This is Laura Lloyd, and she’s an expert on why we overdo things. Especially after work!
This is Laura Lloyd, who knows what it’s like to lose and regain 15lb over and over again through after work overeating and by emotionally eating to handle feelings about work. And even better, she has studied how to lose that emotional weight for good.
She’s a former binge eater, who now binges seldom, and sees binge recovery as a gentle journey of improving and understanding your relationship with binge thinking and your thoughts and reactions in crunch moments.
She’s a self-confessed Bad Habit Magnet and emotional avoidant. As someone who has regularly stood in the pantry looking for an answer, watched Mad Men until daylight broke through the curtains, she sees habits as both her greatest struggle and greatest teacher.
She has had to break caffeine habits, charity shop shopping habits, and over two years ago she quit drinking too.
After work overeating is just a symptom of how we live. So if someone asked you, “what is your life an example of?”, what would you tell them honestly?
She’s an example of how your creativity and diligence and intelligence can work together to help you solve your pain points and get on to do your real work in the world.
She overcame binge eating in her 20s, overwork in her 30s, and emotional eating in her 40s. She’s a work in progress by her own admission, on a mission to evolve herself and elevate you.
How about you? What’s your life an example of right now – a good example, and a bad example? What are you struggling to stop overdoing?
Grab a journal and write about yourself in the third person. Take that objective look at yourself.
Be compassionate. Look at yourself as if you were your friend who would never give up on you.
Hint: Your perceived flaws are also your superpowers.
Follow my socials👆🏽and sign up for my newsletter, because I’ll be sharing a completely new understanding of WHY you keep doing your unwanted after work habits. And no, it’s not because you’re weak-willed!
Most of all, I’ll be curious to hear from you about the emotions that you bring home from work with you, girls! ⛈🔥😭
After work overeating – that’s an interesting speciality! How did I end up with this awesome job?
Laura certified as an eating psychology coach 7 years ago, when she had her second daughter in Berlin (now she has 3). At first, she started helping mums lose their weight and stop overeating without dieting by giving coaching sessions while walking with a buggy.
Now, she studies and teaches the same mind-management tools she used to solve her own binge eating and overeating in her twenties, and has coached scores of women in lifelong weight management.
Laura is the only coach on the planet who, to my knowledge, uses techniques drawn from cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy* for the unique purpose of solving working women’s after-work overeating.
(*In case you’re wondering, to put it simply, that’s CBT plus rehearsing desired behaviours in your imagination).
What you learn about your after work overeating will apply to your whole life!
This’ll be a great chance to see how those mind-management tools apply to all the ways we buffer our emotions, and to share ideas of how to make our lives happier, better, more fun, and less numbed.
When I look at the timeline of my body, eating and life events, this is what I discover: That I have been reacting to my sweet striving, hardworking, desperate-for-outside-approval soul my whole life. By eating.
The part of me that’s been trying to achieve from a place of striving, of self-bullying, of creating obligation and duty and deadlines and urgency, has been there for years. Yonkeys.
As a kid, I wanted to be the top of the class. To solve for being unpopular and a bit of a lonely weirdo (I love a misfit, one of my coaches has a sign on her wall that says ‘weird is a side-effect of awesome’ – I love that). I talk about that in this video.
Then, my first career was theatre.
Theatre is crazy for self-sacrifice. You create massive expectations and commit publicly to delivering this amazing experience by putting a date on a calendar and then going hell for leather to pull the show together for that time.
It’s exhilarating, pressured, tiring, and wonderful – you know somehow you’ll pull it out your ass at the last moment and it’ll be raw, real, live, and phenomenal.
And then you’ll crash.
At that time I ate when the performance pressure was over. I ate (and drank copious quantities of diet coke) to prop myself up through it. I ate when I was burnt out.
My second big career was journalism.
I used to work on the editorial team of theguardian.com from late afternoon to the early hours.
It was adrenalised, competitive, hierarchical, and it felt important – and I’d knock back a readymixed G&T every night in the taxi home, and then eat cheese and biscuits half the night watching Mad Men to ‘come down’ and have some ‘me’ time.
These are just a couple of examples of work-related eating. I have done rather a lot of jobs (I have worked in a bakery, on a production line in a glass factory, I have taught English as a foreign language, I have been a building site labourer for a roofing job, I have stayed at home with tiny babies and written a draft of a novel…) and rather a lot of eating.
And I’ve realised, if I lost the boredom eating, the procrasti-snacking, the comedown eating, the self-doubt eating, the eating to relax etc etc etc etc – I’d be slimmer, and happier, and more at ease with work and with life.
Featured on
Recent Comments