- We believe healthy people come in all shapes and sizes.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- We honor the pain that results when this coping strategy seemingly takes on a life of its own…and robs a person of theirs.
- We believe change occurs when the problem is approached with new insight in these arenas…emotional, physical, nutritional, and spiritual health.
- 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.
- 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
