Looking for guidance on intuitive eating? Here are “10 Principles of Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND, authors of the book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach.   1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating. 2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy...

We’re told to live in the moment, but if you don’t use some of them planning for the future, what will happen to you down the road? I don’t mean for you to worry which is not planning. I’m talking about realistically thinking about how your life will be 10, 20 or 40 years if you continue on your same path and don’t move healthfully forward. Specifically, what will middle or old age be like if you don’t change habits or face fears? My client Grant , 41, was perfectly comfortable living at home with his elderly father. Grant worked part-time, had no health benefits and prided himself in spending his time as he wished. When his father, who had Medicare and social security, had a heart attack and needed more care than he could afford, Grant had no savings to help out. Although he had a college degree in political...

As an adult, what exactly are you looking for from your parents? I don’t ask this question idly, as not a day goes by without at least one client lamenting problems they’re having with Mom or Dad (or both). Occasionally clients know just what they want from them, but much of the time, they’re kind of vague. So, here are some possibilities. You want: Attention: Mom and/or Dad never seem to want to spend quality time with you. She only calls you when she’s driving and he makes dinner plans with you but cancels about half the time because “something’s come up.”Approval: You want them to value what you do and to support your efforts. Say, you’re an adventure-seeker and your widowed mom is a homebody who can’t fathom why you’re dying to see New Zealand. Or you dropped out of business school because you want to be a school teacher,...

Warning: This blog is not trying to entice you to take a weight-loss drug. Nor is it meant to dissuade you from taking one. My purpose is to share what ED recovery and 35 years of experience as an ED therapist tell me about these hot new drugs.  For a while I’ve been working with two dysregulated eaters who are, respectively, on Ozempic or Mounjaro. Both have lost significant weight, suffer few side effects, and for the first time in recent memory are enjoying ongoing feelings of regulated hunger and fullness. To say their inner lives have changed dramatically is no exaggeration. Unless they don’t intend to rely on either drug for life because they don’t care to take medication they absolutely don’t need, or because the cost is prohibitive (or both), consider what might happen when they stop taking it. From what I’ve read, hunger and fullness and dysregulated eating...

Attempting to Zoom with three college friends, I twice tried and failed to get into the session. I assumed I’d done something wrong ‘til I received a text from one friend who was having the same difficulty and another from the Zoom “inviter” who couldn’t get the link to work. We each thought we were the ones who’d messed up. Then the ”inviter” re-sent the link and three of us got in, but the fourth kept texting, “I can’t get in. Help! What am I doing wrong?” She eventually used the re-sent link and there we all finally were laughing at how pathetic we are at technology. These are my kind of people: their first thought is they must be at fault. Why, you might ask, would I be such a fan of people who automatically think they’re wrong? Because back in social work school, one of my professors explained how...

Like most therapists, I’ve had many clients come to harm because they believed someone else’s lies over what they knew to be the truth. The term for when someone intentionally tries to invalidate or undermine our beliefs or feelings is gaslighting. This subtle power grab to make us mistrust ourselves is manipulation meant to convince us we don’t or shouldn’t think or feel a certain way and are wrong about our facts. Here’s an example. My client Dawson was planning to take his family to visit his parents in another state. Dawson had a strained relationship with them and hadn’t seen them in a long time, but his children were excited to see their grandparents. Speaking to his mother the day before their journey, she confessed she and his father felt “a little sick,” but she swore they’d tested negative for Covid so it was safe for the visit to proceed....

Day in and day out I explain to clients that, as adults, they have the ability (and duty to self) to live without their parents’ love and approval. And day in and day out they have difficulty internalizing this truth. Granted that yearning for parental approbation and attention is different than yearning for these things from anyone else. However, adulthood means detaching from believing you need parents emotionally and interacting with them in a way that serves you. For example, my client Bella’s widowed mother constantly wants to spend time with her, ignoring the fact that her daughter is married, works full-time and has a toddler. When Bella declines invitations to get together, her mother either cries or gives her the cold shoulder and won’t speak to her for weeks. Now, please stop and consider what you think and feel about her mom. My thoughts (in no particular order) are as...

Ever wonder how we regulate our emotions—or in some cases, why we aren’t able to regulate them? Professor Tim Dalgleish at the University of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit has some answers. He maintains that “successful emotion regulation relies on cognitive control . . . our ability to attend to information that is relevant to our goals, while ignoring distracting information (italics mine).” He adds that “cognitive control capacity is reduced in individuals who suffer from mental health problems.” This could be in part because the regions in our brains which manage cognitive control and emotional regulation overlap. His research tested people doing cognitive problem solving in both emotional and neutral contexts. Unsurprisingly, certain people had more difficulty solving problems in emotional contexts than neutral ones. And “the more difficulty adolescents [had] performing working memory tasks in emotional relative to neutral contexts, the more mental health difficulties they experience...

If you pay any attention to the news, you can’t have missed the rivalry between Great Britain’s Princes William and Harry. I used to think that Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, were the victims and got a raw deal from the monarchy, but now I’m thinking that Harry doth, as the saying goes, protest too much, and can’t snap himself out of victimhood, which reminds me of clients mired in a done-me-wrong mentality.  We all have grievances from the past, ways that family members, friends, bosses or institutions have hurt us. The idea is to problem solve a way to resolve the grievances—if that’s possible—or tuck them away and stop thinking about them. Sure, try to figure out what happened by yourself, with friends or with the alleged grievance perpetrator. But remember, this is a time-limited process and not meant to go on forever.  For example, if Sam didn’t invite...

Every time someone says, “Oh, they’re so nice, they’d give you the shirt off their back,” I think if this is our standard for niceness, no wonder so many people are dysfunctional. My reaction is always the same: It’s not a great thing for someone to go shirtless. Better for them to keep theirs on and help others get their own shirts. Being selfless, noble or altruistic are admirable, appropriate qualities—but only in some situations. When someone stops to drag a driver out of a burning car, that’s an amazing act of self-sacrifice. When a well-fed person encounters a hungry person on the street and gives them half their sandwich, that’s kindness and compassion in action. When you take the money your parents give you for your birthday to upgrade your cell phone and instead give it to your friend who lost theirs in a fire, that’s living with an open...