What's your eating style?

The second and ultimately more important thing that Jenny did was to start questioning her work life. Why was she at the office so late every night? Looking at her eating habits made her look at her work habits, and she realized she was working her life away. She cut back on her hours at the office by cutting out unnecessary meetings from her schedule. That helped her have dinner at a more reasonable time and to spend more time with her friends and boyfriend. Combined with eating in-office meals on the occasional nights when she still had to work late, that did the trick: Jenny quickly lost ten pounds.

Emotional Eater

When Suzanne first came to me hoping to lose the fifteen extra pounds she'd been carrying around, I had trouble figuring out why she was overweight. She was a dedicated exerciser and maintained a nearly perfect diet. But then I found out that two or three times a week, she would binge right before bedtime. And I mean really binge. Suzanne was capable of downing a pint of premium ice cream (the kind that's super high in fat) or half a bakery cake at one sitting. Because she ate a normal number of calories throughout the day, it was clear to me that these eating episodes were related not to physical hunger, but rather to emotional hunger. And as I got to know her better, I discovered that she indeed had a void in her life.

The nighttime binges had begun after she got divorced and had continued through several years of unsatisfying dates and relationships. To stop the binges, Suzanne needed to first make the connection between her eating and her love life, then find a way to get fulfillment from something other than food. It took a lot of hard work. She started keeping a journal to help her understand the feelings that triggered binges and seeing a therapist to talk about the void in her life. A year later, she met a man and got remarried. By this time she had stopped her bingeing and, not surprisingly, had lost the extra fifteen pounds.