Ok, I already know what you’re going to say to my week nine update in my emotional eating experiment with Shrink Yourself: “hey, this topic sounds familiar, didn’t we already talk about it in your post about self-sabotage?”

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„¢

Yes, you’re exactly right – a couple days ago we looked at  some unconscious  motivations to actually stay overweight. In fact, several smart readers of Fearless Fat Loss left comments on that post and really shared some excellent, personal examples of how they’ve realized their own conflicting desires to stay overweight; conflicting meaning that on one hand they do want to lose weight and on the other there is a part of them that doesn’t want to.

So if you’ve read that already, then you have a  very good  understanding of the topic of week nine’s guided online session with Shrink Yourself. In week nine of Shrink Yourself  you answer questions about your motivations to stay overweight and  learn about your “safety-seeking self”. Your safety-seeking self is that part of you that wants to stay safe, that’s pretty much it! I bet you can easily see the relationship between food and safety – how many of us use food to comfort ourselves and feel safe? I know I’ve done that, can you relate to this, too?

Uncomfortable Emotions lead to Emotional Hunger

What’s very comforting to know is that you don’t necessarily have to solve all of  your emotional issues in order to end emotional eating. This means that whether your problem is self-doubt, anxiety, fear of sexual advances (you have a hard time saying no), or fears of being bored, sad, or lonely without food to lean on, you can still end emotional eating without solving each of those issues. The only thing you need to do is learn how to stop trying to solve these problems with food and your weight and this is exactly what Shrink Yourself can help you with.

Will You Become Perfect?

No, I cannot say that you’re going to be a super shiny perfect human specimen after completing the 12-week Shrink Yourself online program 🙂 but I can say that if you apply yourself, do the exercises, and use the Shrink Yourself tools, that you will be able to effectively end your emotional eating and your up and down struggles with your weight and food.

My Only Criticism

Remember 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 won’t recommend anything to you that I don’t believe in myself. I had to reserve some skepticism since I wasn’t familiar with the program but I kept an open mind to see how things would go.

Well here I am, giving you my update after nine weeks in the Shrink Yourself program, and I can honestly say that it’s more than worth the price of one or two fast food meals per week – heck,  the price of $10.00 a week is  peanuts when you consider the price of food today, especially junk food, which is exactly  the kind of stuff we tend  go for when we emotionally eat. Oh, but I was going to tell you my criticism of the program. 😉

My only criticism of the Shrink Yourself program has to do with  ME – I feel that I could be applying myself more and taking better advantage of everything the program offers. You see there’s more to the 12-week online Shrink Yourself program than what I’ve told you about so far. Each week I’ve been giving you my updates with my weekly guided sessions, but there are  actually several other tools available to help you end your emotional eating:

• Shrink Yourself Forum –  A community of other people who are also healing their emotional eating with the Shrink Yourself program

• Hunger Coach – Available after you’ve completed your first 4 weeks of Shrink Yourself, it’s a very cool set of 12 separate sessions that help you really get to the bottom of why you keep turning to food for comfort (hint:  food isn’t the solution, and you really can learn healthier ways of dealing with life instead of turning to food over and over again 🙂 ). And what’s really neat is that you can access the hunger coach through your mobile device’s internet browser.

• Habit Diary – Each week you activate a new habit to work on and build  upon during your 12 weeks with the Shrink Yourself program. You build new, healthy habits to replace the old, worn-out, emotional eating habits that weren’t working for you anyway.

• Emotional Eating Intervention Reminders – You can set up and send reminders to your cell phone (text)  or email when an intervention would help keep your Hunger Switch turned off. For example, if you  have a habit of emotional eating in the afternoon when you’re tired after a full day of work, you could set a reminder to go to your Hunger Coach and do a lesson. Or, you could set a reminder to pull out your printed session summary and  read it in order  to remain aware of what you are working on  in the Shrink Yourself program that week.

• Expert Advice – You always have the option of getting an online consultation with one of the Shrink Yourself experts. There is a fee for this service, but if you are struggling and need to extra help it’s there and in my opinion,  would be well worth it. After all, once you  truly integrate a healthy way of coping with everyday life without emotionally eating, there really won’t be anything stopping you from ending the up and down struggle with your weight.

• Read A Book! – You can read Dr. Gould’s “other” book (he also wrote  the book Shrink Yourself, which would be a great companion to the online course)  in its entirety (for free!)  on the Shrink Yourself site. The title is Transformations: Growth and change in adult life. I haven’t read the entire book but from what I have read I like it – I’ve always had an interest in psychology however,  and if you are like me then I think you’ll get a lot out of it. A large part of emotional eating often has to do with the past and childhood. Moving beyond emotional eating takes a little bit of “growing up”, to let go of the fantasy of food and what we think it will do for us, and this book is about letting go of those myths and fantasies about life.

Additionally,  after completing 4 weeks you begin to  unlock your own personal weight loss secrets, based on the work that you’ve done previously in the online Shrink Yourself program. I just received another one after completing week nine’s guided online session.

I Still Recommend Shrink Yourself

Sure, I still heartily recommend this program to you if you’re struggling with keeping off the weight you lose because of emotional eating. Even though I’ve been giving you good overviews of the weekly sessions, there is just no comparison  to what you’ll get out of this program by doing it yourself.

As always, I recommend that you read my introductory post if this is your first time happening upon my 12-week series of emotional eating experiment updates. My introductory post also includes a complete list of all current updates.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to moving beyond my emotional eating patterns for good and ending my self-sabotaging ways, so I’ll be back next Wednesday with my update on week 10 with Shrink Yourself.

2015: Please read my update at the top of this post regarding this article you’ve just read since it’s an old article I wrote over 7 years ago. All the best! ~ Permanent Weight Loss Coach JoLynn Braley, founder of The Inner Self Dietâ„¢, the proven step-by-step coaching program for lasting success with your weight.