Clients learn a better way to heal their relationship with food, body, mind, and soul.

For far too long, clients have been struggling with a sustainable, loving way to lose weight, to stop their punishing relationship with food and exercise, and to navigate through the conflicting nutritional advice from experts.

Although medical science has agreed that diet plays an optimal role in health, something is still clearly missing. Obesity, overeating, pain around body image, and emotional challenges with food are at record highs. People have access to all kinds of nutrition information, yet the search for true wisdom and healing continues.

It’s time for a fresh start and a new perspective.

Combining the latest evidenced-based research findings from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, nutrition, and weight to create a healing movement that recognizes the need for a holistic approach to weight, body, and mind. An approach that finally makes the critical distinction that it is not only important what we eat, but who we are as eaters. Dynamic Eating Psychology understands that we all have a unique relationship with food based on our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and past experiences. It recognizes that our eating challenges are intimately connected to all the other life domains — relationship, work, money, sexuality, the need for fulfillment, and so much more.  Discovering these critical connections is the beginning of our healing journey.

Most diet plans tell you what, when, and how much to eat.

Even the most fervent dieters have difficulty sustaining the food restrictions of a diet plan and inevitably wind up overeating. When this happens, we might be sneaking food, hiding food, starving yourself, then binging, and lying to your food journal.

It’s at this point where all the negative thoughts and feelings about ourselves arise. After all, you must be a “bad” person because you’ve broken all these food and diet rules:

• You ate a “bad” food
• You ate too much of a “good” food
• You ate at at the wrong time
• You didn’t log your foods
• You missed a workout
• You didn’t lose any weight
• You gained weight

Researchers found that feelings of guilt, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem are common at this time.

 There is a sense of failure due to a perceived lack of willpower. You are preoccupied with food, yet feel deprived. The worst part is the shame that accompanies this perceived failure. After all, your friends encouraged you to go on a diet. They told you it was the right thing to do and complimented you for your weight loss. Now what?

It’s for these emotional reasons that I contend that lying to your food journal is not ok. Not for the act itself, but for how it makes you feel when you break a diet rule. Any process that makes us feel shame and guilt is not a good process. When the process is set up as “pass/fail” as in most traditional diet plans, we all end up as failures. Most dieters feel that it is their fault that they couldn’t sustain the diet and that the weight has been regained.

Sadly, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is an entire body of research evidence spanning decades that illustrates why diets don’t work and actually cause us biological and psychological harm. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe it’s the process of dieting that has failed us, that we didn’t fail the diet? After all, if the dieting process worked, wouldn’t we all be skinny by now?  

Besides, how can we expect to follow a process that makes us feel so horrible, yet end up in a place of love for ourselves? As one of my professors used to always say, “The journey informs the destination.” You are not going to end up in a place of self-love, if you are hating yourself throughout the entire process.

Stop the chronic dieting and discover an empowering new way of relating to food and body

 that honors your inner body wisdom and does not rely on external food rules, charts, or logs. Begin to accept yourself now, in the present, with your body at its current size and shape. Only then, will you be able to get to the place where you really want to go, a place where you are at peace with food and body once and for all.

Learn a new way to make peace with food and end chronic dieting

Learn how these negative feelings actually perpetuate the diet/binge cycle

You know how it is, you’ve been overeating, your jeans are tight, and you feel like crap. You say to yourself, “Ok, this is out of control. I have to do something. I’m such a pig. I’m starting a diet on Monday”.

For some reason, diets always start on Mondays. So you feel relieved and optimistic knowing that this eating chaos will soon end.

Come Monday, you are eager and ready. You are following your diet rules and plan perfectly, and life is good. Eventually, weight might start to come off and people begin to notice. You feel a tad self-righteous, enjoying the attention and success of all your sacrifices. Who wouldn’t?

As time passes, though, temptation and deprivation kick in and your eyes start to wander onto your friend’s plate, soon followed by sneaking just a french fry or two, and you think, “Omg, so good! Look what I’ve been missing this whole time!” You can’t get those pesky food thoughts out of your head and, over time, you start to sneak more and more forbidden foods.

This is the tipping point you know too well. One bad day at work, a single false move from a friend, or a particularly hungry day can set off a cascade of eating frenzy like no other.

Say goodbye to the food restrictions, bland diet food, and logging points, you’re going for it and hard. You binge out on the forbidden foods that you have been missing for far too long. Unfortunately, the food binge is not limited to that single event, and a period of overeating begins.

Overtime, you gain back all the weight and often even more. The positive comments from your friends and family have long since ceased. And in the silence, you feel great shame. You tell yourself that you have no willpower; you are embarrassed to be seen in public; you feel depressed, anxious, and like a failure; you envy people who are thin and generally feel “less-than” because of your body size.

You sit in this dark pool of negative thoughts and overeating until, one day, when you’ve finally had enough and say, “Ok, this is out of control. I have to do something. I’m such a pig. I’m starting a diet on Monday”. For some reason, diets always start on Mondays.