Chrissie Webber works as a writer, business coach and motivation/ leadership trainer and is Managing Director of Life-Shapers Ltd, an online weight-loss motivation company. With over 20 years experience in the field of business and people development she has an expertise in the area of motivation for permanent weight loss.
Following a lifetime of weight issues - at her heaviest, over 21 stone and a massive size 30 – she has personal experience of diets and their devastating effect on size and psyche. With a background in nursing, psychology and business coaching, coupled with a lifetime of dieting, she developed and successfully used a series of models and tools that enhance weight loss motivation. Now over 5 dress sizes smaller and having sustained her weight loss for several years, Chrissie continues her passionate drive to change the mindsets of people away from a ‘Scarcity’ dieting mindset – where food is demonised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – to an ‘Abundance’ mindset where mind, body and spirit work hand in hand with food and nature.
How much do you reach out for food when upset or angry? Do you use comfort eating to bury your emotions?
One of the triggers that can launch us into inappropriate eating is negative emotion. So how can we reduce the effects our own inner feelings have on us? One way is to see emotion as a barometer – an indication of the levels of negative or positive pressure we are under.
This inner barometer is a unique gauge that indicates when there is something we can learn, in order to correct the imbalance of our emotions. It is a map that can show us the way to greater peace and of course to less comfort eating.
To gain the best learning from each emotional event, the first thing to do is stop reaching out for food. Then you need to sit quietly, allowing yourself to properly experience the emotion. Next you consider what has generated the emotion and then take the following steps…
· Consider if there is anything you can do that is positive and loving to move the emotional situation forward.
o Talk it through with someone;
o Resolve the situation by taking positive loving, action;
o Release your anger appropriately;
o Sit with the emotion, feel it flow through you and then heal it with a kind and loving thought or prayer.
· Accept what you cannot change and change what you can.
· Accept that another person may see things and react to things completely differently to you.
· Accept that trying to make your ‘right’ and another ‘wrong’ is a sure way to emotional turmoil. Give up the need to be right by inwardly accepting the truth of the situation as you see it.
· Consider what positive action you now want to take that is loving and caring of yourself. Then take that action immediately.
Finally, consider what you have learnt about yourself and the situation that will aid you next time. Using food to bury an emotion does nothing to resolve the problem. It only aids us in storing it for another time. Start to learn more about what your emotions are trying to tell you. Develop this skill and you will discover more of the joys of life than the pains of emotions.
