Checklists can be a helpful tool: they can organize your day and make you feel motivated. But when it feels like you’ve got a never ending to do list, you can feel defeated and constantly drained.

You might even find yourself unable to relax or feel like you haven’t ‘earned’ rest because of all the lingering things you need to get done. With this mentality it is easy to fall into emotional eating patterns to avoid your to do list.

Food becomes the only ‘acceptable’ way to take a break, so you go grab an afternoon pastry to get away from your desk or find yourself in the pantry looking for a snack to focus on something other than your tasks. This pattern of eating also packs a one-two punch of helping you disassociate from your to do list and all the feelings around it: stress, overwhelm, anxiety, fear. 

It is unavoidable that life will get busy, but that doesn’t mean you have to live in a constant state of stress eating. Here are four key strategies to bring you some peace of mind, ...

The snow isn’t the only thing swirling as we face the holiday season: emotions can feel all over the place as we’re faced with more things on our to do list that usual. Plus, there are so many opportunities where we are faced with food: dinners, potlucks, parties! If you’re an emotional eater you might dread this time of year.

But you don’t have to feel helpless. Below are three key things you can implement right now to start feeling calmer around food.

This time of year might bring with it specific family recipes you look forward to or limited-time store-bought items you crave. But this mindset can have you believing that these foods are scarce and you have to eat them every chance you get to make sure you take advantage of them being available.

• Try this: Start by giving yourself permission to eat the things you really enjoy. Practicing this means you’ll be much more satisfied by what you put in your mouth. And an interesting mental shift can happen when you know you can eat what
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Social media constantly gives us benchmarks to compare ourselves to.

Your Instagram and TikTok feeds are filled with picture-perfect videos and photos of happy kids, clean houses, and expensive vacations. These platforms are also overwhelmed with weightless “success” stories and details of restrictive diets to try to ‘give’ you the body of the influencer posing on the screen.

It’s tough not to get caught up in these images! It’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, so even before reading the caption or hearing what they’re saying, the image they are projecting is perfection. They are trying to sell you on the idea that if you buy this, do that, you can look just like them, have a life just like theirs.

Talk about a comparison that is only going to make you feel bad about yourself.

But this slim slice we see of others online—a highlight reel—is no yardstick for your own messy, beautiful life!

Here’s the solution to social media comparison:

1. You’ve probably heard this be
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It can be so easy to get obsessed with the numbers on your bathroom scale and hop on/hop off every day or sometimes multiple times a day. You might be telling yourself that it’s “just to check in” but let’s look at your motivation a bit more closely:

If the number on the scale is higher than yesterday, do you have a bad day? End up picking yourself apart and vow to restrict what you eat?

Are you stepping on the scale more than once a day? Do you have set ‘rules’ for when you weigh yourself (for example, must be after using the washroom, must be without clothing, etc.)?

If you find yourself letting the number on the scale dictate your mood and actions, here are four reminders you need to hear. Feel free to print these out to read them when you need to, or even tape them on your bathroom mirror!

1. It is normal for your weight to fluctuate during the day depending on what you’ve had to eat, drink, or if you’ve had a bowel movement. And if you’re a woman, you can expect your weight to
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The summer ‘uniform’ is made up of shorts, tank tops, and sweating! All can make you feel uncomfortable if you struggle with body image. But perhaps the most dreaded of all is the bathing suit. At some point we go from children who love being in the water and playing in the sand without a second thought, to worry-charged and self-conscious adults who will actively avoid situations that require suiting up.

If this sounds like you, you’ll want to bookmark this post to come back to when you’re faced with a bathing suit event. Here are 4 tips to make you feel more comfortable (dare we even say confident!):

• You’ve heard it before but it bears repeating: no one is as concerned about your appearance as you are. We in no way want to discount experiences where someone something commented on your body. No one gets to do that and here’s what you can do if it happens. But we can be our own worst enemy when it comes to criticizing ourselves. Consult someone you trust, a partner or friend, who c
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You may have seen yourself in our last blog post about body checking. It is the practice of monitoring and critiquing your appearance based on diet industry standards. Our tip there was to catch the negative thoughts in action and try and counter them.

In today’s post we’re going to take it to the next level: once you’ve caught that negative thought, how you can support yourself into creating a positive experience when looking in a mirror (either literally or in the form of comparison with other people’s bodies).

• Find the positive. After identifying the negative thought that came up, you might feel empowered to not only challenge it—saying it isn’t helpful—but to spin it into a positive. For example, instead of picking apart your thighs in the gym mirror, you could remind yourself that your legs just carried you through a workout! Focussing on what your body can do, instead of how it looks, can really start to reframe how you feel about your body.
• Dress in a way that feels good. C
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It might feel normal to pass by a store window and check out your reflection. But if you’re noticing more than simply adjusting your scarf or hat, you might be falling into body checking.

Body checking is any way you monitor your body’s appearance. This might look like:

• Pinching or pulling at skin to temporarily manipulate how your body looks.
• Examining your stomach in the mirror while trying to “suck in” as much as possible.
• Stepping on the scale often.
• Taking photos of your body constantly, swearing they will be your “before” photos.
• Comparing your body now to one you had as a teenager or to others around you.

You might even notice that these habits become even more frequent when you are stressed, feeling sad, or even just about to go on vacation! The issue with body checking is that you’ll never feel like you are measuring up to whatever you’re hoping for because it is a way of constantly critiquing your body. The diet industry doesn’t help us at all! Even if it changes i...

For many of you who have been on the diet rollercoaster for years, you probably have collected two wardrobes: one you’re trying to feel good in now and the other is the clothes you hope to fit back into one day. You might even find yourself putting off buying clothes you feel your best in because you’re waiting to lose weight and don’t want to ‘waste’ the money.

Here at the Centre for Emotional Eating we hear this from clients often! Not only is there a wish to one day be the smaller size you were previously, a lot of the time you also have emotional ties to those clothes because of who you were when you wore them. For example, one client loved her blouses and pencil skirts because it reminded her of a time when she was happy in her career.

But getting rid of these clothes will not only free up real space in your closet it will also free up mental space. Here’s what we hear from clients once they’ve taken the plunge and cleaned out their closets of clothes that no longer fit them or ...

A lot of emotional eaters use food rules to try and control their eating. This might look like:

• Counting calories, points, or macros.
• Not eating after 7:00 p.m.
• Not eating or limiting carbs, sugar, or fat.
• Leaving food on your plate.
• Drinking coffee or diet soda to fend off hunger.

Sound familiar? These rigid rules are a reaction to the out-of-control-feeling experienced when strong emotions take over and you head to the fridge looking for something to numb out on. We learn rules from our parents, friendship circles, diet culture, and social media. These rules also make you feel as if you are in control (at least for a little while), which makes it extra frustrating when you “fall off the wagon.”

It may seem logical to try and balance situations where you eat a lot of food with other times of much less food, but the truth is it doesn’t even out that way… And you end up getting stuck in the restrict/binge cycle. This looks like: strict diet > have a craving or emotional exper...

There is a big movement, especially on social media, to be body positive. It is the idea that you feel positive about your body—embracing how it looks, how you feel in it—most of the time. It is meant to lead to more self-confidence, self-love, and total acceptance of your weight, which all sounds great!

… But what if you’ve spent years absorbing diet culture messaging? Or you eat emotionally and that leads to feelings of shame and guilt around your body? It can seem impossible to get to a place where you unconditionally love your body and actively feel positive about it.

This is where the idea of body neutrality comes in.

Being “neutral” about something means you don’t have any positive or negative feelings about a topic, it simply is. This is something you can apply to how you feel about your body. If you constantly beat yourself up after going clothes shopping or suck in your stomach every time you look in a mirror, you might find ALL your ideas around your body are negative. The...