Finding Happiness Beyond Food While Slimming Down

You think you are happy yet you overeat. Your craving for food is actually guiding you to tranquilize your unhappy body.

Learn how the intricate ties between food and happiness have been holding you back and how to slim down and connect to the true happiness that lies within you.

You’re probably here because you’re all too familiar with the dance of love and hate with food, the temporary bliss followed by guilt and misery. It's a cycle that many overeaters and high achievers struggle.

You deserve to be liberated from the stronghold of food obsession and be guided towards genuine fulfillment. Picture yourself finding joy in your own skin and prioritizing what truly energizes your body and mind.

Perhaps you’ve tried before and struggle to prioritize what makes you feel good and that’s why I am here helping you untangle happiness from food. After all, why would you need to overeat if you are calm and content?

Food dominates your feel good interventions

Let’s face it, as an overeater, food plays a key role in your life.

Food is your friend, comforter and energizer:

1. Food often rescues you when you are too tired and falling asleep, allowing you to push through and accomplish impossible tasks

2. Food allows you to complete demanding and complex projects and stand tall in tough moments when everything is falling part

3. Food distracts you when you are in unpleasant situations allowing everything to pass

4. Food consoled you when you are down and lonely, giving you happiness and company

5. Food entertains you when you are bored

6. Food makes you alive, joyful and playful

Food has been attending to your most essential needs. That’s why I’m here to help you explore a new path to fulfillment, independently of food.

Your approach to happiness may be sabotaging your relationship with food

Many of the overeaters and hardworking achievers I work with are comfortable staying busy and being in action. You hold the fort, push through, do good and hope to make others happy.

You think you are happy but then you wonder why you are depleted and overeating. Your craving for food is actually guiding you to tranquilize your unhappy body.

Are you a Maya or Randa?

Imagine two people, let’s call them Maya and Randa.

Maya does what LOOKS good.

Maya prides herself being a good child, sibling, friend, partner, parent, colleague, and leader. Maya values external accomplishments and derives her happiness from society’s validation. From the outside, Maya is successful and admirable.

Beyond her happiness facade, Maya may be suffering:

• She’s overwhelmed from her obligations

• Her inner critic keeps evaluating her work, pointing her imperfections and pushing her towards constant improvements

• She’s angry that while she’s able to control many aspects of her life, her eating is out of control

• She may be feeling flawed and unworthy and often worries about the future

• She believes that her pleasure in life come solely from her freedom to eat whatever she wishes

• She perceives emotions as bad and casts them aside

• She’s troubled by her cravings and excessive night eating

Let me shift now your focus to Randa.

Randa derives her happiness by doing what FEELS good

Randa has an affectionate, friendly and intimate connection with herself and is able to notice early signs of stress before they get to a binge.

Randa is invested in her internal state of harmony:

1. She runs her life through the lens of her body

2. Whenever perturbed, she pauses and listens to her body cues

3. She’s connected to her emotions and allows them to guide her decision making towards attending to needs she might have been neglecting

4. She’s comfortable slowing down to rest and recharge

5. She knows how to express her needs and say no when necessary

6. She prioritizes activities that give her energy and minimizes engagements that drain her

7. She has daily practices that give her joy and fulfillment

So tell me, which path resonates with you?

Maya’s illusion of happiness and overeating

Just like Maya, you may feel you’ve got everything to be happy but in reality you are not:

• You are the master of positive thinking

• You minimize all your negative thoughts and feelings

• You may blame yourself for over-reacting

• You remind yourself daily of all the blessings in your life

• You actually feel guilty for not being authentically happy and find yourself acquiring material sources that bring you short-lived moments of happiness

In your hidden reality, you are consumed by cravings, struggling to distract yourself from bingeing and unable to concentrate unless you overeat.

This struggle with food is not the problem but rather the consequence of unaddressed unease in your body. You escape your misery by finding temporary comfort and safety in sugary treats and salty snacks that later make you unhappy.

If this sounds like you, I am here to give you hope and ease off your burden. Just like Randa, you can derive your happiness from within while slimming down.

The 3 pillars and 17 steps to slimming down

Building on your hard work, my approach to slimming down involves helping you build a nurturing relationship between your body, food and life.

1) Befriending your BODY

The first pillar to slimming down is a journey back home to your one and only body.

It’s impossible for you to heal your relationship with food if you have not reconnected and befriended your body.

A lot of the work I do with overeaters and hardworking achievers is centered around supporting them make peace with their worst enemy: this imperfect body that they feel trapped in.

So tell me, do you tend to live in your mind and pursue externally derived happiness just like Maya, the queen of accomplishments? Yes Maya which we described before.

Or would you rather become more like Randa, happy in her skin, gentle and attentive to what makes her insides feel good?

I’m here to help you a build an affectionate, friendly and intimate connection with yourself so that you can detect early signals of stress in your body and manage them before they get to binge eating.

Curious what you gain, re-read above the 7 skills that Randa utilizes. Quite impressive yet achievable.

2) Nourishing yourself with FOOD

Let’s face it, you know that you should be eating more vegetables and real food but you struggle to implement that in your daily life and moments of stress.

The second pillar to slimming down involves breaking your habit of guilty pleasures with sweet treats and salty snacks and bringing food back to its basic function: nourishment of your body.

Imagine yourself having taken the step to master the first pillar to slimming down. You have befriended your body and can now show up for yourself with ease. You are ready to treat yourself with love.

Nourishing yourself with food involves 5 key steps:

1. Choosing to eat an abundance of food that frees you from cravings. I can bring you a step further by supporting you detox your body from sugar and flour

2. Building your cooking organization skills and daily habits to plan your meals and be motivated to prepare them so that nourishment is readily available to you

3. Eating at regular intervals, ideally 4 times a day to calm your hungry ghost

4. Having daily self-care habits that foster an affectionate, friendly and intimate connection with yourself

5. Practicing journaling and mindfulness so that you are able to notice early signs of stress before they get to a binge

3) Flourishing in LIFE

The third pillar to slimming down involves mastering how to develop life coping skills in all seasons and circumstances while using food for nourishment and tranquilizing your nervous system through alternative sources of pleasure.

Freeing yourself from the hold of food will involve:

1. Putting your needs first and taking care of yourself

2. Doing more of what gives you energy and less of what drains you

3. Having daily practices that give you joy and fulfillment

4. Managing stress and your emotions in a healthy way

5. Connecting to your body and slowing down to recharge when needed

Weightloss will come as a consequence of all this inner transformation.

Will you take a step further?

Are you feeling inspired or overwhelmed?

You’ve already tried to lose weight having experimented with a variety of diets, fasting, juicing, medications, surgeries, body sculpting or meal services. But wait, you may not have ventured into inner work that addresses the root cause of your food-body struggles.

Envision yourself fit and healthy, I am here to complement your efforts and get you there sooner.

Reach out to me for a free 30 min chat with me to discuss your journey to happiness independently from food.

Book a free chat

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Alternatively you can read my book.

I wrote “Beyond the emptiness: How I found fullness outside of food” to spread hope among overeaters.

My memoir describes my pain growing up and living 40 years as an overeater and the circumstances that kept me in this vicious cycle. I share how I transformed on a physical, emotional and spiritual level to lose 1/3 of my weight and sustain it for 7 years.

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Hi, I’m Rouba Chalabi,

I blend food addiction counseling with breathwork to help you heal the root cause of your food and body struggles so that you sustain weightloss.