I was driving to the gym this morning and it was early, so I’d only had a small snack instead of my usual breakfast. My mind wandered as I drove and suddenly I was thinking about what time I’d be having breakfast and what I was planning to eat.

Almost immediately, there was another voice in my head. A scolding, judgmental voice. And she wanted to know what the hell was wrong with me for planning out my next meal before I was hungry.

Oh, here we go.
I should be over this stuff. Thinking about what I’m going to eat and when… Clearly solid evidence that I’m still body and food obsessed.

This chastising voice in my head is so irrational: She’s not picky about what the obsession involves. She’s mad either way. Either, I’m a mess because I’m planning out my meals and that’s too restrictive for her tastes. Or, I’m disgusting for thinking about food when I’m not hungry.

Right away I flashed on a conversation with my dad when I was just a kid, maybe 10 or 11. Just barely before the preoccupation with my weight and body started. We were out doing something as a family, and I wanted to know what the plan was for our next meal.

My dad teased me, and I can hear his voice now saying something like:
“I don’t know, Briana. Don’t worry about it. Have we ever not fed you?”

He wasn’t being critical, he didn’t mean anything by it. He was just responding to my question. But the comment must have sparked something for me to carry it with me. And for it to flash through my mind at this particular moment almost twenty years later, as I berate myself for thinking about my next meal.

But this morning, by some slip of grace, I paused and glimpsed some perspective. Here are the facts:
It’s 7:30 am on a sunny February morning. I’m turning right at the stop light on my way to the gym. My mind flits easily, fluidly across my breakfast plan.

Eating is part of life. No, really. I’m serious.
Wondering what and when you’ll eat is totally neutral. It’s not inherently good or bad.

My mind is always whirling, sentences incessantly fluttering through my consciousness. And one of those narratives happens to be about food. (Because I’m a human being, with a lizard brain, who’d like to keep on eating to survive. Seems pretty normal really.)

Thinking about breakfast isn’t right or wrong. It just IS. But I can do a couple of things with that thought. I can make it mean that I’m still struggling with food and body stuff. (The automatic impulse.) Or I can let it be just a sentence that flickers across my awareness.

OR, I can even make it mean that I’m taking care of myself, thinking about my choices, knowing that I’m doing my best to nourish and take care of myself. And that snarky voice will just have to deal.

My heart kind of lurched into my stomach as I read Jonah Lehrer’s recent article on willpower and resolutions. So many people are already dispirited and discouraged when it comes to solving their body struggles. And I worry that they’ll read this article as more evidence to give up hope.

Lehrer explains that willpower is a limited resource. Like a muscle that gets tired from overuse, if we spend our energy (willpower) keeping ourselves from snapping at our boss, we have less leftover to resist the pint of ice cream at the end of a long day.

We know this.
This is the obvious reason why the white-knuckle diet approach never seems to work. Sure, you can stick with your Perfect Eating Plan as long as things in life are running super smoothly and you have a stockpile of willpower in reserve.

But. As soon as something rocks your boat and depletes your stash, lookout junk food frenzy.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem particularly empowering. Sounds like we’re doomed to a life of either/or. Either snap at your spouse or mainline Oreos. Either eat healthy food or floss your teeth.

Bright spots.
Just being aware of willpower’s limitations can help us avoid that “what the hell is wrong with me for not being satisfied with celery for dinner” mentality.

And maybe this knowledge will help persuade us to take a longer view toward making changes, by starting slowing and celebrating small wins.

And some of the research suggests that if there’s something that takes willpower to avoid, like, um, Hagen Daas, one possible workaround is to distract yourself from wanting the ice cream by focusing your attention on something else.

Two things.
1. Being tempted by that delicious slice of pie is one thing. But wanting to overeat is usually about something other than scrumptious treats.

When you deal with the reasons that you want to overeat in the first place, you won’t need willpower to stop when you’ve had enough.

2. Distract yourself for sure. How about distracting yourself from obsessing about food or your body by creating a life that you love? Why should our days be so full of things that take willpower? Blech.

Let’s call it the
Doing more of the stuff that makes you say ‘I was having so much fun I forgot to overeat’ technique.

This week I had the pleasure of chatting with the lovely and super-talented Leah Piken Kolidas of Creative Every Day. I’m a huge fan of Leah’s art, not to mention her sweet and encouraging spirit.

Nourishing myself through creativity has been such an important part of healing my own relationship with my body. Leah and I talked about the overlap between tapping into our creative nature and connecting with our bodies and ourselves. It was an absolute joy to chat with her about this stuff!

I hope you’ll check out our interview about the connection between creativity and body love, and learn more about Leah and her Creative Every Day Challenge.

I had a moment over the holidays when I thought that I might want to eat way too much of some really junky trail mix. You know, the kind that’s salty and sweet with nuts and raisins and M&M’s? M&M’s!

And in that moment, I was sitting at a coffee shop with my family. Eating a treat. Only I was totally missing out on the experience because I was off in some future moment gorging on some different treat.

This takes some awareness. (I’ve had lots of practice.)
Sometimes I can watch these intense impulses rise and fall. Not that I let the impulse fall every single time. Or that the slew of tricks and techniques and fairy dust I use are absolutely failproof.

Sometimes I eat the M&M’s. But most of time I don’t. Not out of self control; the desire just kinda fades.

When you’re caught in a painful pattern of doing something you really don’t want to do, you just want to know why. It feels so out of control. And then there’s the self-loathing that usually tags along. Ugh.

And it’s not like you get to enjoy whatever you’re doing. The whole time your inner dialogue just rants:

Stop it! Stop! Why are you doing this? You are disgusting. You’re not even hungry. And you’re going to feel terrible after. Terrible! Tomorrow will be terrible! And, why? Just why why WHY?

No, really. Why?
In that moment thinking about the M&M’s, I noticed one of the many answers to why. As I sat in the coffee shop with my family eating one treat semi-consciously and planning another treat in my head… That moment wasn’t terrible at all. It was delicious. And exhilarating. Exhilarating. Oh, that’s why.

Usually, when we feel that little trill of emotion before we do something we don’t want to do, we try to push it away. Urgently. Fervently. No no no. I don’t want to overeat. NO!

We think recognizing the impulse means automatically giving in. Losing control. And we try to resist.

Resistance really is futile.
The harder you try to resist, the more urgent your impulse becomes. And then you can’t get out without doing that thing you don’t want to do. And doing it becomes something you hate about yourself:
God, I have no self-control, I’m disgusting. What the hell is wrong with me? Oh yeah, everything…

But there’s a good reason for doing the things we do. We’re getting to feel exhilarated or we’re sneaking a moment of escape. Whatever it is for you, you can be sure you’re getting something you need.

You can find the reason for the pattern. Yeah, sometimes you’ll still do the thing. But acknowledging that you’re getting something out of it: Huge. And then when the impulse comes, you can say:
Oh hello, exhilaration. I was expecting you.

When you allow the pattern to exist, you can find nourishing ways to meet your needs. Like Pooh said:

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best — ” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.

Theoretically I believe in the possibility of complete healing from stucknesses related to food and body image. And that it will be amazing. But I’m not there.

Where I am now is a comfortable balance between wanting to be perfect and skinny versus wanting to eat all of the chocolate within a 30 mile radius. So it’s not that those desires have gone away…

I guess the difference is that the impulses don’t impress me much anymore. And that shift means I hardly ever feel the need to act out on them. The range keeps getting narrower and easier and the pendulum doesn’t swing nearly as wide from side to side anymore. And hallelujah for that.

But 100% healed, as in cured? As in never eating more than my body needs or never wishing my tush was firmer? Ha! Not so much.

This is related, but I’m not sure how. So imagine seamless segue here.

I’ve been thinking about a book I read forever ago: Why French Women Don’t Get Fat. And for whatever reason (aside from my girlhood love affair with all things French and glamorous), the premise really worked for me. And as I’ve been thinking about my old nightmarish cycle of indulgence following by deprivation, I started wondering why the premise had worked. Because, in many ways, the message is parallel to:

Go ahead and indulge. But balance it out with deprivation.

Except. I realized the author’s message is framed completely different. French women* aren’t afraid of food. They don’t use food, or abstain from food, to punish themselves. Instead, they love to eat. They take pleasure in the rituals of shopping and preparing and feasting. And they see managing their weight and loving food as a pleasant balancing act.

*Ridiculously absurd generalization, absolutely. I’m just speaking to the spirit of the book’s message.

Which all matches up with two of my own Big Important Truths when it comes to healing this stuff:
1. Give yourself permission to eat everything you enjoy, and;
2. Realize that beating yourself up never works: Decide not to do it anymore. And when you slip, don’t beat yourself up for that either. (And so on, and so on.)

Eat what you love, enjoy it thoroughly, and balance it out with healthy moderation is much different packaging than the old:

Eat a wheelbarrow of chocolate and then limit yourself to carrots and celery for three days as cruel, self-inflicted punishment.

Of course I’m not saying that’s an easy switch to make. At all. Especially for anyone intimate with diet mentality. But it is possible. And oh so worth it.

**I think diets suck. (No surprise there.)
To celebrate the New Year, I’m giving a free call with friend and fellow coach Amy Pearson.
Join us and learn a happier way to wellness.
Call details:
Wednesday, January 6th at 9 am PST/ 12 noon EST
Call in: (724) 444-7444, Passcode: 68599
(To sign up for a reminder and recording, click here.)

***And just a reminder… the early bird price for our upcoming teleseminar is good through December 31st. Learn a fresh approach in 2010: Heal your brain (and body) from the effects of dieting.

I know it sounds crazy – stay with me. So I was working out with my trainer last week. (No, not that one – he was just the training signer-upper guy. A different one.) And he was talking about the mass quantities of holiday chocolate on display every single place he goes.

He was kind of amazed by it, and just kept saying: No, seriously, who makes all of that chocolate? And really, what could anyone possibly do with all of that chocolate?

I kind of nodded my head in agreement. And eventually I confessed that in the past I probably would have been kind of freaked out by all that chocolate. Afraid that I’d want to eat it all. Or something.

His face got really surprised. Really? Did you have control issues or something? I never would imagine that of you. (Haha, no he was not being sarcastic. He was serious. I know.)

And during one of our first sessions, I was all self-conscious and hesitated telling him what I do because I had already kind of judged him. I assumed he followed the “just do it” mentality of eating and exercise. Eat less, move more, blah freaking blah. That he wouldn’t understand what it was like to struggle.

I tried to explain that I work with people who have stuck spots around eating and body image, people who need help with the psychological and behaviorial side of eating and exercise. Which gave him a chance to tell me that he used to be a binge eater.

Wha?! A personal trainer? The ones that scare you away from going to the gym? Yeah. I know. So telling him what I do was an opportunity for me to burn up some of my own personal stereotypes.

And the other trainer? Yeah, that one. When I joined the gym, he whipped out this binder to show me his before pictures. Before he lost a whole bunch of weight, and got healthy and fit.

So now I’m having trouble remembering why I, or anyone else, would ever be intimidated by the Universe of Gym or the muscle-centric world of personal training.

It reminds of that story: You’re on a walk and suddenly terrified of a snake in the grass. Until you realize the snake is a coiled up rope and you laugh. And you can never go back to being scared: you can’t even remember what it felt like to believe the rope was a snake.

And maybe you have no interest in working out with a personal trainer. That’s understandable and totally fine – plenty of my right people would sooner lick sand than set foot in a gym.

Maybe it’s yoga that intimidates you… with those bendy, mindful, lithe women with their bendy, breathey serenity. But I have it on authority that those yogis, the ones who fall in love with yoga enough to subject themselves to intense teacher training?

Chances are they had their own stuff to work through, and that’s how they found yoga. They aren’t there The good ones aren’t there to judge you. They’re there to like you, and to help you like you.

My body does not like lentils. At all. And noticing this over and over is reminding me how much diet dogma we all have to clear out in order to have a happy, healthy relationship with our bodies.

Because, duh, everyone knows lentils are good for you. And so my brain thinks I should keep eating them even though my body is constantly offering all kinds of evidence to the contrary.

Intellectually, I understand how important it is to listen to your body. I know all of our bodies are different. Some bodies love fruit, some don’t. Some bodies can handle milk, or gluten, or peanuts, and some can’t. But sometimes old dieting rules cloud my thinking, and sometimes my own inner guidance crosses signals with some “expert” advice.

Lucky for me, helping other people connect with their bodies is part of my job. Because when I’m teaching these concepts, I can’t help but keep refining my own stuff.

I had a conversation with a client recently whose body was telling her, in no uncertain terms:
Enough with all of this stuff that you think you “should” be feeding me. Enough.

And my body is saying:
Enough with the lentils already. I hate them. How many times do I have to tell you?

I think this is so fascinating because, ostensibly, we are trying to eat healthy food in order to nourish our bodies. I say ostensibly because if we peer closely at our reasons, there’s often a thinly veiled impulse to restrict and lose weight or to follow some arbitrary, externally mandated rules.

So my mind wants to eat lentils because they are supposedly super healthy for my body. But my body doesn’t like the lentils, dammit. And, crazy enough, isn’t your body the real expert on what’s good for your body?

Wherever you go, there you are. This is a theme that’s been on my mind lately. As part of my Great Sewing Experiment, I noticed a pattern of punishment woven through my relationship with myself. 

The gist of it is that I didn’t follow through on something I wanted to do. And immediately some part of me pounced on the opportunity to inflict a bit of punishment. It brought me right back to my old relationship with eating and exercise stuff. I rode one long, scary roller coaster of overindulgence following by extreme restriction and deprivation.

If I ate in a way that was less than what I deemed to be perfect, I would inflict a strict regime of deprivation. This pattern created an internal tug-of-war that, by definition, I just couldn’t win. When you battle yourself, a part of you has to lose. 

Martha Beck writes in The Four Day Win about two personas who are constantly struggling for control over our behavior: the Dictator and the Wild Child. They can wreck havoc on our eating and exercise behavior, yes, but the tendency shows up in lots of other places, too. Hence, my Dictator’s appearance mid-sewing experiment.

Of all the tools that helped me heal my body-related stuck spots, getting to know these two crazy ladies who live in my head has been one of the most enlightening.

During the scariest of my roller coaster riding days, if the Dictator felt I’d overindulged, she’d try to whip me into shape. And I’d follow along for awhile. But eventually the Dictator would get tired or bored and loosen her grip, at which point the Wild Child was waiting in the wings, only too happy to take the reins and announce a junk food free for all.

Back and forth they went, desperate for control. The key to breaking the cycle was realizing that neither the Dictator nor the Wild Child was me. I was beyond both, and realizing that meant I could stop identifying completely with whoever was trying to run the show at the moment. 

I hear clients and friends say they’re either on The Program (being disciplined, wielding willpower, doing things perfectly, losing weight) or they’re off The Program (absolutely out of control). And I say that during those times, someone else is running the show. Guess which is which.

Your Dictator runs a tight ship: there will be no straying from the celery and rice cakes. But eventually she gets tired or bored. The second she lets her guard down or turns her back, your Wild Child is at the ready, her graspy hands already grazing the bottom of a gallon of ice cream.

Here’s the thing: neither of these impulses are you. You are the awareness; the presence that can notice their demands and their impulses. You don’t have to be impressed by what they say or what they want you to do. Start by noticing them. This awareness can help you learn to disengage from the tug-of-war. Until eventually you reach a point where you can stop the struggle before it starts.

Several years ago one of my close friends told me this story about her older brother, and it still pops into my head pretty regularly. One day when they were little, he dished himself up a bowl of ice cream and when their mom saw his bowl, she told him it was way too much.

After that, every time he’d ask for a bowl of ice cream, he’d say “I want too much ice cream.” For him too much was just a description of quantity. It wasn’t loaded with judgment. He hadn’t developed an overwhelming sense of lack or fear of not having enough.

When I first flirted with the idea of allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, to stop dieting and restricting and depriving, it sounded incredibly dangerous. I assumed that I’d always want too much. I was afraid that I might be insatiable. 

The thing is, when it came to ice cream or cookies, maybe I was. But I misunderstood something. I was insatiable precisely because I wasn’t hungry for butter and sugar. When I’m not physically hungry, no amount of pastries will fill me up.

The poet Jack Gilbert said:

Why do so many settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not hungry for what’s inside them.

I eventually discovered that that’s exactly what I was hungry for all along. And so too much ice cream would still never be enough.

Another coach recently offered this helpful question to use with clients: Am I hungry, or do I just want to eat? If you find that you’re not hungry and you just want to eat, see if you can pause and acknowledge to yourself:

I want something, and it’s not food.

You might still reach for something to eat, but I find that these momentary pauses are the first step toward creating a conscious relationship with your body. And yeah, yourself.

Confession: this post has an ulterior motive. Except… Well, if I call it out like that right there at the beginning, it seems more utterly obvious than ulterior. Huh. 

Well here’s the thing: as I get really amped about creating my coaching practice, all of the entrepreneurial marketing-type experts out there say to focus on only one thing. I keep hearing loads of hoopla about how I should help one group of people with one specific thing. Even better if they hang out in the same places and have the same birthday and buy the same brand of toilet paper. Seriously, niche it up or fail.

But I don’t wanna. And lucky for me there’s this one biggification genius who says otherwise. Which makes her my very favorite one because she’s kinda telling me what I want to hear. (Pattern here? You betcha.) So in the spirit of doing my thing, I’m listening to her and kinda doing whatever I want. *Knocks on wood*

It’s not much of a secret that I’ve dabbled in a variety of unhealthy eating (and not eating) patterns and stuff. There. And dabble is the gentlest euphemism I can muster. Anyway. I’ve talked about it here and here, and a little here. Oh heavens, I allude to it quite a bit. 

The point is, healing my stuff around eating, weight, and body image introduced me to myself, to what I really want and what I’m really about. It was a pattern that ended up being a window into… well, you know… like, my soul or something. *She takes a deep breath*. Which ultimately led me to finding my thing. This thing: the coaching & helping people & wellness & self-work thing.

And because of my experience or process or journey, I just can’t choose one thing. I have to help people make peace with their bodies so they can get on with their happy, healthy lives. And I have to help people find their thing.

Have. To. Compelled to. *Love* to. 

And the question becomes how to go about doing that. Because maybe your main focus is ending the diet drama, reaching your ideal weight, and staying there. And maybe you’re already doing work you love, and you don’t need help finding your thing or being happy doing it. Well then I don’t want to talk your ear off about that. I just want to help you with all of the body-related stuck spots. And so that’s what I’m going to do here.

But. Over here? I’m talking about all that other stuff. Finding your thing, going for your thing, being deliriously happy doing the thing. And yeah, there will be crossover stuff. To me, it’s all related, it’s all part of learning to be comfortable in our own skin, and realizing that we all have something incredible to offer the world.