If you’re like most people you want to feel happy, joyful, full of self-confidence, and free of self doubts. But what if you do have some pesky self doubts lurking about?

The thing is that the majority of people who struggle with their weight and emotional eating are also plagued with self doubts and an inner critic, which can easily trigger emotional hunger and emotional eating. The problem is if you give into your inner critic and emotionally eat, while you might feel better for a few minutes you end up feeling pretty bad about overeating and neither the guilt nor the overeating are helpful if you’re trying to lose weight.

UPDATE 2015: Hi, as you can see by the date on this article, I wrote this a LONG time ago, May 2008 which was over 7 years ago. At that time in 2008 I was not a professional, certified coach and professional certified Master NLP Pracitioner. I had not yet founded The Inner Self Dietâ„¢ which is my proven, proprietary, step-by-step personal coaching program for permanent weight loss. That’s right! I personally coach my clients to the end of their emotional eating, binge eating, self-sabotage, food obsessions, food addictions, low self-esteem and much more. Click here to read coaching client testimonials from my coaching client, click here to listen to audio testimonials, and watch videos of graduates of The Inner Self Dietâ„¢ in the sidebar of this page you’re on now.

Back in 2008 I did this Shrink Yourself Program and it was nice and all, but it didn’t heal the root of the problem like the binge eating coaching and emotional eating coaching I do with my clients does. I wish  you your Best Life…IN Your Ideal Body! ~ JoLynn Braley, Permanent Weight Loss Coach, Founder of The Inner Self Dietâ„¢

Week Seven of Shrink Yourself

Here we are at week seven in my emotional eating experiment with the online Shrink 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 program.

Where weeks five and six focused on your relationships with others (since relationships are the number one reason that your hunger switch gets turned on), week seven focuses on your relationship with yourself. Specifically, week seven is all about learning how to meet your needs and work on your self-doubts instead of avoiding them with food, since food cannot solve either of these issues for you.

Needs – Everyone Has Them

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with having needs in life, whether you’re speaking of the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, or of the need to accomplish goals you have set for yourself. Where emotional hunger can crop up is when you have a conflict in how you feel about your own needs.

In week seven you learn how to resolve any conflicting feelings you have about the needs you are trying to meet instead of using food for the conflicting feelings that result. Wow, that’s a mouthful! Basically, all emotional eating is a response to uncomfortable feelings, feelings whose source you might not even be aware of. In the Shrink Yourself 12-week program you learn how to cope with your feelings and manage your life instead of trying to avoid the discomfort with food.

So What About Self Doubt?

That’s right, I started this article talking about how those pesky self doubts can trigger your emotional eating hunger switch. Well the second half of the Shrink Yourself guided session in week seven deals with exactly that – your self doubts. It’s really great because the online session actually goes back to those self doubts that you entered in the program in week two and resurrects them. In week seven you pick one of your self doubts and learn a new way of dealing with it instead of using food.

No Diet Info Here

You want to lose weight, right? Well you already know that if you stick to a healthy eating and exercise plan that you can lose weight, but if you’re an emotional eater and you haven’t dealt with what’s driving you to overeat, then you will always have a struggle with food and your weight.

What the Shrink Yourself program does is instead of looking at your food and exercise, it teaches you how to regain your personal power, understand what trips your emotional hunger switch, and how to deal with life on a daily basis in a constructive rather than a destructive way. In actuality, when you want food to make yourself feel better you really don’t even want that food – what do you think about that?

What You REALLY Want

What you really want is to feel better, but why don’t you feel good right now? That’s what Shrink Yourself helps you discover, because when you’re going for that dessert if what you really want underneath the desire for food is to feel safe, feel accomplished, or feel powerful in your own life, then if you felt that feeling you wouldn’t even want to emotionally eat.

This is what Shrink Yourself helps you with and more specifically, in week seven it helps you look at your self doubts realistically so that they don’t snowball into emotional eating. Now I cannot say that the Shrink Yourself program will solve your emotional issues, but instead it does something much more powerful – it helps your reclaim your personal power and learn how to deal with the uncomfortable emotions instead of going for the food.

So when you do this program, it doesn’t mean that you’ll never feel sad, anxious, or have another self-doubt again, but instead it teaches you how to constructively deal with any emotion that comes up so that you can avoid emotional eating, weight gain, and the constant struggle of trying to control overeating due to emotional eating.

What About My Progress?

As of last week, I’ve lost 4lbs and 1.5 inches. These are the same figures I reported in Monday’s post and I didn’t weigh myself again today so that I stay off the scale.

I’m quite pleased with my progress and I attribute it to a combination of doing the Shrink Yourself program, my health and fitness program the 6WBMO, and using Twitter to stay accountable. I personally am very happy with this combination right now, and as you know I’ve been having a lot of fun with Twitter, and I feel great eating clean on the 6-Week Body Makeover plan.

However this post is focused on Shrink Yourself, and I still have 5 more weeks to go with it. Based on my progress so far I’m super happy with it, and I would definitely recommend it to you. Actually there are several other tools that come with the program that I haven’t even been taking advantage of and my goal this week is to do that so that I can tell you more about them.

Check back next Wednesday for my update on week eight in my emotional eating experiment with the Shrink Yourself 12-week program.

2015: Please read the update I included near the top of this post. This post you’ve read is over 7 years old and the fact of the matter is that the Shrink Yourself program did not yield the core transformation that my coaching clients receive in The Inner Self Dietâ„¢. All the best! ~ Permanent Weight Loss Coach JoLynn Braley, founder of The Inner Self Dietâ„¢, the proven step-by-step coaching program to end binge eating, emotional eating and self-sabotage to make weight loss easy.