I'm an emotional eater. Is this program for me?

Yes! Eating for comfort or to relieve anxiety is one of the biggest challenges facing America today. Many physicians and psychiatrists often refer to food as "America's most popular and widely abused anti-anxiety medication." When you think of it this way, you can understand more accurately the extremely detrimental effects eating for the wrong reasons has on our bodies and lives.

Eating for emotional reasons may be a behavior learned at a very young age, even as an infant. These patterns need to be changed before anyone can achieve the long-term success they are looking for with the OPTIFAST® Program. One of the keys to changing behaviors is not to just focus on eliminating the "bad ones" but to incorporate new ones into our daily habits. For example, people who often eat late at night need to commit themselves to changing this behavior. We've found that one of the things that works for many participants (who, just like you, eat for comfort too!) is whenever they feel like heading for the kitchen (the refrigerator), they stop and ask themselves if they're eating to fuel their body or feed their emotions. They write the answer to that question down on a notepad they keep next to the refrigerator. If they find what they were about to do was eat for comfort, they immediately go to another room (i.e. home office), and write. They write about how they feel, what they're planning to achieve the next day, and they just keep writing (sometimes even cards to friends) until they feel they've released the negative energy that was trying to "come out" by eating.