Smart, successful people, like you, despite all they’ve accomplished, sometimes can’t figure out how to stop overeating.
CEOs, entrepreneurs, professionals, researchers, physicians, lawyers, coaches, and leaders know how to solve complicated problems, lead the work of other people, win big contracts, save lives, solve legal issues, and coach other people on various topics, but they feel powerless around food.
You’re always busy, your job is stressful, you may even travel a lot, plus you raise a family. To build your career first, you may have had children later in your life. Now you’re in your late 40s or early 50s and have to face the problems associated with your busy career, perimenopause, moody teenagers and ageing parents at the same time.
The eat-to-soothe stress habit became your release.
You can read about how stress-related overeating works and how this habit forms here.
Perfectionism
Your identity is tied to being successful.
You’re a perfectionist and are never satisfied with your work. You always feel like you could be doing better. You want to control everything so you can avoid being criticised and judged.
You worry about not being good enough. Perhaps you also struggle with self-confidence. Even the most successful people sometimes feel like imposters.
Obviously, this creates a lot of negative thoughts and feelings. Food becomes a release from all that stress and overwhelm, as well as an escape from not feeling good enough.
Mindless eating
Eating is an easily available and quick way to zone out, comfort, distract and reward yourself when you
feel overloaded and overwhelmed.
Another “advantage” of eating is that you can do it pretty mindlessly while working or doing something
else so you can still meet all the demands.
Your brain is constantly working, trying to solve a million problems you have going on at any given moment. It’s so easy to mindlessly eat when you’re busy.
But when you don’t pay attention to your food your brain won’t fully experience what you’re eating so you won’t feel satisfied even when your stomach is full. Your body will ask for more food as you didn’t get enough pleasure from what you ate.
Lack of self-care
Your self-worth is dependent on always feeling like you’re over-achieving. You’re either busy, or you’re lazy and worthless. There is no in-between.
Having fun is a waste of time.
Pleasure, or rather the lack of it, plays an important role in forming an overeating habit.
When you don´t get enough pleasure from other areas of your life, people tend to compensate for the missing joy with eating (or other unhealthy behaviours, like drinking, excessive shopping, etc.). Food may end up being your main source of happiness and fulfilment.
Sometimes we eat because we just need a break from work, stress, and life in general; we want to release tension, zone out, not think, and just relax.
Rest and relaxation are extremely important for mental and physical health. When you schedule relaxation activities, your unconscious mind will not force you to take time out.
You can learn more about other reasons for emotional eating or other eating issues successful, hard-working people have the tendency to have in my post in Brainz Magazine and in this video chat with Karrie Miller at the Emotional Eating Masterclass Series.
But sometimes we know exactly what to do but we still don‘t do it.
Trying the wrong approaches
Even when we actually try to do something about it we often don’t realize that the weight loss advice and
strategies we follow are the exact things that are making us overeat.
You may think that you just need to find a new, better diet to lose the weight you gained due to emotional
or stress eating.
What you don’t realise is that dieting will actually make your emotional eating even worse. In this 1-hour live class, I talked about 5 of the most common mistakes that dieters make that drive them to overeat and how to fix these issues. Change these and you are on your way to food freedom (a.k.a. eating the way you want to eat instead of how your cravings make you eat).
You can watch the recording of this class here.
Also, if you only concentrate on food and exercise you don’t address the real issue that you overeat when you’re stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, tired, angry, not feeling good enough, sad, lonely, bored, or even when you’re happy.
When it comes to food, we all know that we should eat less when we’re overeating and that emotional
eating doesn’t solve our problems.
What you need instead
When we’re really busy, we don’t need more diet rules or “shoulds.”
We need to find out why food has such a strong power over us and find other ways to comfort ourselves.
Busy people often don’t take their relationship with food seriously. You probably think it’s only an
inconvenience. What you don’t realise is that it affects not only your weight but your health, your
confidence, and your self-worth too.
You don’t recognise that binge- and emotional eating are usually connected to low self-esteem,
perfectionism, people-pleasing, and negative body image – and they are bleeding into every area of your life.
You deserve a real solution
You deny yourself the help and support that could make your life easier because you think you can figure
it out yourself but you don’t have time to do so.
Or you don’t feel “deserving” of paying for something like this or you have trouble making your needs a
priority as there is always something “more important” to do.
As a high-achieving person, you believe that you have to work harder and harder to maintain your
success, but if stress and overwhelm are not addressed, this overload leads to exhaustion, food cravings,
overeating, and weight gain (or even burnout and depression in the long run).
If you’re waiting for “the right time” when life is less stressful, chaotic and unpredictable, you’ll be
waiting forever!
If she could do it you can too
A client of mine, who works during the day and runs her two side hustle businesses in the evening is so
busy that she could only fit in our coaching calls during the day. Luckily she has an office that she shares
with a like-minded person and she organises her work so we can have a 1-hour call per week.
She recognised that she needed help, made a bold decision and booked a call with me.
“I found Rita by accident on the internet while browsing the usual diet advice. It was just an intuition after what I read on her site that I would definitely try to achieve the desired shape with her. Rita does this helpful work for all of us who work with her very professionally, with complete dedication, devotion, incredible understanding and insight, and at the same time with infinite modesty. He has a solution for everything and guides you through seemingly difficult challenges with ease. With her presence throughout, she ensured that I was capable of what I set out to do. I live a fast-paced life with a lot of work. Although I tried to eat healthily, this resulted in irregular, mostly quick binges in the evening. We uncovered the reasons for my binges and found appropriate options for individual lifestyle changes, for loving and understanding my body, for a definitive, easy existence without big swings, guilt, self-punishment, or excessive expectations.”
If she’s able to find time to work with me you can too. Maybe you have your own office or you work from
home or you can get outside during your lunch break to have a chat with me. You know you need help to
solve your food issues otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this email.
As a high-achieving, busy person, you have so much on your mind and have no time to take care of yourself. You need someone to help you figure out how to stop overeating and keep you accountable until your new habits become ingrained and automatic.
And this is where I can help you.
I invite you to have a chat with me about your specific situation. Please feel free to book a free 60-minute call here.
It’s a no-pressure call. You’ll tell me what you need help with, I’ll tell you how I see your problem and how I can help you and if you’re interested we can talk about my coaching program. If you want to work with me to solve your issue we’ll schedule our next call. If you’re not interested I’ll wish you good luck and you’ll leave with a better understanding of what triggers your overeating habit. You have nothing to lose.
