On Muffins and Muffin Tops

Posted on 12. Jul, 2010 by Susan in Blog

Muffins do not create muffin tops. Depriving yourself of all delicious foods, like a muffin, will. Quickly.

It’s not the muffin that’s the problem.

Spending all day and night white knuckling against the desire to eat a muffin, stewing over, brooding about and cursing muffins, will most likely lead to situations like shutting yourself inside your kitchen pantry to scarf down 5 muffins at once. All your power is given away to an innocent muffin.

My client Allison is one pretty smart chic. She’s learning how to listen to what her body has to say about when she is hungry and satisfied. But she was having a mental war with a cafeteria muffin.

Each morning, she would longingly gaze at the muffins as she ordered her yogurt. She would think about having an affair with that muffin all day. By nighttime, Allison was pretty pissed off. And then, she would retaliate against the deprivation with a pint of something she felt she “deserved.”

I invited Allison to order and eat the damn muffin.

I personally do not want to live in a world where foods are measured and weighed, anything other than celery stalks are “bad” and people declare themselves “powerless” in the face of snack foods. Are you kidding me?

Our bodies are extraordinarily powerful. They communicate with us all day long. If we listen, we can hear the signals. Hungry, satisfied, sluggish, energized, blocked or in the flow. The answers are there.

Doritos and muffins and cookies do not scare me. I can eat them. My body tells me what it likes. If a muffin makes me feel like crap, chances are, I won’t order one very often. But avoiding “bad foods” leads to diet mentality. And you can see how far diets get us….spending 60 billion a year to lose and gain and lose and gain again.

Allison sent me this email this morning:
“A funny thing happened in the cafeteria this morning for breakfast. I didn’t want the MUFFIN!!!! Go figure! Now that I gave myself permission it lost its appeal. I thought it was funny that I’ve been thinking about this darn muffin for a week now!”

And that’s how it works. She let go of the resistance, and it turns out that she really didn’t want the muffin today so much. It’s not the muffin she’s after. Now she can sort out what she really wants.

Lose It In Sedona – May 13-16, 2010!

Posted on 23. Feb, 2010 by Susan in Weight Loss

The fabulous Bridgette Boudreau and I are leading a weight loss retreat in Sedona May 13-16. Here’s what we have to say about it!

Get all the details and register at http://ideallifedesign.com/telecourses.html.

Popular Weight Loss Advice That Sucks, and why you don’t have to listen

Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Susan in Weight Loss

Celebrities are hired to glam up crappy packaged foods and poisonous “fat blocking” pills. Pick up any “health” magazine, and you’ll find a newly-fit, slightly-famous woman declaring dieting words of wisdom that include earth shattering tips like, “clear out all tempting foods and eat only carrots.” Google “weight loss” and you will receive 426,000,000 results. Most of it is full of damaging lies that separate you from your money, your natural body weight, and your own power.

As a former yo-yo dieter, I’m passionate about reconnecting women with their inner wisdom and the handiest weight loss tool around — their very own bodies. I’ve selected three popular weight loss tips that I invite you to drop. They don’t create lasting weight loss or inner peace.

Clean Sweep

apple_tape measureYou’ve seen these segments on TV. A weight loss “expert” will go into a dieter’s kitchen and fill a dumpster in their front yard with all their mayonnaise, Cheetos, bread, hamburger meat, and basically anything that contains more than 100 calories. The dieter cries, the “expert” tells her to suck it up, and the cameras capture this “motivating” encounter to “help” us understand that we are powerless to the fat gram. We need to clean out our fridges and pantries and purses if we ever hope to stuff our muffin tops into skinny jeans. We can’t be tempted.

After the camera crew leaves, and the dieter has had enough white knuckling, eating lettuce, and chewing on the baseboards, a tsunami of binging and self-flogging ensues. The dieter wonders what’s wrong with her and why she can’t lose weight. The truth is that deprivation just doesn’t work. You can’t hide from food. Food isn’t the issue in the first place. A lasting weight loss journey begins with understanding the thoughts and emotions that are creating the need to overeat in the first place. YOU can become your expert. So, what are you hungry for really? When you cure boredom with a plate of brownies, or stuff down anger with pizza, or create your entertainment through wine and cheese, notice it.

Three Square Meals

We’ve become a nation obsessed with eating according to external cues. We eat by the clock and abide by the rules of the Clean Plate Club. The Clean Plate Club does not allow snacking between meals, eating after 7 p.m., before 5 a.m. or on Sundays. I recently saw a very famous wellness guru Tweet to eat three 400-calorie meals a day with no snacking in between for successful weight loss. Is there no wonder why Americans SUPERSIZE our portions when we think we’ve got to get all we can in three meals? The truth is that your magnificent and miraculous human body is equipped to alert you when to eat and when to stop. This usually results in eating 5-6 times a day and a naturally thin body. It doesn’t matter what time of day that is. If you eat when you are hungry, and fuel your body according to its signals, you can bag all the crazy rules. Visit here to download a free Hunger Scale Guide.

Eat This Not That

Surf around on enough weight loss web sites, and you’ll be warned that you should not eat carbs, meat, egg, boysenberries, and actual real food. You can’t be trusted with any of them. Just go ahead and buy frozen, fake food so that you can control yourself. Ridiculousness! The truth that I have learned by honoring my own body, and working with hundreds of other women and their unique bodies, is that your very own body will TELL you what foods feel good and bad in your system. Guess what? Eggs, and orange juice, and cottage cheese feel just great in my body. They energize and fuel me. Not so for some of my clients. These foods feel sickly in their stomachs. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing with food. Learning how to pay attention to how different foods actually feel inside your body through food journaling can free you from these crazy rules. Visit here to download a free Food Journal worksheet.

The diet industry has a lot to lose if you take back your power. In a $60 billion industry, it’s counting on you to continue using food in unhealthy ways. I challenge you to start your very own personal body revolution. It’s not about counting calories, weighing food, and over exercising. It is about learning how to think. You can do that. You can live at your natural weight. Just take the first sane and rational steps.

Join Martha Beck, PhD and best-selling author of The Four Day Win, Brooke Castillo, Master Coach and author of If I’m So Smart Why Can’t I Lose Weight?, and me for a weekend designed to help you lose the drama and the weight — January 22-24 in Phoenix, Arizona. Get all the details and register at www.weightlossforsmartwomen.com.

Celebrities are hired to glam up crappy packaged foods and poisonous “fat blocking” pills. Pick up any “health” magazine, and you’ll find a newly-fit, slightly-famous woman declaring dieting words of wisdom that include earth shattering tips like, “clear out all tempting foods and eat only carrots.” Google “weight loss” and you will receive 426,000,000 results. Most of it is full of damaging lies that separate you from your money, your natural body weight, and your own power.
As a former yo-yo dieter, I’m passionate about reconnecting women with their inner wisdom and the handiest weight loss tool around — their very own bodies. I’ve selected three popular weight loss tips that I invite you to drop. They don’t create lasting weight loss or inner peace.
Clean Sweep
You’ve seen these segments on TV. A weight loss “expert” will go into a dieter’s kitchen and fill a dumpster in their front yard with all their mayonnaise, Cheetos, bread, hamburger meat, and basically anything that contains more than 100 calories. The dieter cries, the “expert” tells her to suck it up, and the cameras capture this “motivating” encounter to “help” us understand that we are powerless to the fat gram. We need to clean out our fridges and pantries and purses if we ever hope to stuff our muffin tops into skinny jeans. We can’t be tempted.
After the camera crew leaves, and the dieter has had enough white knuckling, eating lettuce, and chewing on the baseboards, a tsunami of binging and self-flogging ensues. The dieter wonders what’s wrong with her and why she can’t lose weight. The truth is that deprivation just doesn’t work. You can’t hide from food. Food isn’t the issue in the first place. A lasting weight loss journey begins with understanding the thoughts and emotions that are creating the need to overeat in the first place. YOU can become your expert. So, what are you hungry for really? When you cure boredom with a plate of brownies, or stuff down anger with pizza, or create your entertainment through wine and cheese, notice it.
Three Square Meals
We’ve become a nation obsessed with eating according to external cues. We eat by the clock and abide by the rules of the Clean Plate Club. The Clean Plate Club does not allow snacking between meals, eating after 7 p.m., before 5 a.m. or on Sundays. I recently saw a very famous wellness guru Tweet to eat three 400-calorie meals a day with no snacking in between for successful weight loss. Is there no wonder why Americans SUPERSIZE our portions when we think we’ve got to get all we can in three meals? The truth is that your magnificent and miraculous human body is equipped to alert you when to eat and when to stop. This usually results in eating 5-6 times a day and a naturally thin body. It doesn’t matter what time of day that is. If you eat when you are hungry, and fuel your body according to its signals, you can bag all the crazy rules. Visit here to download a free Hunger Scale Guide.
Eat This Not That
Surf around on enough weight loss web sites, and you’ll be warned that you should not eat carbs, meat, egg, boysenberries, and actual real food. You can’t be trusted with any of them. Just go ahead and buy frozen, fake food so that you can control yourself. Ridiculousness! The truth that I have learned by honoring my own body, and working with hundreds of other women and their unique bodies, is that your very own body will TELL you what foods feel good and bad in your system. Guess what? Eggs, and orange juice, and cottage cheese feel just great in my body. They energize and fuel me. Not so for some of my clients. These foods feel sickly in their stomachs. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing with food. Learning how to pay attention to how different foods actually feel inside your body through food journaling can free you from these crazy rules. Visit here to download a free Food Journal worksheet.
The diet industry has a lot to lose if you take back your power. In a $60 billion industry, it’s counting on you to continue using food in unhealthy ways. I challenge you to start your very own personal body revolution. It’s not about counting calories, weighing food, and over exercising. It is about learning how to think. You can do that. You can live at your natural weight. Just take the first sane and rational steps.

Weight Loss Coaching in 2009!

Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by Susan in Weight Loss

I Offer Weight Loss Coaching

Posted on 30. Oct, 2008 by Susan in Weight Loss

This is a short video that I did for my mentor Brooke Castillo. This year, learning her tools, I lost 35  pounds. I read her book and thought that it made perfect sense, for everyone else. HA! I learned how my thinking was affecting my eating.  I am so passionate about these tools that I now teach them to clients. If you are not at your natural weight, and want to be, email me for weight loss coaching.