all valid tools to achieving mindful eating.  Shrink Yourself and Emotional Eating is one of those programs that has been demonstrated to be successful in helping people overcome emotional eating.
As they say, a journey of a thousand steps begins with the first step. May your take your first step to recovery through this Shrink Yourself Review.

I hope you found this video informative and useful. What are your thoughts on diets and dieting?

I attribute this to the power of planning and staying focused.  Regular inputs in your journal make an enormous difference to your weight management outcome.  Commit 5 minutes each day to making an entry and reap your rewards in 6 months to a year.

Creating a working structure is your cornerstone for staying on task.  This journal provides a structure for your physical activity and eating plan.  Your entries help you stick to your goals, monitor your progress, keep your actions consistent, steer you away from your sporadic vices and identify some destructive patterns that might be consistently sabotaging you. For instance, finding the link between drinking coffee after dinner and poor sleep quality and excessive tiredness the next day, could be a powerful pattern that is zapping you of your energy to stay focused on self-care. If this regularly undermines your exercise regime and food choices, you might want to sit up and take notice and make some changes.  Do not underestimate the power of small changes in making big differences.  In this instance, cutting out the coffee after dinner could change a whole series of events for the next 24 hours.  Picture these events recurring for a whole year, how could that not cost you dearly in terms of effectiveness and generating results?  But before you can tweek your lifestyle in this manner, you must first make regular entries and then identify the problem areas before you can make the necessary changes. You cannot change what you do not know.   As you make these entries, you will find your self progressing in your stamina and food choices.  Success begets succeess.

For a free copy of Australian Food and Heart Week Exercise Record go to:

http://www.healthyweightweek.com.au/files/Food%20and%20Exercsie%20Chart%20FINAL.pdf

In this video, Jemima shares with you the game plan she has put in place for her sister’s wedding reception tomorrow.  Fundamentally, there are just two very basic guiding rules she will observe for this special occasion and they are:

1. Tune in to your hunger and satiety cues and eat till you are comfortably full.
2. Since there are no constraints on food choices, choose ONLY foods that rate 10/10 on the taste scale.

These simple rules will ensure that you do not feel deprived or left out on this special occasion.  Meanwhile, have loads of fun!

As long as we are alive, we will have problems.  Question is whether they are big or small.  But of course, the sum of all our problems will always add up to 100%, irrespective of what they are.  The wisdom lies in having a rational and balanced view of the problem.  Jemima shares with us how she learns to compartmentalise her life and keep soldiering on.

This episode of Weight Loss in Real Time is about mindful eating and learning to restore consciousness to your eating patterns.  The cornerstone of mindful eating requires you to tune into your body cues.  That is to take time out, relax and listen to yourself.  The more connected you are externally (especially via emails, mobile phones, faxes and particularly when you do not have any rest time to quiet your mind), the less connected you will be internally.  Consider that your mindless, uncontrolled eating is a manifestation of your being out-of-touch with yourself.  And this is the result of functioning at a low level of awareness.

Mindful eating is about restoring nature’s way, paying attention to the food you eat and the manner in which you eat them.  Learning to relax, listening to your body, deliberately slowing down, chewing your food thoroughly and being fully present to the experience of nourishing yourself.  Conscious eating involves the whole of your being; your thoughts, your emotions and engaging all your senses in the art of eating.

Practice mindful eating and you will find that eating according to physiological hunger will be as natural as breathing.  At this point, you will finally have made peace with food.  You will find yourself eating less and enjoying more.   And I promise you, you will never struggle to maintain your ideal weight again.

Have you ever considered giving licence to the people around you to police you in your weight management effort? What I am referring to is sharing your goals with everyone and letting them help you set boundaries and remind you of what you should be doing?
For instance, you could consider saying the following to your family and friends:
1. If you see me eating a packet of chips, please take it away without hesitation.
2. Please do not invite me to buffet dinners in fancy restaurants.
3. Please do not buy me big lunches or dinners.
4. Never say, “Just eat now and diet tomorrow.” Please respect that every decision counts.
5. Please do not offer me high-calorie drinks like milk shakes, alcohol or full fat hot beverages.
6. Please help me clear the table as soon as possible after each meal. I would appreciate it if you could rush me out of the kitchen and put away the dishes.
7. Remind me to floss my teeth thoroughly and brush my teeth immediately after each meal. If I conveniently forget, please march me to the bathroom.
8. Please remind me to slow down when I eat too quickly. My meal has to exceed 20 minutes, preferably half an hour.
9. Do not feel rejected or unloved if I turn down your food. I’d rather accept a non-food gift from you any day. Feel free to give me any of the following: for example jewellery, card, socks, scarf, tie, sexy underwear, flowers, a poem, a letter, kind words of affirmation, anything but food! Thanks.

Is selling out an option?  Of course!  But it may not be the best choice as there are unpleasant consequences.  In the book, “How to stop worrying and start living (first published in 1948)”, Dale Carnegie advocated the following timeless advice for managing our problems:

1. Imagine, what is the worst thing that can happen to you?  Get a pen and paper and write it down.  Get clarity on exactly what you are afraid of.
2. Now, mentally and emotionally accept the worst.  Once you accept the worst, anything else is bonus.
3. Create a plan of action for preventing this scenario.  You have the answers within you; trust yourself to make this plan a good one.
4. With this plan, go right into action.  The magic is in moving swiftly into action.  No one climbs a mountain looking at it.   Click on the following link for more http://www.westegg.com/unmaintained/carnegie/stop-worry.html

Did you know that all tissues in your body can synthesize cholesterol from acetate? However, most of the cholesterol in your body is synthesised by your liver and then your intestine. The enzyme involved in the process is called HMG-CoA reductase.

The activity of HMG-CoA reductase can be powerfully lowered by well-known cholesterol lowering drug – Lipitor as well as a hormone in the body called glucagon. Conversely, HMG-CoA reductase can be powerfully stimulated by a hormone produced by your pancreas called insulin.
Metabolic syndrome is associated with insulin resistance or the ineffective use of insulin. This is linked to low grade inflammation in the body. Insulin resistance has a lot to answer for in the presentation of high serum cholesterol level.
High cholesterol levels can be powerfully reduced by adopting the following lifestyle changes:
1) losing excess body weight
2) choosing a low glycaemic index diet
3) increasing the percentage of lean body mass or muscles through exercise – specifically resistance training (this leads to reduction in HMG-CoA activity)
4) increasing consumption of omega-3 rich foods from fatty fishes and flaxseed
5) reducing intake of saturated fats from animal foods
6) increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables rich in polyphenols which are powerful anti-inflammatory agents
7) increasing consumption of nuts, seeds and legumes rich in micronutrients, fibre and vitamin E
increase consumption of plant sterols (plant sterols out compete dietary cholesterol for absorption and powerfully reduce overall cholesterol absorption)
9) increase fibre intake to 35-40g per day

Surprisingly, having a high cholesterol diet is not as deleterious to serum cholesterol levels as previously believed as high dietary cholesterol has the interesting effect of suppressing cholesterol synthesis by the liver. Also, assimilation or uptake of dietary cholesterol is relatively low as approximately 50% of dietary and biliary cholesterol is not absorbed from the intestine and excreted. This is good news indeed!
I hope the above highlights how a multi-prong approach can be adopted to powerfully reduce your cholesterol levels.
In conclusion, there is no single magic bullet for the reduction of serum cholesterol (the most commonly prescribed drug – Lipitor or statin, comes closest to the definition of a magic bullet but even this has its draw backs and significant side effects, a discussion fit for another article). For now, there does not appear to be one on the near future.

Do you get fired up for 3 days, jump out of bed, enthusiastically commence your diet and exercise program and then start to tell yourself you are a lost cause and lose all your excitement?  Do you see your efforts biting the dust over and over again?  If you tell yourself you are a failure, your outcome will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

These messages powerfully create your emotional state.  These emotional states dictate whether you have your life and eating under or out of control.  What are you telling yourself about your appearance, weight, discipline, self-control, health and general self-worth?  Take a pen and paper and write down the real-time running commentary in your head.

In this video, Jemima shares her internal dialogue with you.