Day Three Hundred and Seventeen!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Emotionally Focussed Eating Program


One of the first goals of the Emotionally Focussed Eating program is to help you make the connection between what you are eating now and the result of how you are feeling now, in order to overcome nutritional disassociation. The what’s and how’s of you are eating are choices that you are making on a moment by moment basis, which reflects a complex interplay between your personality, your emotions, your family history, your culture, your beliefs, and your education. All of this put together is influenced by your biochemistry and that also influences your first brain (in your head) and your second brain (in your gut).


Mood influences your food choices and behaviours, and food choices and behaviours influence mood. Nutritional therapy is about integrating behavioural change strategies with the principle of substitutions. Restoration of high quality foods and delivery of nutrients is central to the recovery process whether it be to do with emotional regulation, psychiatric disorders, pain, illness, or addiction. When nutrients are out of balance it is easy to be fraught with challenges because self-care maintenance may be very challenging to adhere to.


It is important to remember that nutritional change takes time. It takes as long to get out of trouble as it does to get into trouble. This means it is going to take time in order for you to be able to lose the weight that you want to. It takes time to wrap your mind around the new ways to look at food and it has to make sense to you. Everyone does this on their own time schedule. This program is to do with increasing a sense of well-being and weight loss is really just a side effect. Change takes place by integrating positive activities, which is the basis for your new lifestyle. We start out with psycho-education, collaboration and practice. Part of this is also eliminating negative habits, so that the new positive activities you start to incorporate in your daily schedule will replace those negative habits, creating and coming up with substitutions that work for you. 


A lot of people who have gained their weight have suffered for many years without knowing why. Psycho-education provides those explanations, it illustrates the links between nutrition, patterns, and mental health. Part of this is discussing self-care behaviours as well as nutrition, we focus on the information collected through your food/mood diary resulting in decisions rising from a discussion about your diary. 


For weight loss everyone is at a different stage of change when they enter into the program and we tailer the program to the individual and the stage at which they are ready to progress in the recovery process of overcoming their emotional eating to create change. This has to make sense to you as well as your belief system about food. We pay attention to your symptoms and complaints, the goals of which you would like to attain, create action items for change, and simple dietary suggestions that make sense to you. We start slowly and build accordingly.