Category Archives: Mind Management

Welcome back to the last week in our Finding Fullness series! It’s amazing how fast the year is going – already three months of 2022 are behind us! For us business types, Q1 is complete and we are moving fast into the 2nd quarter of the year. Whew!

It’s a good time to reflect. Planning for what we want to create takes intention, so taking a pause periodically helps us to see where we are, refine our goals, and troubleshoot. So how’s it going? Where are you on your weight loss journey compared to where you were at the beginning of the year? Are you still as committed or have you started the unintentional drift away from your plan?

If you’re still moving ahead with commitment and focus, good for you! But if you’ve started to fall back into old habits and have stepped off of your plan, you can recommit and restart right now. It’s ok if you’ve made mistakes if your next step is forward! No matter where you are, you can move ahead!

This week I want to talk about what to do if you overeat. We’ve spent the last few weeks getting clear on how full is enough and how to let your body help you in finding the right amount of fullness so the scale keeps going down. But inevitably while learning a new skill like eating to a just-satisfied level, there will be mistakes. Slip-ups. Errors. The question is, what do you do when you overeat?

Here’s what often happens. You sit down to a meal with the family and you get caught up in a lively conversation when you realize you ate more than you needed. Your stomach is a little (or a lot!) too full. Or you put more than you needed on your plate and felt guilty about throwing the food away, so you ate it, and afterward, you regretted not dumping the extra food in the trash. Or you missed lunch and decided to make up for the missed meal by eating more at dinner, only to discover that your stomach really hadn’t changed in size and you couldn’t fit extra food in there without feeling overfull.

This is what we high-achieving, accomplished women do: We fuss at ourselves. I mean, keeping on track, following the straight and narrow, being disciplined and sacrificing is how we got where we are today, right? If you make a mistake, you have to be corrected, right? And we learned to correct ourselves hard so we don’t have to be reprimanded by anyone else because it’s embarrassing to have someone else tell us we were wrong. So you tell yourself how stupid you were. You should know better by now, for goodness sake! Why can’t you just do this simple thing and stop eating when you’re full? And you say much uglier things to yourself than these – I know because I’ve said them.

The problem with talking to yourself like this is that you’re much more likely to quit on yourself. Maybe you should just learn to be happy despite the extra weight on your body that you don’t want there (you can be happy and overweight). You already screwed up, so just eat the candy bar on the counter or have the doughnuts in the break room. So your beatdown turns into a downward spiral that ends with shame and more overeating than just one meal. Flogging yourself just doesn’t get you to take loving action for yourself.

Have grace. You are a human, and you will make mistakes. We don’t want to make mistakes because we think that mistakes mean we are weak or broken or just wrong. But a mistake doesn’t mean any of that. A mistake is “an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result”. That’s it. If you overeat you took an action that produced an unwanted result. No problem – you can decide to take a different action next time.

Taking the sting out of a mistake helps us change more quickly. Adding blame and judgment to a mistake creates a detour you don’t really want to take. But if you can realize that you can pick up and move on from a mistake immediately, you can move forward toward your goal directly instead of getting caught up in frustration and hopelessness before you regroup and start again. 

Here’s a secret of weight loss: No one has ever lost weight perfectly. Everyone makes mistakes all the way down the scale. You will never meet any person who has successfully lost their weight who one day woke up, flipped an internal switch, and from that point forward they ate perfectly and the weight fell off. I made mistakes all the way down the scale. I still do – but I see them faster and get back on track so I stay at the weight I want to be. You can make mistakes and still lose weight!

So what do you do? Just restart. As soon as you realize you overate, restart. Don’t eat a cookie too because what the heck, you’ve already blown it. Don’t decide to start over on Monday or tomorrow – that’s what people on diets do. You’re building a life and relationship with food that you want forever, not living on a diet. So you ate too much – wait until you’re hungry again. Not hungry at dinner because you overdid it at lunch? Cool – skip that meal. You can eat again tomorrow when you’re hungry. You can start over right now and the judgment can take a back seat. It’s not helping you anyway, but starting over right now will help you. Remember, when you make a mistake it’s a chance to take care of yourself, not beat yourself down. I promise, when you are gentle and kind with yourself, you’ll get back on track and get closer to your goal SO much faster. So offer yourself some grace and get going again!

You CAN do this! We’re going to look at some ways to practice taking care of yourself over the next month, so keep watching for these posts to come out for you. Make sure you’re on my list so that you won’t miss any of my free help that’s here for you. And if you want the support of a one-on-one coach to speed up your success, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s talk. I can take one more client while I’m getting the course ready for you, so don’t miss out if the one-on-one approach is what you want!

Here’s your video help for the week!

It’s a new week and we are rocking right along! This is week four in our Finding Fullness series and I’m really excited to help you get even more dialed into your fullness so you can eat, be satisfied, AND watch the scale go down. It’s possible, I promise!

This week I decided to name this class Get Out Of Your Head because we spend SO much time in our head, working out all the situations we face and weight loss is no different. It’s staggering how many thoughts we have each day. The last estimate I read was somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 a day – it’s just amazing! Our brains are constantly running, solving problems, considering situations. Actually, by adulthood we’ve learned to spend most of our time thinking instead of moving, sometimes I think we treat our body like a transporter to carry our brain around from one thing to another!

Our brains are powerful. We are problem solvers, and we’re really good at this work. When it comes to weight loss, we are fully ready to apply all the brainpower we have to find the solution. We think that if we apply all the knowledge we have to the problem of being overweight, we can solve it – it’s just an information problem. So we try to figure out the best combination of foods, the right intervals to eat, the combination of macros we need, and the cardio and strength training workout that will get us the results we want. if we can just find the perfect formula, the excess weight will just fall off and we will finally be living in a body that we want! If we can find the formula…

But, you have more than your brain working for you on this problem. Even though we like to rely on our brilliant brain, you also have another helper to help you reach your goal: Your stomach!  We’d like to think that we can measure our food and choose the times we “can” eat, but if you’re using hunger and fullness as the gauge for eating, your carefully crafted plans are often not going to line up with what your stomach says. So who wins, your brain or your stomach? I vote for the stomach! First, all the fancy diet plans that you’ve attempted with your brain haven’t been all that successful in the long run. Second, your stomach was created to give you the sensations you need to govern the times and quantities of food that you need – why not use it?

I can hear you arguing with me already. “But I want to eat all the time and if I did that, I’d just gain weight like crazy!” Yes, you would. But I’m not suggesting that you eat whenever you want, just when you’re hungry. It’s not the same thing. If you missed it, go back to the last series on finding hunger and you’ll see exactly how to identify true stomach hunger. Finding fullness requires us to pay attention to the physical sensation coming from our stomach while we fill it during a meal. So how do we do it?

First, it’s easier to hear that quiet signal if there are fewer distractions. Turn off the TV, close your laptop, lay down your phone. While you’re eating, don’t do anything else, except enjoy the company you keep. If you’re alone you’ll hear the signal more clearly, so don’t fall into the trap of multitasking during your meal. You waited to be hungry, so enjoy the food you’ve been waiting for!

Next, check in with your body. Most of the time you’re thinking about things while you’re doing others. While you’re eating, you want to make every effort to be present. Taste the food, feel it beginning to fill your stomach. Ask yourself how full your stomach feels. Is the hunger going away? How much more do you need? One way to do your check-in is to put your fork down every few bites.  While you’re not looking at your plate to choose the next bite, feel your body. Is it satisfied yet? Make sure you’re asking your body if it’s satisfied. Sometimes your body is comfortable, but your mind wants more food!

The process of dropping into the body is about awareness. I like to think of it as actively moving my attention from my head down into my body. It’s a shift from my casual normal awareness in my thoughts to sensing what is happening in my belly. What sensation is coming from my stomach? How full am I? Is there any pressure or tension in my stomach? Is my stomach feeling peacefully full yet? I want to leave room for a square of dark chocolate at the end – if I take another bite, will I have room for it?

The more you practice shifting your awareness and observing the sensations from your body, the better you’ll be at it. We learn over time to ignore the signals our body gives us. We hold it when we ought to go to the bathroom, we stay up when our body wants to sleep, we wear high heels because they’re cute even though they hurt our feet. The entire shapewear industry is built on us learning to ignore the discomfort of being enclosed in a lycra casing all day! Of course we’ve gotten away from our hunger and fullness signals because we’ve gotten those scrambled too. But we can get them back!

Keep practicing – you CAN do this! Getting to your goal takes practice and commitment, but you will get there if you don’t give up. If you have questions or need support, drop a comment on this post and I’ll be happy to respond. And if you’re ready to invest in yourself with personalized one-on-one coaching, I’m here. I can take one or two more clients while I’m getting the online course launched (and once that’s out, no more private clients until my class is well taken care of!). So if you know you want the accountability and customized support of your own private coach, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let me know you want to schedule your free consultation!

Here’s your video help for the week!

(describe dropping into the body, checking in, clearing away distraction)

Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here!

For the past two months, we’ve been working on the two most important aspects of losing weight – hunger, and fullness. If you missed it, head back to the posts from last month to get ALL the guidance on finding hunger. This month, we’re focused on finding the right amount of fullness so that the scale keeps going down. You CAN eat, be satisfied, AND lose weight too!

This week I want to give you a few tips, tricks, and tactics to help you to sense exactly when you feel the comfortable level of fullness we discussed last week. If you’ve been trying to eat until you’re politely full but you keep overshooting, if you want to have that light, energetic full feeling but you find yourself too full, I’ve got some tactics to help you dial into the exact level of fullness you need to get your weight loss on track. Let’s go!

Slow. Down.

The very first tip is to slow the speed of your meal. We get so used to eating by the clock, whether it’s lunch break or dinner time, or the 20 minutes between cases in the OR, or a break between meetings. We eat because there’s an opportunity and because the clock tells us to. When we eat by the clock, we tend to eat fast to fit the meal into the window of time we have. Now, if you’re hungry, it’s fine to eat in your window. But when you eat quickly, it’s very easy to eat more than you need before the full signal registers in your body.

The key is to slow down. Put your fork down between bites, chew and savor the taste of each bite, sip on water instead of rushing fork-to-mouth, gulp-and-swallow. It takes about 20 minutes for the body to register full, so you need that amount of time before you can tell if you need to eat more food. But what if you have 10 minutes? Then eat in 10 minutes, slowly. Enjoy and taste each bite and when your time is done, put the rest of the food away. If you’re hungry later, you can finish it. A few minutes after your short meal, your blood sugar will rise and you might be completely satisfied. If you get physically hungry again soon, you can eat again. But you might be done until the next meal…

Check-In With Your Body

When you get partway through the meal, if you’re paying attention you’ll start to feel the mild sensation of fullness. You might even hear a little quiet voice that whispers, “I’m done!” It can be tough to hear that little voice if you’re not listening for it though. Your assignment is to periodically check in with your tummy, to check in. If you’re slowing down, putting down your fork between bites, taking a sip of water during the meal, you’ll have a moment to see what your tummy is saying.

It can be hard to be in the midst of eating and stop if you’re not used to it. You might try a trick I’ve used to create a moment in the midst of the meal. Take an actual break! You might be sitting around the table, and halfway through your plate, you stop eating and put your fork down. Get up and head into the kitchen to refill your glass of water. If you’re eating with others, offer to get them refills as well. Check and see if anyone needs anything from the kitchen. Then while you’re in there away from your plate, check in with your stomach during this pause. Are you almost full? Are you done yet? Maybe you need 2-3 more bites – so you make a plan to go back to the table and finish with those few bites and no more. When you take a break like this, you do two things: You’ll make sure you don’t overeat unconsciously and you will know when you finish those last bites that you’re stopping because you want to, because you’re satisfied. That is a good feeling!

No Distractions

You might want to fight me on this one, but trust me: The more distractions at the table, the more likely you’ll overeat. To be most present and precise in your eating only to fullness, ideally, you’d eat alone with nothing else to do but eat. But you probably don’t want to kick your family to the curb at mealtime (or at least, you shouldn’t!). People eating together and talking and helping kids and all that activity can be distracting and make it hard to pay attention to your stomach. But we love them and eating together is lovely, so we keep the humans.

So the people stay, but all other distractions must go. No TV, no reading, no phone. No, none of it. The first reason is that you’ll get caught up in the entertainment and then it’s very easy to eat past full. The second reason is more subtle but just as important (maybe more). When you eat and read or watch TV, you link the activity with food. So now your eating is entertainment or distraction or checking out. Now food means entertainment or distraction or checking out. You do not want to give food meaning beyond fuel as a routine. When you need entertainment, you want to choose entertainment, not food.

What you’ll figure out is that eating alone is kind of boring. Ever watch a little kid sit down to eat? As soon as they can they’re up and out of their chair and ready to move on to the good stuff. Once they’ve eaten just enough, they’re ready to move on. What we enjoy about meals often isn’t the food – it’s the company, the laughter, the entertainment (on-screen or in-person). The food is good until your stomach is full – then it’s time to move on!

You’ve got this! Keep waiting until hunger comes and then eat only until you are quietly full – then watch the scale keep going down. Join me next week when I’m going to teach even more on how to help your body guide you in what you need to lose the weight – it’s gonna be good!

If you’ve been waiting to work one-on-one with me, the time for waiting is over! If you’re ready to invest in yourself and get the personalized help you need to reach your goal, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s set up your free consultation. You deserve it and I can help you get to where you really want to be!

Here’s your video help for the week!

Welcome back! I’m so glad you’re here! It’s so good – you took this time to read, to grow, to help yourself along the journey you’ve set for yourself. I’m so grateful to be part of your journey and to give you the help you need to make it to your goal and to live a life of peace and trust with food and your body. This is what we need – to live in balance, where food is fuel and comfort and care are available to us because we know how to provide them without substituting food to cover up our needs. Are you ready to add another tool to your kit of self-love? Let’s do it!

Today we’re continuing on our path of finding fullness. This is the companion to hunger – we need both hunger and fullness to work together as we move toward our healthy normal body weight. That’s the first key to finding fullness: In order to find fullness, you must find hunger first. It’s not possible to find hunger if you start eating and you’re not hungry. If you start a process that’s designed to start with hunger and you aren’t hungry when you start, you can’t figure out where is full enough.

Now, sometimes you find yourself snacking and realize that you aren’t even hungry. You just fell into mindless eating and woke up mid-bite to find you are eating when you didn’t really mean to. So what do you do? Stop it. Right now. I mean it. If you are eating and didn’t mean to, just stop. Don’t let it mean that you blew it, forget it, I’ve already messed up so I’ll just finish this doughnut. Nope. Just stop. You can stop with the bag of chips in your hand and drop them right in the trash or put them away for your meal. Even in the midst of a mistake, you can stop and take care of yourself – you’re worth it!

So, if you haven’t already read or watched this series on Finding Hunger, go back and get this for yourself. When you start with finding true physical hunger in your body, you have already started learning how to feel the quiet sensations from your stomach. So when you start looking for fullness, you’ll find it!

What is full enough? I’ve got two ways for you to start checking in with your body to find fullness. These are just tools, ways for you to gauge the sensation you feel in your body. Most of us have spent years ignoring our body and often abusing it – not giving it adequate rest, water, not using the bathroom when we need to, and eating regardless of whether we are actually hungry or not. So, see these tools as an opportunity to rebuild the connection between your mind and body.

The first tool is the hunger scale for my numerical people. If you went through the hunger series, you know this one. This time, we’re focusing on the positive end of the scale. Remember that the negative numbers are hunger and you want to be at about a -4 before you eat (hungry enough that you’re sure you’re truly hungry but not ravenous). You’re looking for the opposite for fullness – you want to be aiming for about a +4 for full enough. +4 is comfortable and light – it feels satisfied in your stomach, but not as though you need to loosen your pants or lay down for a break from that meal you just ate. Digestion takes energy, so if you overeat, you will divert lots of energy to your stomach and away from your brain and you’ll need a nap!

Now, for my non-numerical folks, let’s talk about the sensations your body feels when you’re full. Finding fullness with numbers or sensations is the same – it takes tuning in, paying attention, noticing the sensation of your body as it fills up with the meal. The ideal amount of fullness is enough. You want to be able to feel a quiet sense of satisfaction, where the hunger sensation has gone away and you just don’t need any more food. Sure, you could eat more, but you could be just fine with what you’ve eaten. The emptiness is gone, but you don’t feel a stretching sensation from your tummy. You feel light and energetic, able to go for a walk, able to bend over and pick your shoes up off the floor. You could fit more in your stomach because it’s stretchy, but you don’t need anymore because the hunger is gone.

Now, the difference between enough and too much, or +4 and +5 or more can be just a couple of bites. You might start to sense from your stomach that the meal is almost over and continue eating because you want more of the flavor. Often you’ll find yourself over full because that extra wasn’t needed. We will get into tactics and practicals to help you know exactly when to stop in upcoming posts, but for now, just know that enough is quiet. You’ll want to pay attention so you hear the whisper from your stomach that says you’re done. By the time your stomach yells at you to stop eating, you’ve had too much!

You can do this! Spend this week waiting for hunger and listening for the whisper of fullness. If you’re able to do that consistently, you will watch the scale go down too.

For those of you waiting for the webinar and course launch, it’s coming! Make sure you’re on my email list so you don’t miss it – sign up on the popup on this blog if you haven’t already and you’ll get my emails (and nothing else!). And if you really want to work with me one-on-one, the window is closing for private coaching with me.  If that’s what you want, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and I’ll make sure to get you in before the course launch – let’s set up your consultation right away!

Here’s your video help for the week!

Hey, hey, hey! Welcome back – so glad you’re here! We are starting a whole new series on Fullness to complement the one we just finished on Hunger. Hunger and Fullness go together like peanut butter and jelly, like spring and flowers, like sand and surf. If we want to get the scale to go down, we MUST stay dialed into our hunger and fullness signals! Weight loss doesn’t happen without them…

But it can be tricky. How full do I want to be? Do I have to stay hungry even after I eat? What if I don’t eat enough to make it to my next meal? How do I know if I overate if I’m not stuffed? These questions are what we are going to focus on this month – we’re going to learn how to define fullness and feel it in our bodies so that we can find the sweet spot where we eat enough to be satisfied AND the scale goes down. Are you ready?

First, I want you to know that if you’re reading this and you feel skeptical and tired and frustrated with the whole weight loss journey, I get it. Some days you just want to throw up your hands and be done with all of it. You’ve been working at this weight loss business for a long time and despite all of your efforts, the scale is going up and down and you don’t really see the changes you want. So you just feel frustrated! Then you want to eat everything in front of you – the kid’s soggy cereal, the pb pretzels in the pantry, a handful of M&Ms, leftover cold pizza – whatever. Doesn’t matter, so you’ll eat any of it as long as you don’t have to keep working at this weight loss thing that’s going nowhere.

Don’t give up! Even now, I have days where I feel that same frustration even though I’m living in a body that I’m thrilled to live in after a lifetime of being overweight and obese. I have hormone swings that cause the scale to jump up (never just jumps down though, right?!). I also am tempted to give in to out-of-control eating because I’m tired or frustrated or discouraged. But I’ve learned how to see what’s happening in my emotions and my thoughts so that I don’t sabotage myself. Don’t give up because you will get this – don’t set yourself back with self-sabotage! Let’s get to what you need to keep going…

First, I want to give you a new definition of fullness. When we eat for fullness that gets us to live in an overweight body, we have learned over the years to eat until we feel overfull. We eat until we are at least slightly uncomfortable at the end of a meal and that’s maybe why we stop eating. Sometimes we eat until we’re stuffed or we need to lay down on the couch to recover from that meal we just ate. Eating until we are overfull causes us to gain weight.

So what’s full? Our new definition of full is enough. We want to eat just enough to make the hunger feeling go away but not so much that the new sensation we feel is a distended stomach pressure. We want to feel satisfied but not a feeling of pressure in the stomach.

So what does it feel like? Remember when I described hunger as a sensation that comes in waves, first quietly and then louder as you wait? Fullness is similar. When you start to feel full, you want to feel it as it begins. It’s very quiet and polite – the feeling is like a little whisper in your ear that says, “I think I’m good.” If you’re not aware, you can easily miss it and the next thing you know, you feel overfull.

Now, we will spend the next few weeks getting into the details of how to eat to find fullness and all the tips and tricks I can give you! But for this week, I want you to just work at feeling full enough to make the hunger go away. I want you to get reacquainted with listening to your stomach as you eat. Often we go unconscious while we’re eating, and either the plate is clean or our stomach is screaming at us to stop before we’re done eating. Eating to a quiet and polite sense of fullness takes focus and practice and consciousness. But you’re up for it – you can learn this skill!

You can do this! Keep going and don’t give up on yourself – you’re worth all the care and love you offer to others. Do this good thing for yourself and give your body the food it needs and not more than it asks for – it’s an act of self-love!

If you’ve been waiting for the webinar I’ve created called Weight Loss Without Willpower – it’s coming! When it’s ready I will be sending you emails to sign up so you don’t miss it. But if you’re not on my list, how will I know you want to come for the webinar? If you’re not already subscribed to my list, just enter your name and email into the popup on this blog’s homepage and I’ll make sure to let you know when the signup for the webinar goes live. I can’t wait to see you there!

Here’s your video help for the week!

Welcome back! I’m so glad you made it for the last week in this series on hunger – I’ve got some goodness for you today!

For the past three weeks, we’ve been working together on dialing into the sensation of hunger, learning the difference between physical and emotional hunger, and figuring out when we’re hungry enough to eat. Eating for the signal of hunger ONLY can cause weight loss without changing anything else – it’s just amazing! But over the course of these few weeks, you might have run into some challenges with eating only for hunger, and I want to help!

If you’ve been struggling to eat only for hunger, you’re not the only one. When we learn to eat for lots of other reasons than hunger, learning to eat differently takes some work! Let’s go over some common challenges and solutions to finding hunger…

Overhunger

One thing I hear from clients is that they struggle to find hunger because they’re always hungry. Once you’ve sorted out whether you’re feeling hunger in your stomach vs hunger in your head, realizing that your stomach is asking for food all the time can be hard, because you know you can’t eat constantly and lose weight!

This is called overhunger, and it comes primarily from a hijack in your hormones that comes from eating processed foods. When you eat lots of food made with sugar and flour, your hunger and satiation hormones get off balance, your insulin response gets jacked up, and to avoid blood sugar highs and lows your body calls for food frequently. The fix is to eliminate the flour and sugar and replace it with fats. Instead of crackers and chips and bread, if you have more nutrient-dense foods like roasted veggies and salads and whole potatoes, your body won’t call for food an hour after you ate, because you haven’t burned through those foods as quickly as the processed ones.

Processed foods get digested very quickly so you need more food after you eat them. When you make your meals, be sure to add healthy fats like avocado or a drizzle of high-quality olive oil to help slow digestion and keep you full for longer. If you eat them, add an egg to your veggies. Saute your veggies in butter. Eat the chicken with the skin on. If you’re eating more fat and less sugar and flour, this will help you transition out of being dependent on fast energy processed food like sugar and flour. Just remember: Eat only when you’re hungry!

Stress

Yep, this is a common reason for eating when we’re not physically hungry. We have a lot of stress in our daily lives! We’ve learned that when chaos ensues, the way out is to open a bag of chips or snack on a few cookies. And, it works! For the moment, we get a reprieve from the pain of the stress and we can ignore it while we eat. The problem is that when we’re done, we still have the stress to return to and now we have the pain of the scale not going down the way we want. That’s pain on top of stress, and it’s not worth it in the long run. So we get to practice learning to support ourselves through the stress without eating. This helps in the moment, and we also reap the reward of the long-term gain of getting to our weight goal!

The trick is to find alternatives to food to solve our stress. Deep breathing is one option that doesn’t take much time. A quick stretch break is another – moving the body can help release stress energy, and you can do it in front of your desk. A bubble bath at night instead of a glass of wine(or three!) is another option. What do you want to choose to manage your stress instead of food?

Lack of Sleep

This is a big one. We live in a country that “runs on Dunkin”, that believes that sleep is for the weak and I can sleep when I’m dead. First of all, if you don’t get enough sleep, you will shorten your lifespan (but that’s a topic for another time). But lack of sleep actually shifts your hormones and changes your hunger signals. Ever stay up way too late or work all night only to find that the next day you’re hungry all day AND all you want is snacks and sugar? Yep, you really need sleep!

Most adults need 6 1/2 – 8 hours of sleep a night. Aim for 7 if you’re not already getting that. Many of us are getting far less and wake up daily to an alarm we’d like to smash. If you want to be able to trust your body’s hunger signals for fuel, you also need to give it the sleep it needs. They work together!

Food as Reward

This is culture. We learn very early that a cookie comes when we do something good, that ice cream follows a basketball win, that a party has to have champagne or cake. We think that if we have a good day, made it through a hard day, or accomplished something notable that the way to celebrate is with food. Now, if you’re hungry, go ahead and eat. But to top off your meal with a sleeve of Oreos because it was a crappy day isn’t really a reward.

It’s a punishment.

You have to deal with the consequences of the pity-party Oreos later. That’s just painful. But you ate the cookies because you thought you deserved them after the hectic day you had. But really, did you deserve to eat a bunch of cookies (or drink the wine)? Is that what you deserved – to have a hard day and then have to deal with the weight gain that follows the cookies?

What do you really deserve? You deserve your own compassion for the tough day. You deserve your own kindness and love for doing what needed to be done. You deserve acknowledgment for what you got done, not a beat-down for what you couldn’t get to that day. How can you really support yourself – without food?

You can do this! Keep focusing on eating for hunger and the scale will keep going down. Next month, I’ve got a whole new series for you on fullness, the yang to the yin of hunger. We’re putting it all together!

If you want my personal coaching help to get to your goal and if you love what you’re learning but need a little more support to get there, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and let’s set up your free consultation. Once the course launches, I’m not going to be able to take any more private clients for a while, so get in while you can!

Watch for my upcoming webinar, Weight Loss Without Willpower for more help getting to your goal!

Here’s your video help for the week!

Welcome back! We are in the thick of our Focus on Hunger series and this week we’re getting into the specifics, the details of how to wait for hunger, how hungry should we be before eating, and how do we know if it’s time to eat or not. I’m going to answer all these questions, but first…

How has it been going this past week?

Were you able to figure out when you were physically hungry vs when you were emotionally hungry?

What did you learn about your hunger?

Fascinating, isn’t it? For most of my clients, emotional hunger is a much bigger part of their daily experience than they thought. Actual physical hunger isn’t as frequent!

This is good news for this week because as we focus on waiting for true physical hunger, I have a surprise gift for you as you practice this new skill of waiting for hunger.

You’re going to have more time in your day.

Isn’t that fantastic? Who couldn’t use more time to take care of all the to-dos or just to take a breath? All of us can use more time – we’ve got plenty to do!

Here’s how it works: You only eat when you feel true physical hunger. I know, very simple. Not always easy, because those emotional hunger signals try to get in there and confuse the situation. But the only signal you want to respond to for eating is stomach hunger. (If you missed last week where we discussed the difference between physical and emotional hunger, go back and get it here.)

For example, in the morning, after you wake up you’d usually make breakfast, eat and clean up. But you notice that actually, you’re not hungry after your glass of water to start the day. (Try this if you’re not already drinking water in the morning – you probably need it and thirst is often confused with hunger.)

Instead of eating breakfast, skip it.

Now you’ve got the time from cooking, eating, and clean-up back in your day. You just got back at least 30 minutes! I know, some of you are resisting the idea of skipping breakfast. Won’t that slow my metabolism? Isn’t breakfast the most important meal of the day? What if I get hungry before lunch?

Actually, you won’t wreck your metabolism by skipping breakfast. That’s part of the premise behind intermittent fasting, that you can prolong the overnight fasting window to help lose weight. I’m not suggesting you fast – just wait until you’re actually hungry before you eat. The small bump in metabolic rate that your body makes to digest food isn’t enough to outweigh the energy intake you consume when you eat (otherwise you’d burn up every bite you eat and would waste away to nothing!).

If you get hungry mid-morning, decide what you’ll do about it. Have a cup of tea or coffee with cream to calm your tummy until lunchtime, or have a piece of fruit or a small handful of nuts to hold you over until lunch, or eat lunch early. Whatever works for your schedule, do that. Then when hunger returns, have your meal. Keep it simple – no overcomplicating things here!

As an aside, your brain wants to make this weight loss process very complicated. Your mind thinks that the more complicated, the better, because losing weight is hard and it must be a very complex solution to solve the problem of being overweight. It has to be, otherwise, you would have solved it by now. The problem with complicated is that it’s too hard to maintain. So even though your brain is trying to be helpful, complicated is not the way to go. Your life is full and complicated – your eating and weight loss need to be simple or you’re not going to get it done. Consider it: what if losing weight could be simple? How can you make this simple for you?

Next, how hungry do you need to be to eat? Do you have to be starving before you eat or should you respond to the first whiff of hunger? This is where the hunger scale tool comes in. The hunger scale is a range of numbers between -10 and +10, with “I could eat my arm off” at a -10 and Thanksgiving overeating at its worst “I’m so stuffed I want to die” at a +10.

I—————————–I—————-I——————-I———————————I

-10  -9   -8  -7  -6  -5  -4  -3  -2  -1  0  +1  +2  +3  +4  +5  +6  +7  +8  +9  +10

You want to be in a range of -4 to +4, with a +4 being comfortably full, light, and energetic. We will get to fullness later, but for now, that’s a good target.

Remember, hunger comes in gentle waves and grows over time. You might even miss a -1 because it’s pretty quiet. But true stomach hunger will come back. A -4 feels a little more insistent – it gets your attention. You’re sure you’re physically hungry, you feel it in your stomach, and although you won’t keel over and die if you can’t eat, you’re ready. So serve yourself a meal and enjoy it!

Now, a couple of tips. You’ve waited for this meal, so don’t snack in front of the microwave and miss the best bites of your meal. The first few bites taste the best when you’re hungry and your taste buds are at attention, so don’t hijack that by tasting and snacking before you sit down to eat. Also, sit down to eat (unless you can’t – then plan to sit down for your next meal). Get present for the experience of the meal so you can enjoy it and so you can tune into your stomach for when you’re politely full. Last tip: just eat. No TV, reading, emailing, etc. Eating your food gets missed when you multitask. You actually miss the experience of your meal and then you feel cheated like you didn’t even eat. It’s also too easy to overeat when you’re not paying attention. If you want a break or entertainment and you are;t hungry, then watch TV. But when you’re eating, just enjoy your meal. Don’t mix your need for entertainment or rest with your hunger – your brain learns to associate food as the solution to your other needs. When you’re done eating, you’re done – go on with your day until the next time you get hungry!

You’ve got this! Now, for those of you who’ve been waiting, my weight loss course is coming! I’m planning to launch the course with a webinar called Weight Loss Without Willpower and I don’t you to miss it, so make sure you’re on my email list so you get invited to it. Attending the webinar is how you’ll get the details on the course, so don’t miss it! Keep up the good work and I’m here to keep the help coming – find the video version of How To Find Hunger below…

If any of you have been waiting to schedule your free consultation to work with me as your private coach, the window is closing! Once the course launches, I won’t be taking private clients while I focus on serving the class members So if you want a spot, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and let’s get you in before it’s too late!

Here’s your video help for the week!

We’re getting into this week! We’ve gotten clear on why we need to get up close and personal with hunger, how hunger is the signal we want to feel to prompt eating, and how eating only for hunger actually fuels our weight loss.

Hunger is our tool – something we can use to help us lose weight!

Let’s identify what real hunger actually is! We often eat for many other reasons than true stomach hunger, so it’s easy to answer the normal signals we use to eat instead of only stomach hunger. I like to think about hunger in two categories: emotional hunger and stomach hunger.

First, let’s examine emotional hunger. We often eat to soothe uncomfortable emotions instead of actually needing to feed the body. We want to be sure to put food in when we need it! If we can identify why we’re eating, we can decide if we’re eating for the reasons that work for us instead of against us. If we only eat when our bodies call for fuel, we will lose weight!

Emotional hunger is eating when we don’t need food but we want it. Over the years, we’ve learned to celebrate, comfort, soothe, and fix boredom with food. It’s a normal thing in our culture to go out for ice cream after a game or to have a glass of wine (or two or three!) after a hard day of work. We eat popcorn while we watch a movie and we have a whole category of “comfort food” that we eat when we feel sad or discouraged or disappointed. We’ve learned to eat for lots of reasons that aren’t physical hunger!

So what does emotional hunger feel like? Emotional hunger is loud. It’s very demanding and urgent. Hunger like this is designed to get your attention and make you act quickly. For example, if you’re having a stressful day at work, your brain might offer that chips are required, immediately! You feel drawn toward the bag of chips and it seems like nothing else is the right thing at the moment.

Here’s what’s really going on. You feel stressed and it’s uncomfortable. You want to get that feeling to stop as fast as possible, and your brain knows that eating chips will distract you from the discomfort, even if it’s only for a few minutes. What it doesn’t understand is that when you eat the chips, you will feel better for a moment, but later you’ll see them on the scale and feel even worse, because you’re stressed AND you didn’t lose weight (the thing you really want more than chips). But you eat the chips because in the moment it takes your mind off the stress and you feel better. Right in that stressful moment, you can’t think of anything else that will fix your stress other than those chips!

One tactic to help your brain the next time you want to eat and you’re not hungry is to spend some time now thinking of alternatives to eating to solve the uncomfortable emotion you feel. Make a list and write it down somewhere convenient, like on the notes app on your phone. If you’re stressed, maybe you need to take a moment and do some breathing exercises. Maybe you’re exhausted and need to plan for an early bedtime. Some green or black tea might give you a little boost until you can catch up on sleep. If you need comfort, you can give yourself a hug (it works!) and decide on a hot bubble bath later in the evening. Whatever feeling you need to solve, you can think of a non-food solution.

Snuggled up…

Now, what does true physical hunger feel like? Stomach hunger is more subtle. It tends to be like a suggestion, a tapping on your shoulder that is asking for your attention instead of demanding it. You’ll feel a pulling or gnawing feeling in the upper belly just left of center. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s a little uncomfortable. Stomach hunger comes in waves – if it comes and you don’t answer it, it’ll go away and come back in 30 or so minutes.

Stomach hunger is more polite than emotional hunger. It’s not yelling at you, but it’s there. It wants you to answer it, but it can be quieted with warm tea or a glass of water. If your hunger is physical, it will keep coming back, a little more noticeable each time. This signal is the one you want to answer when it asks for fuel. Can you imagine what would happen to your weight if you didn’t answer any of the calls of emotional hunger and only the ones for stomach hunger?

That’s the focus for this week. Wait for true stomach hunger and let that be the signal to eat. Start discerning the difference between stomach and emotional hunger, and stop answering the calls of emotional hunger. That’s it – not hard, but it’ll require your focus. Remember, you’ll be tempted to try to complicate this. But just focus on identifying and answering stomach hunger, and you will be more successful than if you dilute your efforts by adding on diets or exercise, or other food rules.

You can do this! One step forward at a time and before you know it, you’ll be changing the whole game! Next week, I’ll help you add a tool to help you determine how hungry is enough to eat. It’ll help you refine your focus. Until then, you can get a second go-round on this lesson on the YouTube channel. And, for those of you who’ve been waiting for the digital weight loss course I’ve created, it’s on the way. I’ll be offering you a chance to sign up for my webinar, Weight Loss Without Willpower so you’ll get first access to the course, so stay tuned!

If you really want a chance to work with me before I close my one-on-one coaching spots for the course launch, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s get your free one-hour consultation booked. Individualized help is rare and special in our world today, so don’t miss out!

Here’s your video help for the week!

Welcome back! It’s a new month and we are starting a new series – time to fire up your weight loss plan! I’m glad you’re here, staying committed to your goal and getting the support you need to be successful. If you were here for last month’s Fresh Start series, how is it going with taking out the mind trash, focusing, making your plan, and getting accountable? Are you seeing yourself grow in each area, little by little? If so, great – you’re getting closer to your permanent weight loss goal! If you aren’t seeing growth or if you just got here, take a little time and go back over the posts or YouTube videos from the past few weeks. They’ll help you get on track!

This month we are focusing on hunger. Yep, I heard all the groans! I know – everyone wants the weight to fall off, but we don’t want to be hungry as it happens. We think weight loss without hunger is attainable because even the big weight loss plans advertise it – buy our plan and you can lose weight without being hungry! Three meals and snacks throughout the day and you never have to feel hungry as you watch the weight fall off!

How’s that worked for you in the past?

Right – it doesn’t. At least, it only works while you follow their packaged food plan or the exact calorie-restricted regimen, which you promptly toss out the window as soon as you finish the program, at which point you watch with dismay as all the weight you lost comes back (usually with some extra!).

You need a plan you can live with forever. You need a reliable signal for when it’s time to eat, and when that signal is not there, it’s not time for food.

Yup, that’s hunger!

Who knows better than the designer how their design is made to function? I’ve studied the body for decades through medical school, residency, lifestyle medicine training, holistic nutrition training, and the one thing I know: The body is more complex than any human (doctor, scientist, nutritionist, or trainer) understands. The signal we have for when to eat is hunger. Our problem is that we don’t follow it. We don’t like it. We learn to eat in response to other signals (fatigue, stress, boredom) and we get out of touch with the one that matters.

Let’s address the biggest reason why you don’t want to get hungry. It’s uncomfortable! The sensation of hunger from the stomach is supposed to get your attention, so it doesn’t feel great. Actually, it’s not that bad, but once we decide we don’t like the feeling and we want to avoid it, the fear of hunger makes it bigger than the physical sensation actually is.

Besides, I’m not asking you to fast or bypass your hunger.

Hunger is THE signal to eat. You just want to be sure it’s actual physical hunger. If you eat because you’re physically hungry, you will lose weight. We’re going to spend the next few weeks working on how to do it and trouble shooting challenges that come with learning to wait for hunger, but for this next week, all I want you to focus on is using hunger as your only signal to eat. Nothing else. Not mealtimes or because the kids are eating, or to help you feel better after a stressful day at work – only because you are physically hungry.

It might seem like that’s not enough to be successful at weight loss and you want to get this show on the road! Here’s the thing – the more you give yourself to work on at once, the more you dilute your focus. When you focus on one thing, you can get really good at it! So even though it seems easy, just spend this week working on eating only when you’re hungry. It can be more challenging than you think, especially if you’re like most of us who eat for lots of reasons other than hunger! Besides, it’s just 7 days to the next challenge – see you in a week!

You can do this! Keep taking one step toward your goal and you’ll make it. I’m here if you need support – make comments or ask questions below and I’ll help. If you really want more individual support and are ready for the accountability and attention of a coach, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s set up your one-hour free consultation. We can get you to your goal!

Here’s your video help for the week!