How to Stop Overeating, Overcoming Overeating

Losing Weight Karate Kid Style

TUESDAY, JULY 24, 2007 | POSTED BY MICHELLE

Do you remember in the Karate Kid when Mr. Miyagi asked Daniel to paint the fence, and wax on and wax off? After a week of doing Mr. Miyagi's chores Daniel was pretty frustrated. Mr. Miyagi quickly quelled his frustrations by proving that while he was performing these chores he was learning the fundamentals of karate.

People often ask me how I've lost my weight and kept it off. It was more of a change of lifestyle. I learned to put my clothes away at the end of the night, I learned to clean up while I cook instead of after, I learned to pay my bills on time, you get the idea. The better I got at managing the simple details of my life, the better I got at eating right. I made this connection yesterday to Dr. Gould in a meeting we were having. And then, in an act of serendipity this article appeared on CNN yesterday (http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/personal/06/29/in.your.head/index.html) that detailed that people who achieved long term weight loss had a complete shift in lifestyle which included being more organized and detail oriented. Making those kinds of shifts actually alters your brain in a way that allows you to be more disciplined about eating right.

I would like you to take on the challenge of learning to lose weight in alternative ways. Try any one of the following things:

1. Organize all those loose photos you have in albums.
2. Keep your house clean.
3. Clear out the closets and the garage of things you don't use anymore.
4. Pay your bills on time.
5. Clean away any clutter.

Doing these things and doing them consistently will make it easier to lose weight. Give it a try.

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By 2015 75% of Americans will be Overweight

FRIDAY, JULY 20, 2007 | POSTED BY MICHELLE

According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Human Nutrition by the year 2015 75% of Americans will be overweight and 41% will be obese.

This statistic doesn't have to become the inevitable future of our country. We can change but the answers aren't in the food pyramid they're inside of us.

What are we really hungry for?

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Resistance to the Idea of Emotional Eating

MONDAY, JULY 16, 2007 | POSTED BY MICHELLE

Our work with thousands of people has shown us that emotional eating is the number one reason that people break their diets. Here are some of the reasons that we've seen people have to explore before they could understand the idea of emotional eating and stop letting it sabotage their dieting success.

*I just have to finish the food on my plate
*I don't want to waste food
*I don't care anymore
*Nothings going to change so why bother trying
*I have a metabolism problem
*Everyone in my family is fat
*I'd upset a loved one if I didn't eat

If you hear yourself saying anyone of these things, use some of our free tools and get to the bottom of why you've been overeating. For me, the thing that I always said was "I just don't care anymore." That became my justification for eating whatever I wanted. The truth was that I cared deeply but I was just too afraid of failing one more time.

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Shrink Yourself on MSN

MONDAY, JULY 16, 2007 | POSTED BY MICHELLE

Read an excerpt from Shrink Yourself on the MSN website posted today:

Click here

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Fat: A Perfect Hiding Place

TUESDAY, JULY 10, 2007 | POSTED BY MICHELLE

In the later weeks of our online program and in The Shrink Yourself book Dr. Gould covers the subconscious reasons that people secretly want to stay fat. Of course, you don't feel like you want to stay overweight (I didn't think I did either) but somewhere inside you the safety seeking part of you does. This makes losing weight tricky. It makes people put weight back on when they get close to reaching their goal weight. It makes people that have lost all the weight they want put it back on plus more. Losing weight can feel like taking away a security blanket but as one of our members once said, "once you begin to live a life you love, fat just feels like a useless blanket you're hiding beneath."

Here are a few reasons people keep weight on - see if any resonate with you:

*to avoid sexual attention (from a partner or strangers who seem predatory)
*to punish someone
*so that people's expectations of you are not too high
*to see if people really love you for who you are (to test love)

These are just a few, you can read more in the Safety, Rebellion and Emptiness chapters of the Shrink Yourself book.

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Stress + Junk Food = Obesity ** Break The Toxic Equation

THURSDAY, JULY 05, 2007 | POSTED BY MICHELLE

Way to Shrink, Grow Fat Is Found
By Rob Stein

Scientists reported yesterday that they have uncovered a biological switch by which stress can promote obesity, a discovery that could help explain the world's growing weight problem and lead to new ways to melt flab and manipulate fat for cosmetic purposes.

In the article (see link above) published last week in The Washington Post it revealed that a new study at Georgetown University has nailed down the biochemistry of how obesity happens in mice, with the good likelihood that this is precisely what happens in humans. The key culprit is stress. Stress plus a junk food diet (high-fat, high-sugar) creates obesity, not simply a junk food diet alone. Mice that were subjected to stress and fed a junk food diet gained twice as much fat as mice that were fed the same diet but not subjected to stress. It was the worst kind of fat that was gained. Abdominal fat laced with hormones that leads to various illnesses (high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol).

The authors of this study were optimistic because the findings suggested an injection of something that blocks neuropeptide Y, a chemical messenger produced by nerves in the body that stimulates fat growth, would inhibit weight gain. Yes, that might work and we can wait for them to develop such an injection. However, the authors of the article didn't even consider a far simpler solution. There are two options. The first is to abstain from junk food. However, as you might already know, this can be difficult because of the calming effects of eating certain foods. The second is to teach people how to manage their stress and their fat cells will not be stimulated to grow. But how?

Stress is ubiquitous. We can't propose eliminating stress but you can break the addictive pattern of using junk food to manage stress. This is what Shrink Yourself has been teaching people to do. Once that connection is broken, you can learn more efficient ways to manage the inevitable stress of everyday life.

When food is removed as a stress management coping mechanism, you can make sensible food choices and lose weight. That's how you break the addiction to junk food. Our programs interrupt both factors in the toxic combination of stress and fatty foods and the obesity they create.

To Read the complete article in The Washington Post click here:
Way to Shrink, Grow Fat is Found

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HOSTED BY...

As a psychiatrist who has worked with thousands of overweight people over four decades, I can understand how much you suffer when you are overweight or think of yourself as fat. Not only do you suffer from the physical and medical consequences of extra weight, but I know that you also suffer from painful feelings, such as disappointment, hopelessness, and guilt.

This program will help you learn the mental skills you need to stop overeating. Because, most of the time, you are really not hungry for food but for something else.

As you uncover and demystify your hidden triggers to eat, you will diminish their power over you, until one day you wake and the cravings will be gone! The new thinner, healthier, happier YOU will emerge.

Find out if you're an emotional eater and what your triggers are. Take my Emotional Eating Diagnostic.

JOIN NOW!