Renée is simply the best emotional eating coach out there.
No need for more diets or more workouts, you have to understand the cause of your overeating habit.
Get some expert advice on that topic right here, right now! 🙂
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Who is Renée Jones?
Renée is awesome! 🙂
She’s a coach & a counselor and she helps people overcome emotional eating.
Meet Renée:
She started her first diet when she was 10 years old with her mother and it was the start of a 40-year diet…
When she turned 50, she said to herself “If I don’t get there now, I’ll never get there!” saying this because as women, we all know that it gets a bit harder to lose weight the oldest we get… 🙂
Even she was very motivated, she remembers that she just couldn’t do it! Every month she was postponing it.
Then, through some online researches, she came through the advice “only eat when you’re hungry!”
To what she replied “Yes! That’s what I do, but I just eat too much!”
Then she realized that she would be able to do a diet if she didn’t have this emotional eating component.
She says:
“If I could just stay on the diet, it’s going to work. But it’s that moment when you find yourself staring at the refrigerator looking for something to soothes you, that’s where I always sabotage myself!
I need to find something that could help me with that.”
She adds:
“In the end, I actually hired a coach because I couldn’t do it by myself! If I would be able to do it by myself, I wouldn’t be doing this for 40 years, right?”
And this is how Renée succeeded in losing weight! 🙂
“Once I figured out “Ok, this is how it works for me, this is what I need to do, I’ve got the accountability in place, I’m working on all the stuff and then I hit my goal before my 50th birthday!
And I thought “This is too good not to be shared”. You’ve got to help others do this!”
This is how Renée started helping others on how to stop emotional eating forever.
Actually, what is emotional eating?
Renée answers by sharing:
“For example, when my mother died, I used to love eating peanut butter. This was the connection we used to have the two of us. That’s how I soothed myself.
Then, when my grandmother died, I said to myself “I can get another 20 pounds to soothe myself or I can try to figure this out”, that was the connection to me”.
She adds:
“We associate food with comfort. We even talk about “comfort food”.
If you’re using food for any reason other than fueling your body, it is probably an emotional response.
Think about Holidays, don’t we have special food for Christmas, Hannukah, and other celebrations?
Most often, those foods are just memories! The things your mother made for you for example…
What we do is we go to those to soothe ourselves!
Even from birth! When a baby cries, we put something in his mouth to soothe it. Either the bottle, a breast, or even a pacifier.
We learn this “put something in my mouth and I feel better”. It’s a mechanism that actually works for us!
But, as adults do we want to continue this?”
Amazing questions, right? 🙂
The symptoms of emotional eating are very interesting to understand…
An emotion sticks with us for only 90 seconds!
Renée and I talked about the fact that emotions stick with us for only 90 seconds!
And we can learn how to just let them be!
Renée remembers realizing with a client that they could just let that emotion be. Renée asked her: “What if we would let that be?”
“Let’s imagine that it’s like a river, you can choose to swim or not, you can just be there with it.
You don’t have to stuff that down to the food chaser, just feel that, let it be the river and not a reservoir for it.”
Then, Renée’s client was free of this, the rest of the sessions were simply happening to reinforce it.
She was able to just feel the emotion, doing that just release it completely!
Amazing, right? 🙂
How to deal with emotions?
We can just welcome the emotion!
You don’t have to react to it or to resist it.
Just let it pass, just like the saying: This too shall pass. It won’t last more than 90 seconds!
Actually, I share more about how to deal with any kind of emotion in my post called 6 Steps To Mastering Your Emotions [Infographic]
This is the infographic that can help you in mastering any kind of emotion starting today, it’s a skill that you can develop! 🙂
How is emotional eating related to self-confidence?
Renée answers that there are so many connections!
She says:
“I truly believe that low self-esteem is an epidemic in our world.
We don’t know how to build our confidence, by the time we figured it out, someone would say that we are being arrogant.
Finding that balance is really difficult.
So many of my clients, when they feel so low, they’re trying to make them feel better because they don’t access to self-confidence.”
And eating is something that people are doing to make them feel better.
I agree with Renée that we could work on the cause of it (building our self-confidence and self-esteem), then, we won’t need any food to comfort us for the lack of self-confidence/self-esteem… That’s fascinating!
One great tip to build your self-confidence?
Renée shares one of the things that can really help you in building your self-confidence”
“One of the things that I did back then and continue to do until this day, is that I’,m setting alarms on my phone.
I’m setting a label for something that I need to hear or to learn.
It shows it to you on your screen, even if it’s on silent, it still goes off. You have no choice but to look at it!
It took me about 2 months for it to really have an effect on me. It created a change in me just by reading it every day.
The one that goes off at around noon is “is that who you want to be?”.
There are times that I react not exactly the way I want to react and the alarm reminds me that I can change my reaction.
The reminder can be anything that you need it to be! You can change it to whatever can help you to grow!”
How to get more from Renée Jones?
1. You have to check out Renée’s website: PackYourOwnBag.com.
I asked Renée why her website is called “Pack your Own Bag”?
She shares:
“Very often, our emotional baggage gets packed for us.
And at some point, we have to unpack all that we don’t need anymore.
They served us as children, now we can pack for the journey we want to be on.
We unpack and then we pack our own bag with the stuff that we need.”
2. Get yourself a free gift! 🙂
It’s a video with an exercise called The Compass, which helps you set your goal and keep you moving on that.
Renée shares:
“When I get a new client, I send them my book and a wristband.
It says “check your compass” and if you’re about to go off the rails, if you check your compass, you get back on track!
3. Watch Renée’s famous Ted Talk! She’s amazing, really! 🙂
It can really help you in breaking free from emotional eating!
You can find it in Spanish too!
(There are not enough books on emotional eating! Grab this one absolutely!)
To sum up!
I am passionate about emotions and eating, so talking with Renée was amazing to me! 🙂
I like how we ended the interview.
Renée says that “overcoming emotional eating isn’t that hard. We just have to get the hang of it.
Hang is actually an acronym for something else!
H. H: ask yourself: Am I hungry? If you are, you should eat something.
A. If not, go to the A: What is the attraction to food at that moment?
N. And then, N: what do you actually need? Do you need a hug? To talk? A walk?
G. Then, the G: Go get what you need, this will soothe you more than the food itself.”
And I love her famous quote:
“Face your stuff, don’t stuff your face”.
Thank you, Renée for your time! 🙂
