Do you often feel driven to eat when you aren’t hungry? Do you tend to eat more when you feel anxious, depressed, restless or bored? This is called “emotional eating” and most of us have done it at least once. Some of us, however, take it to the extreme and make it an ongoing habit all day, every day.

The problem with emotional eating is that it creates a vicious cycle that never resolves anything. With physical hunger, you feel hungry, you eat, you feel satisfied, and the need to eat dissipates until your body needs more fuel. With emotional hunger, that satisfaction is never achieved because eating cannot resolve emotional issues.

So you feel restless, anxious, bored, depressed, or sad, and you start craving cookies or potato chips to soothe yourself. Eating may distract you from the negative feelings for a few minutes, but when you stop eating, they are still there. So you keep eating more and more to try to feel better, but it doesn’t work.

Stopping emotional eating is easier than you think, but it does require a bit of courage and persistence. Start with these three steps: (more…)

One of the biggest failures of the weight loss industry is that many plans don’t teach participants how to make lifelong changes. They focus on rapid shedding of pounds, often triggering an inevitable nosedive back into forbidden foods – hence, the lost weight is simply regained, leaving the dieter feeling disillusioned and discouraged.

No matter what type of diet plan you are following (or plan to follow in the near future), it is vital to approach it from a balanced, realistic state of mind. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that you can follow a magical plan, drop the weight, and then return to your former eating habits. That’s a sure recipe for failure.

Instead, view your diet as a lifelong process of making wiser choices that will benefit your body in many positive ways, including shedding excess fat.

Below are a few helpful ways to do that: (more…)

Have you ever felt resentful because YOU had to be the one cursed with a weight problem? Many overweight people feel this way at times; they look around and see skinny people eating all they want without gaining an ounce, while the overweight person has to struggle and sacrifice for every pound lost. It’s not fair!

These feelings of resentment may be perfectly valid, but unfortunately they aren’t helpful. They simply keep you feeling sorry for yourself which can severely limit your progress.

Here’s a good way to transform negative feelings into strong motivation and use it to fuel your weight loss journey: (more…)

Laughter has long been believed to have great health benefits, like strengthening your immune system, releasing stress, reducing pain, and improving cardiovascular function. But can it help you lose weight? Many experts say yes.

Laughter can encourage weight loss by:

- Burning more calories.

Did you know that laughing raises your heart rate and burns calories? Not enough calories to be considered physical exercise, but at more than one calorie burned per minute, laughter can definitely help you burn a few extra calories throughout your day. It all adds up!

- Reducing emotional eating. (more…)