Beyond Yoyos

As a counselor and personal coach, I teach what I most need to learn:

• how to shift beyond emotional eating into nourishing practices,
• what it’s like to empower young people around food in a way that allows them to access their inner wisdom, and
• how to inject fun and community into the route back to ourselves.

I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, where the river behind my house serves as a metaphor in so many ways.  I adore my two children and thank my husband everyday (well…almost — after all, I gave up perfection many years ago) for his presence in my life.

A personal growth junkie, I have absorbed the wisdom of so many teachers, finding grace and truth in the stack of books that call out to me, the leaders, counselors and coaches I’ve trained alongside, and the people whom serendipity brings my way.

Take a look at my website to learn more about my private practice, follow me on Twitter (beyondyoyos), and read the posts on this blog, which has quite a long history.

I started this blog as a soul-driven project in celebration of my birthday a few years ago.  I wanted to explore the threads that run between people who have successfully beaten the yoyo diet cycle, lost 40 pounds or more, and kept it off. I decided to do these profiles because I talk to so many people who are stuck in the vicious cycle of weight loss: gritted teeth, deprivation and self-punishment followed by a rebound into overeating and then later shame and the rising number on the scale.

I wanted to explore, for myself and for you, what makes it different for the few who get beyond the yoyo?  Many themes have emerged and you can read about them on my Tapestry posts, so named because I wanted to capture the weft of what runs through wildly divergent approaches to weight loss and healing from emotional eating.

(You can get to the Tapestry posts by clicking on the page I created that links to all of the posts, or if you want to read the first few lines of each post to decide which ones to dive into, click on the tag to the right of this page in the word collage, and you’ll get all of the posts that are categorized under that particular word.)

Now that I’ve finished the interviews (I didn’t make it to 40 interviews as I intended, but it’s a worthy group of stories!), I listed them on one page (called Stories) so that people can read them in order if they wish. (You can also access them by clicking on the word “Stories” in the word collage to the right, underneath my picture, and you’ll get a view that shows you the first few lines of each post.)

I’m more actively posting on the Politics of Weight and Attuned Eating sections of my blog so jump over there if you’d like to see some current info.

If you just want a chronological listing of posting, with the newest first, click on Chronological Posts.

Thanks for reading!