Your weight and food issues aren't about what you eat. It is about why you eat. It isn't about if you are hungry physically but your emotional eating. One of the problems with weight loss surgery and diet programs is our belief that they hold the answer. If only we can follow them, they will work for us. Unfortunately for many of us, we didn't experience long-term weight loss success. Did we fail? No. Absolutely not! The diets failed because they are not the answer. As effective of a tool as weight loss surgery and diet programs can be, they aren't the answer. What?? I'm a weight loss and weight loss surgery coach, and a weight loss surgery post-op of seven years and I'm telling you that surgery and diet programs aren't the answer? How can that be?

Actually, I am a weight loss and weight loss surgery coach because you need to develop your own program that is special and customized for you. The answer is inside of you. Organized diet programs and plans make us the same and apply their cooker cutter approach to dieting. We are all different and unique. We need our OWN program that is individualized for us. You can develop coping strategies to combat emotional eating, food triggers, compulsive overeating, and head hunger that are the answer that is yours.

Weight and food issues aren't about the food. Food is the symptom, not the problem. The key to weight loss success is to discover for yourself why you overeat. If you do that personal work, food will become a non-issue. Food will be food - nothing more or less, and not a way to soothe, calm ourselves or self-medicate numb ourselves out. It isn't enough to find the right combination of foods, a certain food or other sort of limiting way to eat. Aside from true physical hunger, it is about becoming aware of what drives you to eat. You may think it is because you are hungry. In your head, you might be. Some of the feelings and emotions that drive us to eat emotionally are anger, lonely, tired, boredom, sadness or other emotions and situations that cause us to feel we aren't in control. Head hunger can be so strong that it masquerades as physical hunger.

Food doesn't hold the answer for your food triggers-you do. Food is food. It is nothing more than a source of nutrition and replenishment for your body and energy. We make it an emotional issue of what to eat, what not to eat, when to eat, when not to eat, and the accompanying negative emotions. There isn't any power or magic component in food.

Pay attention to the emotions and situations that cause cravings, drive you to emotionally overeat and are food triggers. You put food in its proper place by dealing with the emotions. It puts you in the driver's seat of your diet to move full speed to achieve your weight loss goal.