Outsmarting Your Inner Overeater: Seven Tricks for Losing Weight Effortlessly

If you have a tendency to overeat at dinner, at dessert, after dessert, or before bed, use these seven tricks to outsmart your inner overeater and lose weight effortlessly!

1. Understanding the Inner Overeater. The inner overeater is maniacal and conniving. It doesn't tell you: "Warning! Overeating coming on – get out now!" No! It takes control surreptitiously. Feelings can be difficult to deal with – especially when they are painful and/or confusing. When they become overwhelming, we go into overeating mode to circumvent having to deal with them. Eating food we enjoy is much more pleasurable than listening to the cacophony going on in our head and feeling those uncomfortable feelings. "Don't know what to do with those: Keep eating!"

2. Be on the Lookout for Eating Over Feelings. If you find yourself eating food you don't want to be eating or eating large quantities of food, drop everything and do something else, anything else: Go and take a walk around the block, put on lively music and dance in front of the mirror – something with movement to reset your mindset. Grab your journal and write: "What is going on with me?" and see what goes onto the page. You can also tap (Emotional Freedom Technique) on "Even though I am eating over feelings…" Those simple techniques will shift your intention from eating over feelings to eating to live.

3. Outsmart the Outsmarter: Keep your journal in or near the kitchen. Before you eat dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, sit down with a cup of tea or coffee and write down your current thoughts and feelings, and/or your thoughts and feelings from the day before, and/or a dream you remember. Write until you are fully in touch with what is truly going on with you – the good and the bad. Have a heart-to-heart talk with your inner child. Write down your thoughts, your fears, your frustrations, things you are confused about, your goals and hopes for the future. By doing this, you are bringing to the surface your deepest thoughts and feelings so that your inner blabbermouth will feel listened to and you can go on to eat a meal consisting of exactly what you want. In this way, you control the food; it doesn't control you. The cacophony is your inner voice wanting to be heard and acknowledged. So hear it and acknowledge it.

4. Do Something Aerobic Like Taking a Brisk Walk Before Eating. Exercise is a natural appetite suppressant – in a good way! A few minutes of exercise before a meal is a great way to cramp your tendency to overeat.

5. Don't Deprive Yourself. If you love dessert, and you are on a food plan that doesn't call for dessert, I'm sorry. I love dessert. I also don't want to put the 50 pounds back on that I have been keeping off for the past 32 years. So I allow myself a few bites of dessert – before or after dinner, whichever I like. Since I know ahead of time that I will be allowing myself my little treat, I don't go crazy. If your child says, "Mommy, I really want a piece of chocolate," and you respond, "Would that be dark or milk? At the park or during the movie of your choice we're going to watch tonight?" your child will feel you are giving them their heart's desire. It's the same with our own inner child. When we give ourselves our heart's desire, there's no rebellion bingeing on 14 chocolate bars.

6. Water, water, water. I know you've heard it before, but a glass of water 15 minutes before each meal will help you to eat a little less at your meal. In addition, drinking water helps our body cleanse itself.

7.  Sign Up for an Exercise Class. Enroll in a Silver Sneakers or other group exercise class. It will raise your metabolism, tone muscles, and burn calories. In addition, you will make friends, laugh because the teacher's really funny, and have fun dancing for an hour. Getting to know and love yourself will go a long way towards helping you outsmart your inner overeater and lose the weight you wish to lose.

Janet Stegman is an EFT and Inner Child Practitioner, successfully counseling people with addiction and other mental health disorders for more than 20 years. Janet is the author of Sandcastles: Tools for Letting Go of Addiction and the Pain of the Past; How to Raise a Healthy Happy Child; and My Mother the Comedian . . . I Mean Superior Court Judge. She also has extensive comedy and musical theatre credits including Janet Stegman Starring in HBO Here I Come! and Peter in Peter Pan. Janet lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she teaches Silver Sneakers and dances the Lindy Hop every chance she gets! For more information visit www.janetstegman.com.