We should stop using the word addiction and shift to a new word – bonding.” – Professor Peter Cohen
If you feel stuck in compulsive overeating, emotional eating, food perfectionism, a sugar or food addiction, or a rebellious relationship with food, we can help. We’ll help you grow out of food compulsions through a compassion and developmentally based, heart centered approach.
Our approach can help you in 3 key areas:
- Changing how you see – learn a different way of understanding food compulsions – as a cry for connection and help – that normalizes the behavior, softens the fear, and offers a map for healing. Learn how to use compassion and connection to build the container for growth: loving relationship, or attachment.
- Changing how you relate – learn how to use connection to support yourself in difficult situations like when you want to binge. This is an important switch: responding to your needs, emotions, challenges, and triggers with compassionate, caring support rather than fear/anxiety, disgust, contempt, frustration, collapse/helplessness, or self hatred.
- Changing how you grow – learn how to use the power of connection and the safety of relationship to support your growth out of food compulsions. You’ll also learn what “prunes out” the desire to overeat or binge and how to support this process. Connection makes healing and growth easier, less stressful, and possible.
The fruits of this approach appear “up on the surface” as changes in what and how you eat, changes in how you rely on food, and a new way of responding to the urge to binge or overeat.
Because this approach is grounded in development, not habit change, you can expect to see these shifts appear in multiple areas in your life, and not only with food. Our approach is non-violent, gentle, and grounded in deep respect for our human vulnerability.
Paid courses
Heart of Food
The Heart of Food is a 28 day support to free yourself from anxiety about sugar and food. Instead of a focus on behavior – eating a certain way – we’ll focus on what can actually soften the anxiety and obsession with food. You’ll learn what really fosters transformation, and what can birth new life. Your relationship with food and sugar can feel more nourishing and less anxious – even during the holidays. Then the tension about getting it right “lifts.” The obsession to control or manage food softens. This is not about your diet. There’s no homework. No achievement challenge. Just daily nourishment and new practices you can try. Acclaimed for its ability to open your eyes to new ways of seeing and being around food, the Heart of Food is a support and salve to you over 28 days. Gain an understanding and insight into what’s underneath food compulsions. If we can combine that with a space of compassion, kindness, of empowered relatedness, then rather than feeling like a victim of food, you can feel like “I’m standing in my strongest self. And my strongest self can lead me through this.”
Overcoming Sugar Addiction: The 30 Day Lift
If you use sugar for stress relief, self soothing, or to care for your emotions, there’s hope. Move from wanting to eat less sugar into actually doing it with The 30 Day Lift. Rather than relying on will power or control to create change, you’ll learn practical, hands on ways of using compassion, acceptance, and connection to gently support yourself into new ways of relating to the needs and feelings that drive your cravings.
When Food Is Your Mother
Feb-Mar 2017 Course homepage | Oct-Nov 2017 Course homepage | Learn more
For many people, overeating, food obsessions (like a sugar obsession), and binge eating are not just “bad” habits or coping strategies but emotional bonds – a well-intentioned attempt to feel safe, secure and connected in the face of isolation, overwhelming emotion, powerlessness, and pain. This emotional bond with food – and the needs that drive it – can be so strong that it overrides a need for health or sobriety. Gain insight on how to heal it, and guidance on how to replace it with true, secure refuge.
This course is taught in the fall and in the spring. Next class begins the fall of 2017. You can sign up for the next class here.
The Holiday Lift
The Holiday Lift is a new tradition! It’s a 30 day, relationally oriented support program to feel less anxious and more peaceful about sugar and food during the holiday season. It’s an anti-diet, full of nourishment program that is all about helping you feel more calm, connected and capable with food during the holidays. It consists of 5 minute daily videos along with bonus Q&A coaching calls where you can ask questions. Next class begins in November of 2017 and you can join anytime through February of 2018.
Soften Sugar Cravings
Course homepage
Practices like compassion, heartfulness, loving relationship, and deep listening can soften sugar cravings, the binge/restrict sugar cycle, and unwind compulsive sugar habits. In this course, you’ll learn how to support yourself through the developmental process of unwinding your fixation with sugar, discover kinder ways of relating to your sugar journey, and learn how to compassionately support yourself as you change how much sugar you eat.
When Food Is Your Mother pre-2017
Course homepage
For many people, overeating, food obsessions (like a sugar obsession), and binge eating are not just “bad” habits or coping strategies but emotional bonds – a well intentioned attempt to feel safe, secure and connected in the face of isolation, overwhelming emotion, powerlessness, and pain. This emotional bond with food – and the needs that drive it – can be so strong that it overrides a need for health or sobriety. Gain insight on how to heal it, and guidance on how to replace it with true, secure refuge.
Overcoming Sugar Addiction for Life
Course homepage
When you’re feeling stuck in a compulsive relationship with sugar, healing is not about simply cutting out the sugar, greater will power, or learning the tricks to finally “stick to your guns.” For these approaches ignore a deeper truth: that you’re craving and overeating sugar for a valid reason. Trying to stop the behavior doesn’t address the deep needs and feelings that drive the sugar cravings in the first place. To find lasting freedom from sugar bingeing, you need to heal the sugar addicted heart: to befriend and listen to the part of you that seeks comfort in sugar. In this course, you’ll learn how to create a kind, loving, nourishing relationship with yourself – with your needs, feelings, hurts and more – to heal your addiction to sugar.
Heal Overeating: Untangled
Course homepage
Untangled helps you foster mercy and tenderness towards your struggles with food, so that your overeating is no longer viewed as a problem – something “bad” to cut out – but something to embrace. This change in relationship softens shame, creates a supportive container for growth, and opens the door for behavioral change. When you relate to your inner life with greater compassion and love, you can respond differently to the pull to overeat.
Introductory free courses:
To get a taste of our approach, try these free courses:
Sugar Addiction 101
A free, introductory video course that maps out the four stages of healing a sugar addiction, explains why a focus on control and will power compounds a sugar addiction, and how to move beyond a sugar abstinence into a conscious, mature relationship with sugar.
Overeating 101
A free, introductory video course that dives into the needs and emotions that drive overeating and binge eating. Gain a new perspective, and understand the path to healing.
Binge Rescue Course
When we’re feeling overwhelmed by intense emotions, panicked, insecure, unsafe, or flooded, we can feel strong cravings and urges to overeat, binge, or seek out food. Here’s help to recover after a binge, or help you prevent an imminent binge.