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Are you busy, ambitious and looking for a way to curb emotional eating for good? On today’s podcast we catch up with Alegra Loewenstein. She is a Health Coach specialising in helping busy women to get rid of the guilt around eating showing them how to eat what they want and lose weight naturally in the process, no counting and no restrictions.
How To Curb Emotional Eating
- Her approach to eating and losing weight is very different to the conventional way of thinking. She believes that for the vast majority of people you can eat whatever you want. This can be achieved by listening to our bodies and respecting it.
- When we are tuned into our bodies we will eat when we are hungry, stop eating when we are full and as a result our bodies will get the exact amount of food we need to be our best and look our best. Our bodies will actually get rid of the excess weight naturally.
- She says that you can curb emotional eating by learning to eat the right amount of junk food that is satisfying, feels good and taste good but when it stops feeling good you will stop eating it. We get into this trap of not listening to our bodies at all which is the catch with all the other advice we get from various sources.
- If you are measuring what you eat based on a certain number of calories then you have just totally ignored anything that your body has to say about it. For example, you may have just finished exercised and you are very hungry but you will stop eating when you reach your allowed quota, like those 100 calorie snack bags.
- She has met a lot of women who are under eating during the day with 100 calories here and 200 calories there and by the end of the day their bodies are telling them that it is so hungry. When added to the stress of the day many women just go to the kitchen cupboard and eat the entire box of cookies.
- There are so many weight loss diets on the market but the truth is what works for one person does not work or the next person. If you feel good eating two meals a day and you feel fantastic you should do it. If you are suffering and totally not enjoying yourself by eating two meals a day then she predicts that diet will not work for you.
- In the beginning, when you try to curb emotional eating it is not going to be easy because we have trained ourselves to count calories, to eat the wild berries from Amazon so we have to literally un-train ourselves. As women we are ambitious and busy so we are not always going to be able to pay attention to our bodies so we have to do a little bit of planning to get it right.
Why Do You Do What You Do
She really enjoys helping women let go of the old story, where we have to starve ourselves and eat things that taste like cardboard, punish ourselves to achieve a health goal.
She’s helping women to stop feeling guilty about their food and stop feeling like the only way to win is to eat these horrible things and to starve themselves. She really wants to help them transform their relationship with food. She is really good at helping them.
She gets to work with so many amazing women. They get better at doing what they do. [clickToTweet tweet=”She gives them freedom over their relationship with food.” quote=”She gives them freedom over their relationship with food.” theme=”style2″]
Food feels like a friend to them. They are turning to food because they feel bored or stressed or they have a project to complete and going to the fridge and eating a slice of cheese is so much nicer.
Who Was The Role Model In Your Life
She really does not have business owners in her family. She always had the idea to own her own business while growing up. She wanted to have a candy store at one point when she was addicted to sugar even tea shop on another occasion.
When she heard about being a Health Coach she immediately thought that she would be so good at that without knowing what a health coach actually does.
She grew up eating healthy because her Mother was immune to the fads, she cooked wholesome foods. [clickToTweet tweet=”Her family had a very common sense and open minded approach to food while growing up.” quote=”Her family had a very common sense and open minded approach to food while growing up.” theme=”style3″]
She wished that she had a more open conversation about food while growing up so that she could have avoided her emotional eating challenges.
Her first boyfriend was not a healthy relationship. She hopes now that he is happy. It was good to pull herself out of that relationship.
As a young woman she struggled because she turned to sugar and through that journey she learned how to curb emotional eating that she faced.
The Best Advice She Received In Her Life
We have to sit through the pain and the discomfort. She is so averse to confrontation and awkwardness and so many thing she would rather not do.
You can’t avoid it all you have to sit through some of that experience.
She has a spiritual business coach who helps her move through some of these experiences in her life.
The One Thing That Has Impacted Her Life to Date
Parenthood has knocked her to the ground and she had build herself back up one piece at a time. She had no idea what she was in for. There’s no going back only going forward.
Her husband has said that their 6 year old is a 3rd of the way down living with them.
Her Background
She worked in education through the non-profit sector. She has a Bachelor’s in Biology, Ecology and Conservation Biology and a Master’s in Fine Arts in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry.
She worked in education specifically science education teaching elementary students about alternative fuels, natural gas and electric cars.
She worked with the University of California in San Diego where she worked with Scientist on campus and connected with them mostly at the high school level students including touring the science labs, seeing glow in the dark Zebra fish and playing ping pong using your brain waves only via electrodes.
Starting Her Curb Emotional Eating Practice
As this was all grant funded she got laid off when the grant ended. Although she enjoyed staying at him with her little one when he turned one she remembered thinking that she just needed to get a job to stay sane. It is at this point that she started her business to help women curb emotional eating even though she already did her certification a while back.
Getting started in business is a lot harder than she thought it would be. However, she is determined to get it done. She advises to get started, start small. Find something to do to start. You don’t have to be ready to be at 100 percent. Test your path a soft launch perhaps especially for coaching.
What Success Means To Her
She is ambitious and competitive. She has to get to this point in order to achieve success. It resides in happiness. She sees success as a double edge or two sides to the coin.
Fun Questions
The worst piece of advice she received was from her first business coach. She did not get the results that her business coach predicted so she felt like a failure after her first 3 months in business. Don’t let other people set goals for you.
[clickToTweet tweet=”She would trade places with her husband or her kids for one day because she believes that it would help her family” quote=”She would trade places with her husband or her kids for one day because she believes that it would help her family so much if she could really understand where they were coming from or what they were thinking” theme=”style4″]. Better still if they can understand her too then her life will be so improved as a result.
She wants to dye her hair for the new year in mermaid colours, purple, blue and green.
Her guilty and pleasure is dates stuffed with mascarpone cheese.
Final Advice
Focusing on enjoying your food will make you a happier person and make you healthier too. It is very hard in a busy world.
You can find out how to curb emotional eating here. You can take Alegra’s free quiz where you find out who to blame for eating the whole box of cookies.
You can subscribe to our podcasts to get notified when more success stories become available. In case you missed it check out Sasha’s Success story here.
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