Emma Randall MSc, PG Dip, BA Hons, Dip Raw
Start Your Journey For A Better Relationship With Food
One-To-One Sessions (in person or online)
~ Do you want to overcome mindless eating, binge eating or grazing, and start feeling that you can trust yourself around food?
~ Are you tired of yo-yo dieting, still overweight, and looking for ways to lose weight and keep it off in a more balanced, less all-or-nothing way?
~ Are you ready to do the mindset work that diet plans haven’t taught you, and discard any unhelpful beliefs, attitudes or behaviours around eating, nutrition and weight loss that have been keeping you stuck?
Uncovering The Root Of The Habit
If you want to improve your eating habits and relationship with food, lose weight and achieve long-term weight control or expand your nutritional knowledge to help you make healthier food choices, my one-to-one sessions explore in depth both the psychological and nutritional aspects of eating, and are tailored specifically to individual client needs.
Whilst mindful eating is about paying attention to the eating process, getting curious and noticing what, how and why you eat (non-judgementally), it’s not just about trying to modify unhelpful habits- it also considers the root causes and drives too (mindset), which keep the habits going. This is why people can feel stuck in a rut with eating behaviours they don’t believe they can shift.
We talk about ‘food issues’ or ‘weight issues’, but it’s not food or weight itself that’s the main problem but issues such as anxiety, guilt, self-loathing, escape-seeking, approval-seeking, a history of trauma, procrastination, avoidance, boredom, frustration, a need for a dopamine hit, stress, loneliness, anger, resentment, depression, sadness or lack of fulfilment.
Supporting Mental Health & Well-Being To Enable Better Eating Habits
We have to consider both conscious and subconscious motivations, drives and needs in order to understand why a behaviour might have become an unhelpful, compulsive habit. General mental health and well-being is intimately linked to eating habits. Improving your relationship with food requires becoming more self-aware in terms of any unhelpful and deeply ingrained thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours around food, nutrition and dieting, as well as acknowledging the different types of eating you might do on a regular basis such as reward eating, stress eating, boredom eating or secret eating, and addressing mindless eating and managing the food environment (food cues).
Battling With An Inner Critic Or Low Self-Worth?
To have a better relationship with food, you need to build a better relationship with yourself. When looking at our relationship with food, eating habits and body image, it’s important to look at our past. Our childhood can positively or negatively affect our relationship with food, our self-concept, our current relationships, our belief systems, body image and general behaviour well into adulthood. A person might have been told as a child to clear their plate, or they might have had a mother who was preoccupied with dieting and restricted food for the whole family, or who told their child that they must never get fat. Or a child might have been told that they were ugly or stupid. Perhaps food was heavily restricted, or in contrast, there were no boundaries around food. TV dinners and ultra-processed meals might have been a big feature in a person’s childhood, or perhaps a person was brought up in a chaotic home, that was even a place of violence and abuse. Food can also have positive connotations too- perhaps the family enjoyed eating together, and food is now a big comfort for a person in adulthood- perhaps they even put food on a pedestal.
A person might have a strong inner critic, which can have roots in their childhood. This inner critic might have a knock-on effect in different aspects of their life, including their relationship with food, and can be associated with low self-worth. They might seek validation or attention from others through their appearance, which might cause them to get trapped in yo-yo dieting, or their validation-seeking might be through their career success, which could lead to exhaustion, comfort eating or reward eating. The concept of self, or identity, can help us to understand people’s underlying motivations, which influences behaviour, both helpful and unhelpful.
What Food Can Symbolise
For some people, when life is going on around them, eating can feel like a relief. It can help to release tension and calm them down, or they might see eating as a chance to have a break, or providing moments of escapism. Food might feel like one thing they CAN have when other areas of their life seem out of control. Or perhaps they feel that all areas of their life are working well, but it’s just food that they can’t seem to manage.
Food and eating can therefore symbolise different things to different people, whether it’s a way to relax or have a break, a means of calming down, distracting or numbing oneself when things feel difficult or overwhelming; it can be a way to reward oneself, let go or decompress, a way to put things off (procrastinate), and it can even be a means of rebelling or rule-breaking. Food might be used as a way to self-soothe or even self-punish. Their eating is then followed by feelings of guilt and shame. Read my blog post about different types of eating.
Mindfully Managing The Food Environment: Ultra Processed Food
People don’t get addicted to food. But they can get addicted to ultra processed food (UPF). These foods tend to be stripped of their natural fibre and contain white flour and/or sugar, and saturated fat. Examples include biscuits, cakes, pastries, chocolate, breads and dessert. In general, UPFs don’t fill us up, so they’re easy to overeat. To process the sugars in foods, the body produces insulin, which is vital for keeping blood sugar levels at an optimum level, but in excess it can lead to fat storage in the body and insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes). This is why it’s important to look at what your meals and snacks contain, not just the calorie content.
UPFs are manufactured in a way that makes them hyperpalatable, irresistable and very easy to overeat, whereas foods in their more natural state don’t have that effect, making it easier for us to eat them in moderation. Note: there is ultra processed food (lots of ingredients) and minimally/moderately processed food (the food is still largely in its original form, such as baked beans or plain yogurt, and can be nutritious).
Teaching clients about how they can take charge of the food environment through mindful eating practises, keep their blood sugar levels stable throughout the day, as well as helping them with lifestyle strategies to maintain good energy levels, achieve a positive sense of well-being and manage stress are an integral part of helping a person with their eating and weight management goals. Read my blog post “How Food Affects Mood: Eat Your Way To Happiness”.
Building Self-Awareness And Insight
Food psychology is a fascinating area, so if you embark on one-to-one sessions with me, see it as an interesting project- not just about an end goal, but a transformative, insightful process where we look at the whole picture. I will help you to gain insight into underlying motivations, drives and needs that might have been keeping you stuck in a cycle of unhelpful eating behaviours. With increased awareness, knowledge and skills you’ll be in a more empowered position to set up strategies that enable you to set up a happier, more balanced, and personalised way of eating that’s suited to you and fits with your lifestyle. Read my blog post: “How To Improve Your Eating Habits With A Stressful Life”.
Addressing The ‘Diet Head’
Not all the clients I work with want to, or need to, lose weight. Some people might want to specifically address overeating or binge eating, improve their overall relationship with food or nutritional knowledge to make more healthy, balanced and satisfying food choices, or tackle a lifetime of disordered eating. But for those with a history of yo-yo dieting, there’s often a self-limiting, rule-bound ‘diet head’ telling you what you should and shouldn’t be eating, and an inner critic that kicks off whenever you eat ‘bad’ food, keeping you trapped in a cycle of guilt and a sense of failure. It’s not you failing at the diet, but the diet failing you, because most diets are restrictive and unsustainable. I help clients to adopt a more long-term approach to their eating, and to move away from unhelpful behaviours such as obsessive calorie counting.
Three-Pronged Strategy
I encourage clients to explore three key areas in relation to their eating habits and relationship with food, with a personalised session format tailored to individual needs. For some, there might be more focus on the psychological (mindset and behavioural) aspects of eating; for others there might be more focus on nutrition education, or sessions might cover a mixture of the two:-
1. Mindless habits: teaching mindful eating concepts and practises
2. Emotional eating: helping a person to understand and address why they eat- if food is used as a coping mechanism; it may also include exploring body image issues
3. Nutrition and physiology: improving the client’s knowledge about important biological processes which play a crucial role in weight management potential, happiness levels, motivation levels, energy levels and general health and well-being, which in turn influences eating habits. These include insulin, fat storage mechanisms, stress hormones, appetite hormones, sex hormones and even gut health. It can really help to motivate a person to make better food choices once they’ve gained deeper insight into the benefits of healthier options, whilst knowing that they don’t have to completely cut out any particular foods.
Small, Consistent Changes
You need to be patient with yourself, as there might be decades of unhelpful thought patterns and eating habits to address, but building self-awareness is a great starting point- once you’ve gained greater self-insight into your eating habits, thought processes, attitudes and beliefs in relation to food, eating and weight loss, you can then find strategies for positive, long-term change.
You can’t expect to radically change your eating habits overnight, so small adjustments is key, making it feel achievable, and flexible. Just a few small, consistent changes to a person’s eating behaviour can make a difference quite quickly, and this can help boost motivation and self-belief. A very common issue to address is all-or-nothing thinking- the mindful eating approach encourages a more ‘middle-way’ mindset, enabling a person to move away from extreme, restrictive methods towards more balance. We tend to be much happier human beings when we’re doing things in balance.
Prices: One-To-One Sessions (Online via Zoom/Teams or In Person: Surrey)
Initial session (90 minutes): £75
Subsequent sessions (60 minutes): £60
SPECIAL OFFER (ongoing): Purchase four sessions up front, and get the fourth HALF PRICE (£30). You can also pay as you go. For any subsequent batches of sessions, the 4th session is half price (£30) every time.
Session availability: Weekday mornings, afternoons and evenings, and some Saturdays.
Flexibility Of Sessions
If clients choose to have ongoing sessions, they have the option of reducing session frequency. For example, they might start off with weekly or fortnightly sessions (most people find fortnightly useful), but further down the line they might choose to see me for ‘check-ins’ once a month, once every 6-8 weeks, or even once every 3-6 months.
Ready To Transform Your Relationship With Food?
To book a session or have a FREE chat to find out more about my one-to-one sessions, please Whatsapp/text me or give me a call (Emma Randall): 07961 423120 or email me: info@mindfuleating.org.uk
“This has been life changing, I feel so comfortable with my choices and feel like food no longer has a hold over me.”
“I’m thrilled that I’m losing weight and I can’t believe that I can actually lose weight and not hate the process. It’s all thanks to you!”
“I was eating totally the wrong things before, leaving me hungry all the time and still putting on weight. I’ve now lost over a stone in 4 months. I emphasise that this is not a diet! This is about just making better decisions about food”.
“Emma suggested small (and often easy) adjustments to my daily habits to help me be more mindful of my eating and start to see food as a friend and not foe”.
“My mindful eating sessions with Emma have made a huge and lasting difference to how I feel about food and myself more generally. Emma is very easy to open up to, and never judgemental.”
You can see full reviews and read more client success stories.
My Other Services
Webinar: ‘How To Stop Mindless Eating’.
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