General

Every single one of my clients wants to lose weight, and my goal is to help them replace the habits that keep them overweight with new habits promoting better health and a leaner body. I have been reading about why 69% of adult Americans are now overweight and it is a complicated issue. What I have concluded is that, unfortunately, it is very hard to take weight off and especially challenging to keep it off. Our bodies fight to keep fat on, because our biology is still very much like it was thousands of years ago, always wary of famine. It has not adjusted to the new reality that in the United States the bigger danger to humans is overeating. Therefore, when we lower our […]

When I was bulimic back in my 20s, I would tell my friend Doug how much I wanted to stop the cycle of bingeing and purging. Doug, who was very wise, would say, “There is something positive you get out of throwing up, Alexandra, or you would have stopped long ago.” He was referring to a “competing commitment”. Yes, I was committed to stop the bulimia (I was in therapy every week), but I also had a commitment to have everyone like me by saying yes to everything – and that was working directly at cross purposes with my desire to stop throwing up. Because I was pleasing everyone over myself, I was using food as a treat and the purging as a release valve. […]

“Food is a drug, Alexandra”, my friend Whit earnestly said to me during a discussion about his inability to stop his late night binges. Don’t I know it. As someone who struggled for 12 years to overcome bulimia, I am personally aware of the power of food. Dr. David Kessler wrote The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite when he realized that he, a former FDA commissioner and doctor, was unable to resist chocolate chip cookies. He discusses how processed foods are so unnaturally full of salt, sugar and fat that they hijack our bodies ability to sense satiety. Few of us binge on whole foods like broccoli and peas, but we become different people when faced with potato chips, chocolate […]