Maxine Croft
Maxine Croft is a life coach, NLP and EFT practitioner. They will be in a constant battle with themselves and their relationship with food.
If you are not happy with how your body looks and have tried any number of diets that have not worked, it can be easy to look at your body as a failure, and ultimately yourself too. I have developed a program that tackles the issues step by step, so that women are able to create a healthy relationship with their body, food and themselves. This means that that they can be free to enjoy their lives,
What are you losing if you make changes to your eating habits?
When you don’t make the changes that will help you achieve what you want, you need to ask why you’re not doing it?
If you were to change how you eat, what would you lose, or what does a part of you think you will lose?
The energy to keep going through a stressful day when you don’t have the sugar?
The continued pleasure of food when you just want to keep eating even though you’re full?
The relaxation of a glass of wine at the end of a tough day?
The added enjoyment of eating your favourite snacks when watching tv etc.
There is an upside to self-sabotaging behaviours, otherwise you wouldn’t do them.
Find out why you are turning to food and see what other options you have.
How can you manage your stress so that you don’t need sugar so much? Get good sleep, movement, connection, and eat healthy fats and proteins to stay off the sugar rollercoaster.
Make sure you are diarising fun and pleasure into your life.
Find other options to unwind at the end of the day etc.
Book the FREE consultation to find out how to change your eating habits and not feel like you are losing something in the process!
Giving yourself a hard time rarely leads to the outcomes that you’re looking for, regardless of what the goal is.
If changing your eating habits is something that you’re constantly trying to do, I can assure you that berating yourself with negative self-talk is not going to help, and more likely is going to drive you towards more food.
When you can start to recognise your value and how great you are, regardless of your weight, eating habits, or body shape, then you won’t be able to stop yourself from making the choices that are good for your body and your mind!
To receive the FREE workshop to find out how to do this, SIGN UP using the Link in Bio!
Dieting doesn’t work if you haven’t looked at what’s going on with you and food.
If you need to eat to feel better when you feel bad, then dieting is not going to help change your eating habits in the long run.
You may be able to get some short term weight loss, but the weight will always come back if food is your emotional soother.
If you want to have eating habits that make you feel good, then you need to change two things.
1. How often you experience uncomfortable emotions that make you want to eat.
2. The habit of wanting to eat when those uncomfortable emotions arise.
Sign up to receive the FREE workshop ‘What’s your Weight Story’, where I talk about how you can do that!
Link in Bio!
If you take the focus off weight and concentrate on reducing your stress, then you won’t need to emotionally eat and weight will come off on its own!
Sign up to FREE workshop!
Link in Bio!
Often food choices are symptomatc.
They are the external expression of how you feel about yourself and your life.
Overeating and food cravings can be how feelings such as frustration, boredom, anger and sadness show up in your eating behaviours.
There is often a root cause, or even several root causes why you might want to keep eating when you are no longer hungry, or have intense cravings that you feel you have no power to control.
They are unique to each of us but can include:
Feeling that you are stuck in your life and seeing no way to change it.
Feeling like food is one of the few pleasures you have left, so why would you want to let it go.
Believing that you are not worthy or ‘good enough’, so there is no point in reaching for anything different in your future.
When you start to address these underlying issues, the need to use food to make life more bearable/pleasurable dissipates.
The pleasure that you take from the purpose you have in your life, and excitement for the future, replaces the need for the in the moment pleasure of food.
Food is one of life’s greatest pleasures, but when it’s providing most of the pleasure, its role has got too big.
BOOK the FREE online consultation to start creating the eating behaviours you would like to have.
What’s your weight story?
This often holds the clues as to when and why you have struggled to lose and maintain weight loss.
It’s not something people normally consider, but instead gloss over their weight history and put their perceived failings down to a lack of control and self-discipline.
If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you need to address all the blocks that are standing in your way. That is why I have put together a 30 minute whistle stop tour of those challenges and how to get around them.
Sign up to receive the FREE workshop using the link in bio, and find out how you can create the food habits you want to have and lose weight for good.
Imagine if your body was your friend.
You wouldn’t necessarily be available to all their needs all the time, but you would be there for them as much as possible.
When you’re not happy in your body, it’s so easy to see it as an enemy.
Something that doesn’t look or behave in the way you want it to.
But when you connect to your body as a friend, you are naturally so much more motivated to give it the care it needs.
To give it the sleep, rest, stimulation and nutrition that allows it to thrive!
One of the biggest obstacles to having a healthy relationship with food, is ‘all or nothing’ thinking.
Rooted in the idea of eating perfectly, this will take you away from having a healthy relationship with food every time.
This is mainly perpetuated by living on a constant unsuccessful diet. Everyday is an attempt to calorie restrict and once a rule has been broken, the wheels come off, and a ‘good’ day turns into a ‘bad’ day.
There can be a sense of urgency associated with the eating that happens once you have broken the food rules you were trying to stick to.
A need to eat the forbidden foods as quickly as possible. They are normally restricted and avoided, but now that you have started to eat them, you must use this opportunity to eat and enjoy them as much as possible, because by tomorrow or even in a few minutes time, they will be forbidden again. Until the urge to eat them again overpowers the urge to resist them.
The subconscious fight against restriction and deprivation is often what overwhelms your intentions to have a ‘good’ food day.
Our brains are not designed for food restriction, and they will fight us when we try and install it into our lives through sheer force of will.
When you can learn to relax around food there is no longer a need to fight. ‘All or nothing’ thinking is replaced by an ability to make conscious, calm decisions in the moment about whether you want to eat something or not.
Perfectionism won’t give you the results you want, being able to relax around food will.
Control - What does it mean to you?
Most women I speak to say they want more ‘control’ over their eating behaviours. But it’s this desire for control that can cause so many of the battles with food.
Control is something we need to be really specific about. Do you want to control your desire to overeat and win the battle?
Or do you want to be able to make the choices that serve you in a relaxed way. And what are the choices that serve you?
Do you even know?
Most women have become so indoctrinated by the idea of ‘good’ food versus ‘bad’ food, ‘a good food day’ versus ‘a bad food day’, they are not even clear how they want their eating habits to look.
It’s important to work out what you want when it comes to your eating habits, rather than just falling into the trap of feeling bad for eating something ‘bad’.
What would control look like to you?
You can start by writing down exactly how you want your relationship with food to look - be specific.
* I eat healthy, nourishing food most of the time.
* Sometimes I eat for pure pleasure and that’s ok
* I feel relaxed about saying no to foods that I know don’t serve me if I eat them too much.
* I have the resources to process my emotions and don’t need food to feel better, numb out or distract myself from how I feel.
Why don’t you have a go writing out what you want your food choices to look like.
BOOK the FREE consultation using the link in bio to start taking the steps to creating these habits!
This is what it ALL comes down to!
Feeling stuck is the worst feeling.
When all your will is pushing to do things differently but nothing changes.
It’s so frustrating, but it also doesn’t make sense. How can you want to do things differently so much, and yet not be able to change?
It’s because there is a part of you that doesn’t want to change. A part of you that sees the benefit of staying the same as outweighing the benefits of change.
You may wonder how that could possibly be true if all you want is to change your eating habits and lose weight.
How could any part of you not want that outcome?
It’s because the perceived benefits of emotional eating, overeating, and avoiding feelings, are just some of the many reasons that a part of you may resist changing your eating behaviours.
Until you address these often subconscious barriers to weight loss, trying to will yourself to change, is like having your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time.
To find out how you can take your foot off the brake, lose weight and break free from food, BOOK the FREE online consultation.
Link in Bio!
Often the solutions to our problems are out there, we just need to take time to work out how to solve them, instead of pushing forward with the same approaches and actions that don’t work.
As another round of the Online Group Program comes to an end, I am reflecting on the amazing women who have chosen to be a part of the group.
Each with their own unique challenges when it comes to wanting to change their eating habits, and yet there has been a sense of collaboration and shared experience as we have worked through the various topics we cover in the program.
I used to only work with women one to one on their relationship with food, and then I realised the power of group work.
To release the guilt or shame that can build up over many years of struggle with food, being in a group gets the fastest results. It provides the understanding that whilst you might feel alone in your struggle, you’re not.
Above I have listed some of the topics that we cover in the group program. If any of this rings true for you, I would be honoured to have you join us in the next round.
To BOOK your FREE consultation and find out more about the program follow the Link in Bio!
When you start using EFT/Tapping, you become aware of where your challenges lie with food, can release the judgement that goes with them, and find your behaviours start to change too.
Often we’re so caught up with feeling bad about ourselves and our eating habits, we don’t get clear about where the problems are.
It’s not that you’re weak willed and lack discipline. You have just learned to use food to make you feel better.
It’s not that you’re greedy and can’t say no to food. You’re using food to fill an emptiness inside.
It’s not that you’re trying to sabotage yourself, it’s just you haven’t learnt another way to process uncomfortable feelings.
The moment you bring EFT into your life, you will start to feel different.
BOOK the FREE consultation.
Link in bio.
It’s entirely possible that you believe that if, and when, you lose weight you will finally be able to accept yourself and be ‘ok’.
However, this brushes over the fact that it’s because you don’t feel ok about yourself, that you may be turning to food in the first place.
What I find with many of the women I work with, is that when they start to create an acceptance of themselves, and they start to recognise their innate worthiness, their behaviours around food change.
Ironically, this self-acceptance with who they are now, means that they no longer need to overeat or soothe the uncomfortable emotions that come with never feeling like they are enough.
If you would like to take the first step towards this realisation, please BOOK the FREE consultation. Link in Bio!
When it comes to your weight and eating behaviours, have you ever taken the time to think about what’s going on with you and food?
This is not something that we normally think about.
I know that when I was struggling with my weight, I wasn’t remotely interested in my relationship with food. I just wanted the weight off and I didn’t really care how it happened.
In my head, I could deal with things like my relationship with food when I’d lost weight, but I didn’t have time to think about that until that had happened.
However, this is one of those situations where until you do the groundwork first, you’re going to struggle to achieve the outcome. In this case, working on your relationship with food can be the key to unlocking your ability to losing weight and keeping it off.
I am talking about those times when:
* You realise you’re hungry and before you know it you’ve emptied the fridge.
* You experience uncomfortable emotions and feel the urge to turn to your old friend food to feel better.
* Or you’ve managed to lose weight and then for reasons you still can’t explain, you find yourself slipping back into your old eating habits.
But how do you create a healthy relationship with food that allows you to make the food choices that you want to make again and again?
It’s not by going on a diet or introducing lots of food rules that you hope you’re going to be able to stick to. It’s by looking at the role of food in your life and what it gives you on an emotional level.
I offer an online 8 week group program that addresses your relationship with food, looking at aspects such as overeating, food cravings and emotional eating.
Step by step you will see how these issues lose their power over you, allowing you to:
* Find the freedom that comes when you don’t sabotage yourself anymore.
* Feel confident about losing weight because it feels natural to eat in a way that supports your weight loss.
* Realise that when you feel differently about food, you behave differently around food.
Link in Bio to BOOK the FREE consultation!
The next Online Group Program is due to start on 17th July at 6.30pm.
Over the course of eight weeks we look at the topics below and more.
* Stress eating.
* Overeating.
* Emotional eating for feelings such as sadness, deprivation, restriction, loneliness and many more.
* Looking at where emotional eating started as a habit and how to break it.
* All or nothing mindset when it comes to food.
* Eating for reward such as after a bad (or good!) day.
* Cravings.
* Resistance to exercise.
* Subconscious blocks to change and weight loss.
If you would like to know more BOOK the FREE consultation.
Link in bio.
I look forward to getting to know you better!
The biggest challenges we face when it comes to any goal in life, are often not the ones we know about, but the ones we don’t know about.
We want the relationship but are scared to love, we want success but fear the demands it will put on us, and we want to change our eating habits and lose weight, but worry about the kind of pressure that might bring? Pressure to eat in a certain way, maintain the loss etc.
It may seem counter intuitive, but can you think of any reasons why you don’t 100% want to change your eating habits?
I have put below a list of possible reasons you may resist changing your eating habits and losing weight:
* I will have to live with the pressure of keeping weight off, and be forever restricted in the foods I can enjoy.
* I will have to endure people commenting on the change in my body.
* I will get unwanted attention from men.
* My friends and family will be jealous.
* Having extra weight makes me feel protected and safe.
* I don’t want to have to let go of emotional eating, I’m not sure how I will soothe myself.
* People should accept me as I am, and I shouldn’t need to change to be loved.
* People will expect more from me if I lose weight.
* I will expect more from me if I lose weight.
If any of these beliefs resonate, then you have now identified a reason that you may be standing in your own way in making the changes that you want to make.
If there is a block to your weight loss, what can you do to give yourself the safety and reassurance to know that it’s safe to change? Can you think in practical terms what you need to know and do, to feel safe.
Once you feel safe to achieve your goals, you are free to start achieving them, and you can!
If you would like help to do this, and overcome any blocks standing in your way, BOOK the FREE consultation using the link in bio!
Having a healthy relationship with food allows you to enjoy life, achieve weight loss goals, and feel that you are giving yourself the love and respect that you are worthy of.
It’s not about eating ‘perfectly’ (whatever that looks like!)
It’s about eating all foods, but in ways that serve you.
To find out how to do that, BOOK the FREE 30 minute consultation.
Link in Bio!
If you didn’t have conflicting voices in your head, losing weight and keeping it off would be easy.
You would just make the choices that give you the results you want.
So why don’t you?
Because there are parts of us that don’t want to give up the foods we love, don’t want to say no, or feel deprived, or have to sit with the uncomfortable feelings we are trying to escape from in food.
We need to acknowledge these voices, and let them be heard so that they can understand:
✅ That we don’t need to live without the food we love to lose weight.
✅ That we can make food choices that serve us and still have pleasure from eating.
✅ That we are not going to live in a state of deprivation if we make changes to our eating habits.
All of these voices need acknowledgement and reassurance that making changes to your eating habits is not going to lead to make life less pleasurable.
When you are able to naturally make decisions that serve you around food, and address how you are using food for emotional comfort, you won’t have these high pressure, uncomfortable conversations going on in your head.
You will be able to relax and enjoy food!
Book the FREE consultation to find out more.
Link in Bio!
We’re so used to judging ourselves about our lack of discipline/control when it comes to our eating behaviours, we ignore the fact that it can be emotions that are driving our behaviour.
We can believe that it speaks to who we are as a human being that we’re unable to eat in the ways that we want to eat. We think are not trying hard enough which is why we fail to do what we say we want to do.
However, it’s generally negative emotions that fuel people into eating in ways that they regret later.
If we eat the cake, biscuits or do something impulsive that will make us feel better for just for that moment and escape the uncomfortable emotions, then we want to have it.
That doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, it just means that you need to address what is driving you to eat foods that you would rather you didn’t.
Or maybe you do want to eat those foods, but not secretly when no one is watching, or feel filled with guilt and shame when you do, or that you are likely going to get out of control when you start.
We don’t spend much time thinking what we want when it comes to our relationship with food. We just know we don’t like how we eat. But I’m guessing what you want is:
✅ To enjoy all foods but feel free to make a choice, and not compelled to give into cravings every time.
✅ That you can say no to certain foods and feel neutral rather than being unable to stop thinking about wanting to eat them.
✅ That you can just relax when it comes to food because you know you consistently make the food choices that serve you!
Book the FREE consultation to find out how to make this possible for you. Link in bio!
When you are presented with highly calorific, delicious food, this can send minds and bodies into a spiral of desire.
If you struggle with your weight, this can end up making you think and feel all kinds of negative things about yourself.
They are not true! We have evolved to desire this kind of food, it’s just that it has never been as available to us as it is today.
Release the guilt, your response is normal.
If you want to find a way to help yourself navigate these desires then book the FREE consultation.
Link in Bio.
How would your life change if you stopped eating when you’re not hungry?
This is one of the biggest reasons that women can’t lose weight and keep it off. Because they’re eating when they don’t need to be. When their bodies have got enough fuel to keep them going, but they want to eat.
Why?
Let go of the judgement, guilt or shame. This is just a habit and nothing more. It’s about trying to change how you feel.
The problem is this habit can keep you from losing the weight you want to lose and being able to keep that weight off.
If you want to succeed, this habit is not going to change all by itself. You need to take a bit of time to see what’s going on and work on it. That is what we do in the Online Group Program.
Imagine the freedom that comes when you don’t emotionally eat anymore!
Think how much better you would feel if you were able to stop this habit and lose weight for good.
BOOK the FREE consultation to find out more!
Link in bio.
The next online group program is starting on Wednesday 22nd May at 6.30pm.
If you would like to stop emotionally eating then BOOK the FREE 30 minute consultation to find out more.
✅ The online group program runs for eight weeks and involves a one hour group session every week.
✅ The sessions are held on Zoom with different topics each week.
✅ Group sizes are small.
✅ The first week is an introduction to EFT and how to use it, and after that we address the various aspects of emotional eating that prevent long term weight loss. This includes food cravings, eating past the point of hunger, eating to avoid feelings of sadness, frustration and loneliness etc., and many others.
✅ You receive a weekly email on topics covered.
✅ We also take the time to look at any individual challenges that people are facing, as these are often relatable to others in the group.
BOOK the FREE consultation to find out more!
Link in Bio!
In the background of the work that I do with women to help them improve their relationship with food, I also help women with all kinds of other challenges that they face in their lives.
Lack of confidence and not feeling enough, seems to be at the core of so many of the challenges that women face, including weight loss, which has led me to put a new spin on the work I do.
I have just launched a new website, (link in Bio) to help women to address the areas of their life where they don’t feel confident.
I’m still offering one to one sessions, as well as the Online Group Program to help women to create a healthy relationship with food, but in addition supporting women to find the Quietly Confident Woman within.
Please check out the site and I would be so grateful if you could DM me with any feedback!