You may be busy. You may be on a deadline. Or on your period. But you still need to eat.

Let’s face it, if we all ate like we do when we’re well-rested and high on life, we’d never fall off diets or overeat.

If there were no bad days, there wouldn’t be any emotional eating or binge eating either. Finding a relationship with food that can cope with the bad, messy days and the hardest emotions – that’s what we need to learn here. That’s the only thing that’s sustainable for the rest of your life.

And let me tell you something wonderful: There has never been an easier way to begin.

Eating is something we have to do every day. Whether it’s a good day, a bad day, or a helluva day. Eating psychology is not like a diet, that you have to be ‘all in’ and focus on obsessively to make it work. It’s a lifelong journey of awareness and habit change, and we have to make changes we can live with forever.

And although it won’t happen ‘by magic’ without you doing any of the work, it doesn’t have to be difficult, time-consuming, emotionally draining, or lonely work.

(That’s why I publish Youtube vids like this one – I want this work to be so accessible, people can have epiphanies on their lunch break!)

You see, when I was a binge-eating teenager in a pre-internet era, the only support for food obsession was on the national health service. So if your disordered eating wasn’t life-threatening, you didn’t qualify! (That was actually a great incentive to get worse!)

But not any more! You can have all the help you need on your phone or laptop – coaching, community, a roadmap, and step-by-step exercises so you can become a psychologist of your own eating. 

You don’t need to ‘have time’ for self-transformation. Life doesn’t have to stop while you sort your head out. You don’t need to take weeks off for a recovery retreat in Bali, or commit to hours in therapy!

I know because I have fit self-development around what I could manage. OK, I had to let go of my own perfectionism and say ‘Hey, if I do this to 60% good, it’s a great step forward for me’. I have taken courses while nursing my babies. I’ve listened to lectures while driving. And I’ve also done LIVE Facebook Q&As in the Asda car park with a kid asleep in the back.

Usually, I give coaching by Skype and FaceTime across continents from my home office – but at a push, I could be anywhere – I once even answered someone’s coaching call from a bathroom in Abu Dhabi!

Yet every day that you put off starting deep eating psychology work on yourself, you’re wasting your incredible life energy on mind chatter and guilt around food.

Energy that you could be using to do your thing or love your people.

• Every day you resist going beneath the surface of your food struggles, your failure at the table notches up. Your self-belief gets slowly eroded, so change feels beyond reach.
• Every day you choose a quick fix – (I know, I know, your friend had an AMAZING experience on that fast/cleanse/detox/healthplan/milkshake diet) – you detour from your real goals, only to fall off the wagon eventually.
• Every day you don’t take action when your gentle, deep inner wisdom tells you it’s needed, you’re waiting for some more extreme, desperate event to give you motivation (like your health being affected, or your self-disgust reaching a record level).

There has never been a better time to start. Let me give you some examples. 

The last challenge I ran, one participant, Katie, was quarantined with Coronavirus, a full-time job, a toddler, and a plumbing failure. And she still said:

Transcription: [For anyone whose sight makes reading a screenshot hard, this is a social media post which says: “I’m sitting here in bed feeling like this is the start of a very powerful journey, far far beyond losing weight. This is about connecting with me, peeling back some layers, feeling some pain, revisiting and reclaiming some experiences (like my entire adolescence and early 20s..) and challenging myself to dig deeper, to look inside, to really ask myself some questions, and listen to the answers. It is not going to be easy and I really feel now, there is no tight deadline on this. Yes I would love to lose weight, bt if that takes a couple of years, and comes alongside real change in my headspace and my sense of self, I am all for that. I am so glad I found you, Laura Lloyd!! And reading the thoughts insights of this group have been so uplifting and affirming. I hope you are all doing as well as can be”.]

And by the end of the challenge, she wrote:

[Transcription: “Thank you so much for a truly transformative 2 weeks. I’ve just been sitting in the sun, listening to the meditation about getting into the body before lunchtime, feeling grateful for all the wisdom and insights shared over the past two week. Thank you to everyone for your incredible honesty, compassion and generosity, and to Laura Lloyd for guiding us with such skill (and charisma!). Feeling blessed for having found you. Take care all and look forward to posting and to future courses.”]

The best thing is, Katie and her fellow challenge-takers are still in conversation on WhatsApp, and still meet monthly on Zoom – their eating psychology journey and comradeship is still going strong.