Meet Miriam. Miriam is a 33-year-old mom of a rambunctious 3-year-old boy, works full time as a teacher, and has 3 additional jobs on top of that. To say that she’s a busy, stressed-out lady would be an understatement.
Because of how busy her life is, she gained weight. She is working 60-70 hour weeks, and is always on the go-go-go. One day, she stepped on the scale, and saw that she was actually heavier than when she was pregnant, and thought enough was enough.
That’s when she decided to join our online group coaching program called End Emotional Eating. And in the 12 weeks of that program, she:
- Lost 15 pounds.
- Got her husband and son eating healthier.
- Felt more control over her life and eating behaviors.
- Started exercising more.
- Decreased her evening snacking by 95%.
If you’d like to watch Miriam tell her own story, you can check out our interview below.
Our next cohort of the End Emotional Eating program starts on Wednesday, August 4. We’re only letting in 20-30 people. If you’d like to be notified when registrations open up, so you can be first to know, and get the best price, sign up here (this is not a sign up for the program. This is just to sign up to be notified when the registrations open up. It’s ultimately up to you whether or not you register).
Miriam’s Life Before
As you learned during the introduction, Miriam is a busy lady. She’s got a rambunctious 3-year-old son. She works full time as a teacher (and you know how stressful teachers have it during covid). Plus, her husband lost his job at the beginning of covid, which added to her stress.
When some people get busy, their fitness and health falls by the wayside. That was certainly true for Miriam. The busier she got, the more weight she gained, because:
- She wasn’t preparing or thinking about her meals. She didn’t really have set mealtimes. She was too busy for that.
- She was under stress, so she started stress eating.
- She wanted to unwind at night, and the way she did that was by watching TV, and snacking on something (and it wasn’t carrots and celery, let me tell ya).
- She wasn’t moving around or exercising, because well… there just wasn’t any time for that.
She knew it wasn’t healthy, but the moment when she decided to do something about it was when she stepped on the scale, and found her weight to be higher than when she was pregnant.
She was already not happy with her body and eating choices. She felt she needed more control over her life, and that started with control over her body.
Right around that time, I happened to be just launching my End Emotional Eating Program, and it appealed to her. She liked it because:
- It wasn’t taking out an entire hour of her day, 3-5 times per week to go exercise (plus commuting time, etc.). Rather, they were short, 15-30 minute sessions once per week.
- It accommodated to her schedule. Whether she could make our group meetings or not, they were recorded, so she could watch them on her own time.
- She had an accountability partner. The accountability partner was another student going through the program, so they were in it together, and they kept each other on track.
- The program addressed the real causes of her weight gain: stress eating, emotional eating, mindless snacking, and lack of planning.
- The mental/emotional/behavioral exercises that she had to do were just 30 seconds to 2 minutes in length.
- The environment was supportive, and nonjudgmental.
- It wasn’t just another diet. In fact… it wasn’t a diet at all.
- The price was right… it was considerably lower priced than 1-on-1 personal training.
Basically, the program hit a lot of the checkboxes that would have prevented Miriam from participating in a more involved and lengthy program. So she got to work. And if all these conditions sound good to you, and you want to be notified when enrollments open for the End Emotional Eating program, sign up here (note: this is not a sign up for the program. Just a sign up to be notified when enrollments do open. It’s up to you whether you want to enroll or not).
The Strategies We Used
In each week of the End Emotional Eating program, there’s one simple exercise we give our students to improve their relationship with food.
The Hunger Check-In
One of the exercises that we had our students doing is in a Google Sheet to write down both the name of the emotion they’re feeling right before a meal, along with rating their hunger on a -10 to +10 scale (-10 is famished. +10 is stuffed. 0 is not hungry and not full).
This shines a light on our unconscious behaviors, and makes them conscious. It might be lunch time, so it’s time to rate your hunger, and you rate it a +3. In other words, you’re not hungry. Yet, you still sit down to eat, just because “it’s time.”
After a few days or weeks of doing this, you start to wonder “maybe I don’t need all that food. What if I waited until my hunger level was between 0 and -3?” So you play around with different ways of actually eating when hungry. Whether it’s lengthening the time between meals, or eating smaller meals, or some other strategy.
The Post-Mortem
The other strategy that Miriam found particularly helpful was the post-mortem. When you write down what you’re feeling just before you eat, you often realize that you eat for reasons other than hunger. Maybe you’re stressed, or bored, or frustrated, etc.
When you track your emotions at the time of hunger, this once again makes the unconscious conscious. You start to notice that there are 1 or 2 emotions that you consistently feel that make you eat when not hungry. Once it becomes glaringly obvious, we help our students come up with ways to deal with the triggering emotions without food.
One of the things that really worked for Miriam is another exercise we did, which is taking 30-60 seconds in the morning to write down what you plan to eat that day. It didn’t even have to be “healthy.” If you plan on eating chocolate cake, just write it down. The point is the planning. Not how healthy or unhealthy it is.
She noticed that if she took that time to pre-plan her meals for later in the day, whether she was feeling stressed, rushed, bored or frustrated, she was still able to stick to her plan the majority of the time.
But that’s just Miriam. Not every strategy worked for every person. The cool thing is that there’s more than one way to get things done. Planning worked great for Miriam. But it didn’t work so well for Carole. So we used other strategies with equal effectiveness.
Although there were 12 different strategies in total, these are the 3 that Miriam found most helpful. Other students found different strategies more helpful for their own situation, personality, preferences, and schedules.
How Miriam’s Life is Different Now
Because Miriam was such a diligent student, and did her homework consistently, she saw far-reaching improvements in a lot of aspects of her life.
For one thing, she’s down 15 pounds. Decent for 12 weeks. Sure, it’s much slower than crash dieting, but there are 2 remarkable things about that:
- I actually didn’t tell my students what to not eat. And in only 1 of the 12 lessons did I tell my students what to eat (and it wasn’t exactly a meal plan. It was pretty much to just choose between more protein and more fibre).
- Miriam has a condition called “PCOS” (polycystic ovary syndrome) that makes it extra hard to lose weight. 15 pounds in 12 weeks for someone with PCOS is quite impressive!
Her 15-pound loss happened as a consequence of:
- Paying attention to her physical hunger levels (vs. emotional hunger).
- Finding ways of dealing with negative emotions without food.
- Finding alternatives to nighttime mindless snacking.
- Having an accountability partner to share each other’s successes and challenges.
It didn’t happen as a result of counting calories, carbs or protein. It didn’t happen as a result of surgery, a drug or a supplement. And it didn’t happen as a result of cutting out “banned” foods.
It came as a result of better emotional health.
Besides the weight loss, a lot of other benefits came, like:
- Her 3-year-old son, and her husband are actually eating better, because she’s eating better. One of her main goals in enrolling in the program was to be a good example for her son. Mission accomplished.
- She started exercising more. She realized that all 4 of her jobs are sedentary, and her schedule is obviously super busy. But she still just wanted to move more. So in one of the 12 lessons, we addressed movement. As a result, she’s now moving more than she used to. Now, these aren’t exactly tailor-made personal training sessions, but they are short bursts of exercise (just 5-10 minutes per day) that get her moving. And that’s 5-10 minutes more than she was doing before. As we preach in this program, “progress, not perfection.”
- Her nighttime snacking decreased by 95%. That was her big nemesis, and she was able to conquer that mountain.
- She feels much more in control of her life, because she feels healthier, in charge of her nutrition and movement, and now, there’s a bit more order in her life.
The cool thing is that besides that, not much about her life has changed. She’s still working 4 jobs. Her 3-year-old is still just as rambunctious. And yet, she managed to accomplish all this, in spite of those circumstances.
If you’re jealous of Miriam, and also want to see similar results, our next cohort of the End Emotional Eating program starts on Wednesday, August 4. We’re only letting in 20-30 people. If you’d like to be notified when registrations open up, so you can be first to know, and get the best price, sign up here (this is not a sign up for the program. This is just to sign up to be notified when the registrations open up. It’s ultimately up to you whether or not you register).
