The Juicy Woman

Making Peace with the Nutrition Information on Fast Food Restaurant Menus

About a month ago I did my first photo shoot in New York City for the magazine First for Women on the Go. I’ll be one of the women featured on the body confidence page in the July 23 issue. I was interviewed as a coach and body image expert and asked to share my experience and secrets on how making peace with food and lovin’ the skin I’m in has led to a breakthrough in my 19 year relationship with my husband, Angel.

I was on the way back home from the photo shoot and I stood waiting in the Port Authority Bus Terminal for my bus to arrive when I realized that I was pretty hungry. I hadn’t eaten since early morning. At the photo shoot, they had a lovely buffet, but I wasn’t really hungry. That’s become pretty regular with me. I’m happy to say that food doesn’t have much of an emotional tug over me anymore.

As I stood on the line at Jamba Juice, I noticed that each of the shakes and smoothies had nutritional information prominently posted next to the items on the menu. Up until reading Anna Dubrovsky's Holistic Girl blog today, I didn't realize that this was now being done in accordance with a new citywide regulation that went into effect several weeks ago, stating that fast food chains with 15 or more outlets must display calorie counts alongside menu items. 

For a moment, upon reading that the 16 oz. small size of the Orange Dream Machine that I wanted had 340 calories, I got side tracked and started thinking in the old way about food. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Is this too many calories? How can I slurp up this amount of calories instead of eating a real meal?

Then I dismissed all the chatter and asked myself, “Andrea, what do you really want?"
I realized that I really wanted to taste a Jamba Juice smoothie. I’d always seen them in New York, but never considered drinking calories if I could eat them instead. Now I feel differently about food. I just eat and drink what satisfies me. That way I don’t overindulge and fall into the trap of gluttony that comes with dieting and watching your weight.

Diets Don’t Work, Reason #3 - Diets Inhibit Your Ability to Tune into Your Hunger

Hunger! What in the heck is it? If you're a woman who is struggling with dieting, most of the time you're walking around convinced that you're always hungry. After all, you may say, "There's always room for more" That's because we have become so detached from our bodies and live our lives surrounding so much drama and busyness that we're just not aware of how it affects our bodies.

The idea of eating in response to your hunger may seem absolutely ridiculous. This is because the voices in your brain are always screaming, urging, egging you on to eat that cupcake, dive into the open bag of Cheetos, have an extra helping at dinner or supersize it at the drive thru.  You begin to think of yourself as a bottomless pit of hunger, fearing that if you wouldn't have the diet to keep you under control, you'd lose your mind and never stop binging.

The diet organization feeds on that fear by telling you never to get too hungry. You’ve been cautioned to ignore or fear your hunger and fill up on foods that block your awareness of being hungry.

There are so many reasons that we have the urge to eat that have nothing to do with satisfying our physical hunger. These are some of the culprits that have been pushing your hungry buttons:

• habits or conditioning makes you think that you are hungry
• programmed eating like breakfast, lunch and dinner keeps you focused on food
• seeing others eating around you
• seeing food on television, looking at pictures in magazines
• driving down the highway and passing all the fast food restaurants
• being in a supermarket surrounded by food
• smelling popcorn at the movies

These are all examples of triggers that push you to want to eat when you're not hungry. Diets don't effectively teach you how to deal with this kind of constant temptation, so you're left alone to begin the tightrope rope walk between wanting to eat all the time and feeling deprived and frustrated. It feels to you like you have an emptiness inside and it makes sense to fill it with food.

Diets Don’t Work, Reason #2 - Diets Focus on Food, Not Feelings

Dieting has directed you to focus solely on the foods you’ve been eating. The problem is not what you’ve been eating, but what’s been eating you! When you diet, you throw your body into conflict and you wage war on yourself.

For people who are emotional eaters, food holds an extraordinarily powerful and important meaning, connecting with love and acceptance, comfort and peace. If you have happy memories of eating and food, your brain has created an association that food=comfort. You may have heard people joke around and say that they are on a See food diet. That means that when they see food, they automatically want to eat it.

Now here’s where things get interesting. Your experience with trying to lose weight and dieting has led you to accept many conflicting beliefs about yourself and food.

As a dieter and a woman raised in a society where thin is considered beautiful and fat is ugly, you’ve been unconsciously collecting a whole bunch of limiting beliefs that keep you stuck and afraid of food, trying to grab the brass ring of beauty and become that thin version of you. With the focus and emphasis on the importance of being thin, diets reinforce the message that deprivation is the road to success.

Our culture worships thinness and condemns fat. We are living in a fat phobic society where it’s not okay to be okay with being fat. According to our society’s double standard, if you’re fat, then you have to resign yourself to eating carrots and celery and eating lean until you become a thin person and then you can eat what you want. Diet organizations have turned food into the enemy.

Imagine what kind of pressure that puts on you as a dieter. There are two conflicting thought patterns going on inside of you. First you’re thinking about how good food tastes, how much you love it and all the happy memories that come from eating. At the same time, your brain is battling with thoughts and judgments that come from years of dieting that has labeled your beloved food as bad for you, fattening, tempting, forbidden, poison and many other labels that lead you to fear it and want it at the same time.

It’s no wonder that your head doesn’t just explode from the stress!You've got to end the conflict that keeps you in unhappy patterns of dieting and binging. Freedom from food and weight obsession starts by making peace with food, saying goodbye to dieting and self acceptance. Get started on the road to ending the war on food and calling a truce with your body. Grab a free copy of my Lovin' the Skin You're in Sampler.

Diets Don’t Work, Reason #1 - Eating to Self Comfort Has become a Habit

Your urge to reach for food when you’re not hungry, during times of stress has become an unconditioned habit that has been your body’s way of dealing with overwhelm and feelings of frustration. Despite what you may have been told, it can’t be controlled by sheer ‘will power,’ nor is it evidence of any weakness, wrongdoing or lack of discipline on your part. Nothing is wrong with you. This just means that you are an emotional eater.

Unconscious or emotional eating in response to stress is one of the biggest enemies and saboteurs of any diet. This stress eating is how most dieters unwittingly sabotage their weight loss efforts. Stress is the body's physical, mental and biochemical reaction to all of our life's events. These good, bad and ugly situations known as “stressors” parade throughout our lives whenever the status quo gets challenged.

When you find yourself ready to give into your kids’ whining, wanting to bang your fist on your dying laptop, feeling the pinch of making a promise you can’t keep, or perhaps feeling overwhelmed with joy at the prospect of celebrating a great job opportunity; your body is under the siege of stress. These stressors in your life are threatening to ravage your body and make you lose control.

If you are a busy woman who’s an emotional eater, you’ll notice that almost anything can trigger a binge when you’re dieting. Cakes, cookies, pies, donuts, even last night’s cold chicken with broccoli looks appetizing at a time when your life gets rattled. You're probably just as likely to fall off your diet if you're celebrating a big success or just having a really bad day. If this is your plight and you recognize that you have unconsciously created these kinds of associations to food in your brain that leave you at the mercy of your cravings, then take heart, there is a solution that will take you beyond dieting into a life of food freedom. You can begin again and reclaim your power over food.

As stated before the secret is to learn to make peace with food and deal with your stress. If you’d like to get started learning more about how you can lose weight without dieting, then download a copy of my free Lovin’ the Skin You’re In Sampler: The Juicy Woman’s Self Image Makeover Morsels.

Say Goodbye to Dieting: Nine Reasons Why Diets Don't Work!

Diets don't Work! In April of 2007, a composite study done at UCLA, demonstrated that for up to 98% of all people, diets don't work. The underlying reason why most people regain their weight after losing on a diet is because diets don't teach you how to address the emotions that push you to eat when you're not hungry. It all comes down to two things, making peace with food and stress management.

If you're a woman who's been struggling with your weight, you probably think of dieting or depriving yourself of the foods you love is the only solution by which you can get thinner. I'm here to tell you that's not true. There is a natural non diet alternative that does not involve pills, powders, gadgets or gizmos and best of all, you get to eat anything you want. It's called Intuitive Eating and it's based on learning how to eat in response to your body's hunger. Unlike dieting, there are no foods that are forbidden or inappropriate. Nothing is off limits.

If you're willing to give up the quick fix mentality and the empty promises that comes with dieting, and take time learning to really make peace with all foods and love your body, then you truly can lose weight without dieting by learning how to become an intuitive eater.

As a professional coach, it's my job to lead people to find the answers that are right for them. In light of that, I'd like to share with you a quick summary of nine reasons why diets don't work, then over the next several days, I'll break down each item and explain it more thoroughly in a separate post.

The following are nine reasons why diets don't work for most people:

Reason #1 - Eating to self comfort has become a habit - When you find yourself reaching for food when you're not hungry, it's not evidence of being weak or undisciplined. It's simply a coping mechanism that you've learned to relieve your stress.