Our lower brain wants us to avoid pain - even emotional pain - so it creates urges to eat sweet, salty, high fat foods for a quick dopamine hit when we are sad, lonely, nervous, stressed, uncomfortable or any other negative emotion. But emotions are not problems to be solved... and food is only a solution for hunger... not loneliness! Heidi shares examples of how to distinguish emotional urges from intentional food choices, and how to stop eating to feel better.

Early in life we started creating expectations of our life and writing mental handbooks of how other people SHOULD be and act. The problem is no one can read our mental manuals AND other people are only good at one thing - being exactly who they are. Our expectations of other people create disappointment and resentment in our bodies - a nasty bitter pill - and they create disconnect and distance from others. Learn how to drop our expectations, stop judging and focus on how WE want to show up in the world.

Our inner critic sometimes works in overdrive, thinking that she can shame us into improving. And she is programmed to find the negative. BUT we don't improve from shame. Listen as Heidi teaches you how you are normal to have negative thoughts about yourself and how these thoughts are NOT you. Learn tools to manage this mean and wrong inner critic. Confident people are the ones who don't believe these thoughts!

Everyone in our life falls short of our "expectations" of them from time to time. We get to decide if we fill the gaps in our thoughts with grace and understanding, or with judgment and criticism. Learn how the judgment hurts us and how creating relationships of grace is a gift to this person AND to ourselves. Our self-worth grows when we develop empathy and compassion for others. Grace is having a relationship with someone's heart, not their behavior.

The holidays tend to be a time that we pay more attention to other people's needs and sacrifice caring for our own needs. And the side effect of this is that we have LESS to give others. Learn tools, especially for the 2020 holiday season, to have an emotionally and physically healthy season. Learn why we need to tell people what we need as we also find ways to serve them. Stack the odds in your favor that you don't use food to feel good and you set reasonable expectations all around.

Perfectionism lies to us to get us to chase it. Our brain on default wants to think that other people "like" perfect people, that we should AVOID making mistakes, that another person's opinion is VERY important, that struggling is bad and that there are only two options in life - good or bad. But none of these things are true nor helpful for our growth. When we dismantle these perfectionist beliefs, we feel so much relief, calm and confidence.

Some of the stories we re-tell of our past keep us stuck and block us from making progress today. Listen as Heidi interviews master certified coach Jody Moore to learn what from our past stories is impacting us today and how to reframe these "hurtful" stories. Learn helpful tools to adjust our lenses of our life and how to make these stories work in our favor. We can be bitter, or better. We can be victims, or heroes. Our choice!

I've been able to maintain a healthy weight over the last 14 years after struggling for decades with my weight. I used to believe I was just a "big girl". I ate lots of sweets, carbs and I ate to numb feelings of sadness, insecurity, discomfort, uncertainty and shame. I was able to break out of these cycles by changing what I believed about myself, about changing my identity... which lead to learning more about nutrition and exercising. Listen to hear how changing my inside was the key to changing my outside.

Procrastination isn't about being lazy. It is us avoiding feeling discomfort, uncertainty, fear or doubt. These are just EMOTIONS and they are the price we pay for achieving our goals. Listen and learn the tricky lies our brain tells us to prevent us from starting something and HOW to overcome these default thoughts. Learn why visualizing how you'll feel when the goal is done can fuel you to get going. So, get going!

It feels good when people like us. Then we encounter people won't don't like us. And our brain thinks this is a problem. But this isn't a problem. If someone likes us, is NOT about us and is ALL about them. Learn how to manage your brain in these situations, show up confidently and how to let other people be wrong about you. When we build our own self-esteem, we focus more on how we want to show up and who WE want to be. Even our teenagers don't need to like us... and it's all okay.