February 4, 2012

Emotional Eating Experiment – Shrink Yourself by Dr. Roger Gould

Chemistry Lab TubesI have something very exciting to tell you today – I’m starting another experiment on myself. Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one. You might remember some of the other experiments I’ve done: mono dieting to cleanse the lymph nodes, an experiment in being 100% free of refined sugar for 30 days, and my detailed 6-Week Body Makeover experiment.

Well I have another one that I’m doing now and it’s going to run for the next 12 weeks. Each Wednesday for the next 12 weeks I’ll bring you an update on my progress on (guess what) – healing my emotional eating!

You’ve heard me go on and on about how wonderful the 6-Week Body Makeover is. Not only does it teach you how to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat, how, when, and how much to exercise, but when you follow the plan, you will see marvelous results.

Many of you have also done my 31 Days of Loving Yourself Thin exercises and learned about my beliefs of how loving the self and releasing self-criticism, you can move beyond the self-incrimination that often accompanies overeating; which as you already know, doesn’t help you make positive changes.

Permanent Weight Loss

You’ve also heard me say that there are many pieces to the puzzle of weight loss and fitness, many of those pieces outlined in my last post about roadblocks. And you know what one definite truth is? There are many different people on this planet and one way doesn’t necessarily work for all people (although I’d argue that love is the most powerful force on Earth – you really can’t top the miracles you can work when you love yourself fully).

So, I’ve been introduced to a tool that from what I’ve learned already, appears to be a powerful course to help you work through your emotional eating issues. What I’m talking about is a program created by Dr. Roger Gould, M.D., called Shrink Yourself.

This is something new to me but after trying Emotional Eating 101 (a free, 4-day series on emotional eating, food addiction, binge eating, and overeating), I resonated with many of the same thoughts that I’ve been sharing with you here. For example, I think that in order to lose weight permanently, you must discover (and heal) what is motivating your overeating. Using a diet to solve the symptom of overweight without looking at what caused the weight gain is like putting a band aid on a tumor – it’s not healing the underlying problem. The Shrink Yourself program is on the same wavelength – very exciting.

**If you haven’t heard of emotional eating, it is when you use food for reasons other than physical hunger. If you eat because you feel bored, stressed, angry, happy, sad, anxious, depressed, insecure, confused, indecisive, or for any other emotional reason, that is emotional eating.

So what is this program? The Shrink Yourself program is a 12-week, online program developed by Dr. Roger Gould, M.D. Dr. Gould is a psychiatrist (practicing for 35 years) who received his medical degree at Northwestern University in Chicago and is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. In his Shrink Yourself program, Dr. Gould helps you break the cycle of emotional eating and/or binging once and for all (that’s what I want!). He has already helped 1,000′s of people break their emotional eating patterns, stick to their healthy eating plans, and lose weight for good.

The online Shrink Yourself program is like virtual therapy for emotional eating but costs pennies compared to live therapy. Here’s an interview with Dr. Gould on ABC News that gives you a good feel for the Shrink Yourself program:

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I’m really excited about the Shrink Yourself program and am grateful to have been offered an invitation to go through the process. This does not mean that the program gets an automatic thumbs up from me – just like everything else that I blog about here at The Fit Shack, I give you my own opinions, likes, and dislikes. Even though I have high expectations of the Shrink Yourself program, I feel like I should hold back and reserve some judgment instead of getting over-excited about it.

You know if I wanted to, I could just write today’s post and say, “hey, this looks good (it does), I suggest you do this”, but I like to experiment on myself. It makes me accountable, and then I’m not just doing something for me, but also keeping an open mind to report my findings. And while your results could be different, you’ll be getting my real life experience of working this program. Clearly I have emotional eating issues to work on that are a part of my weight problem.

Be sure to tune in next Wednesday for my first update on my emotional eating experiment. And of course if you don’t want to wait and would like to sign up now and do this with me (they have a forum for members and a bunch of other extras, too), then by all means head on over there and check out the Shrink Yourself program now.

The 12-week series:

Permanent Weight Loss

About JoLynn:

JoLynn Braley, The F.A.T. Release Coach, is a certified Master NLP Practitioner and coach who helps highly successful women, age 35-55, achieve permanent weight loss.

JoLynn guides her clients through her proven, step-by-step system where they release their fears and drop the fat...with Struggle-Free action.

JoLynn combines the power of NLP (neurolinguistics) with LOA (law of attraction) along with the power of her own intuitive gifts to provide core mind-body transformation to her clients. To learn more about her step-by-step, proven process to success click here.

Comments

  1. Susan says:

    Emotional eating is a huge, and challenging, component of losing weight that is often overlooked/ignored.
    I wish you the best in your “experiment.” I look forward to the results! :)

  2. Hi Susan, thanks!

    I’m looking forward to my results, too! :) I know without a doubt that if I just stick to my healthy eating and exercise plan that my body will heal and drop the weight – where I get off track is with emotional eating and emotional cravings for the sugar and flour – the stuff I used to eat all the time.

  3. I’ve struggled with emotional eating all of my life and I’m very curious to see what kind of results you get from this program.

    I do wish you all the best of luck.

  4. Hi Diana, thank you very much for wishing me luck!

    I understand having emotional eating issues for a lifetime – mine began when I was a kid and especially after high school (my first year of college).

    It makes sense though, what Dr. Gould said – that when you’ve had these issues for so long, you won’t heal them overnight. That’s why the program is 12 weeks long, but that will fly by before I know it.

    I do have high hopes for this, we’ll see how it all turns out! :)

  5. MizFit says:

    very cool

    and where have I been?

    just (finally) found you.

    MizFit

  6. Hi Miz, cool, thanks for stopping by! :)

  7. Evan says:

    Looking forward to hearing about the program.

    Addressing the causes rather than dealing with the symptoms via dieting sounds like the way to go to me.

  8. Look forward to watching your progress, JoLynn.

  9. Anne-Marie says:

    This is very interesting. I’ll have to check it out since emotional eating is my number one trigger for overeating – that and being tired and using food to wake me up.

  10. Hi all, thanks for your comments! :)

    @Evan, exactly, unless we heal the cause we’re only putting a band aid on the symptom (overweight).

    @Mama, thanks, so am I!

    @Anne-Marie, I’m with ya on that – emotional eating (and sugar addiction) has been a large part of my relationship with food. I’m ready to change that!

Trackbacks

  1. [...] someone to diet and exercise to lose weight, however if you caught my recent post about my new experiment in emotional eating, I will be giving you my updates on that part of my journey (yeah!) on [...]

  2. [...] session that you do to learn more about your emotional eating and your hunger triggers, or what Dr. Gould calls your “hunger [...]

  3. [...] When I started my emotional eating experiment I mentioned that I was going to keep doing these weigh-in posts on Mondays to separate the food and [...]

  4. [...] happened upon my 12-week series in healing my emotional eating, please head on over and read my introductory post for a fuller description of what this program is all about. I will also update that post each week [...]

  5. [...] I moved my site to a different host over the weekend and if this wasn’t a good exercise in emotional eating, I don’t know what would be. There were ups and downs, but finally everything appears to be [...]

  6. [...] the way, if this is your first time reading about my emotional eating experiment, you can read my introductory post to get caught up on just what this is all [...]

  7. [...] I’ll be bringing you my emotional eating experiment update on Friday, however in the meantime, here’s something for you to consider while [...]

  8. [...] your first time reading one of my emotional eating experiment updates, be sure to head on over to my introductory article for an overview of the [...]

  9. [...] of a connection between my sugar addiction and emotional eating than I used to. Before I started my emotional eating experiment with the Shrink Yourself program, I tended to view my sugar addiction as being pretty much [...]

  10. [...] the aftermath of just that one week away. I still have a ton to do, I’m also working on healing my emotional eating, and oh yeah, what’s a driving theme behind The Fit Shack? Weight loss, fitness, and healthy [...]

  11. [...] even though I feel I’ve been making progress with healing my emotional eating, I also feel like I could be doing more. What’s motivating this feeling is what I posted [...]

  12. [...] I’d Twitter through the rough times and stay the course. Besides that, I’m am learning new ways to cope with emotional hunger, but that doesn’t mean that I these feelings haven’t stopped coming up [...]

  13. [...] the help of Twitter. Sure, I’m eating clean and exercising (and I’m also working on my emotional eating), but it’s by twittering about my progress that is helping me stay on track. There’ve [...]

  14. [...] Yourself program. If this is your first time hearing about my experiment you can head on over to my introductory post for more information, which includes a list of links to each of my weekly updates in this 12-week [...]

  15. [...] you haven’t started the classes or heard of the book yet and you find yourself giving in to emotional eating because of too much stress and drama in your life, pick up a copy of A New Earth and check out the [...]

  16. [...] Yourself program. And if you haven’t read the previous posts in my series yet, start out with my introductory post, which will give you a good overview of what this program is all about. Share This [...]

  17. [...] is needed to not only lose weight, but to keep it off for life. For example, if you’re an emotional eater (using food for emotions), addicted to refined sugar and white flour (or other foods like unhealthy [...]

  18. [...] when I first began this journey with my emotional eating experiment and Shrink Yourself? I said that I wasn’t sure how this was going to work and that I [...]

  19. [...] in the 10th week of my emotional eating experiment with the Shrink Yourself program. I’m experiencing a decrease in my desire to emotionally [...]

  20. [...] eating updates in this 12-week series for the first time. The “beginning” is my introductory post to the Shrink Yourself program to my 12-week experiment on myself of healing my own emotional eating issues with Shrink [...]

  21. [...] I freely share my own experiences with emotional eating, sugar addiction, weight loss motivation and such, all at the same time walking a balance between [...]