16. Becoming a Natural Eater In Your Mind

21. Your Emotional Thermostat

Emotional Intelligence: Your emotions are trying to help you!  In this episode, we continue building the Emotional Intelligence layer of your weight loss foundation by exploring the concept of your emotional thermostat. Just as a thermostat alerts us when something needs attention, our emotions provide valuable information about what may be happening beneath the surface.  Instead of reacting automatically to difficult emotions with food, self-criticism, avoidance, or giving up, we can learn to get curious about what those emotions are trying to tell us. Using Kimmie Jackson's Universal Human Needs, you'll learn how to identify the need behind an emotion, gain greater clarity, and respond in ways that help you move forward on your weight loss path. You'll also learn a simple three-step process—Name It to Tame It, Zoom In to Decode, and Connect, Check and Go—to help you recognize and fulfill your needs while continuing to make progress. The emotion is the signal. The need is the message. And your response is where growth happens.

20. Your Most Misunderstood Weight Loss Tool

Emotional Intelligence: What if one of the most powerful tools for lasting weight loss has been with you all along? In this episode, we're taking a closer look at emotions—what they are, why they exist, and why they may be one of the most misunderstood and underutilized tools in your weight loss journey. You'll learn the true role emotions play in creating movement and change, why ignoring them often keeps us stuck, and how understanding them can help you move forward with greater clarity, compassion, and intention. I'll also introduce Kimmie Jackson's Three Universal Emotional Needs and explain how unmet emotional needs can quietly influence our choices, habits, and relationship with food. By the end of this episode, you'll have a new understanding of your emotions—not as problems to solve or feelings to avoid, but as valuable messengers designed to help guide your life. Your emotions are not working against you.  In fact, they may be one of the greatest tools you have.

19. Emotional Intelligence: What Your Weight Struggle Is Trying To Tell You

Emotional Intelligence: What if your weight struggle isn't the actual problem? What if the cravings, overeating, self-sabotage, starts and stops, and feeling stuck are actually trying to tell you something important? In this episode, we begin the fifth and final layer of the Lifted You Weight Loss Foundation: Emotional Intelligence. Drawing from the work of emotional intelligence pioneers Peter Salovey, John Mayer, and Daniel Goleman, you'll learn how emotions contain valuable information and how unmet emotional needs can quietly influence your thoughts, habits, eating behaviors, and weight loss progress. Together, we'll explore a new way of looking at your weight struggle—as a messenger pointing toward deeper needs that may have gone unseen for far too long. You'll discover why emotional intelligence is essential to lasting weight loss, how unmet emotional needs can create a personal fog that keeps you feeling stuck, and how learning to understand and respond to those needs can help you reconnect with yourself, strengthen your Doer, deepen Body Connection, rebuild your weight loss identity, and become a natural eater in your mind, body, and heart. Oftentimes the struggle isn't the problem... It's the message.

18. Becoming A Natural Eater In Your Heart

Body Connection: In this episode, we complete our three-part Natural Eater series by exploring what it means to become a natural eater in your heart. Lasting weight loss is also about what you believe about yourself. Today, we zoom out and look at the entire purpose behind everything we’ve been building together, because all of it has been leading here. Becoming a natural eater in your heart means you begin living from the identity of someone who truly believes she can maintain her natural weight. It means your choices become identity-based. Your consistency becomes identity-based. And your self-care becomes real, compassionate, and intentional. In this episode, we talk about: Identity-based change,  non-negotiable self-care,  uplifting self-talk and loving responsibility and  emotional needs  Next week, we’ll begin moving into emotional intelligence and emotional movement as we continue learning how to meet our needs intentionally and move through life with more clarity and connection.

17. Becoming A Natural Eater In Your Body

Body Connection:In this episode, we continue building Body Connection by exploring what it means to become a natural eater in your body. Many of us never actually learned how to listen to our bodies around food. We learned to eat for comfort. For celebration. For distraction. For coping. We learned to override fullness, ignore hunger, and disconnect from the signals our bodies were trying to give us all along. And over time, that disconnect became normal. In this episode, I share personal stories about my own relationship with food, the weight identity I developed growing up, and how clarity helped me finally understand what was really happening beneath my eating habits. Then we dive deeply into the hunger scale: a tool for awareness, body connection, and intentional choice. We’ll talk about: physical hunger vs. emotional urges fullness and satisfaction overeating and body disconnection   reconnecting with your body’s natural systems; and how to begin hearing your body clearly again.  Becoming a natural eater in your body is about learning to recognize your body’s signals…and respond to them on purpose. Next week, we’ll move into the heart as we explore what it means to become a natural eater in your heart—where identity, emotion, and self-support come together.