Eating impulses are normal and frequent experiences for everyone. As we progress through our day, we all experience sometimes easily understandable and other times more mysteriously unaccountable urges to get something to eat. Eating impulses can be mild and easily managed. They can also be fierce and feel completely unmanageable. Eating impulses can at times be rather vague. At other times they can be completely specific. Some impulses can burst out in a suddenly compelling urgency. Some begin as a faint want and build over time into a commanding urge that gnaws without relief.

For some people, these eating impulses are of relatively little concern. However their impulses play out, these people are sufficiently healthy and weight stable without deliberate effort to control their eating. But for the rest of us, unregulated eating is potentially lethal. For us, eating as our impulses would have us eat, means being overweight and/or unhealthy (diabetes, heart disease , etc). We must regulate our eating.

EATING REGULATION REQUIRES TWO THINGS

1. It requires some sort of plan of regulated eating - a healthy (for you) food plan.

2. It requires management of impulses to eat in disregard of the healthy food plan.

MOST PROGRAMS trying to help people with weight or eating management focus primarily on the first part of this equation. They give people a diet and they give support for staying with the diet. The emphasis is on the diet - be it Hilton Head, South Beach, Adkins, high carbohydrate, low carbohydrate, Weight Watchers or whatever - and the suggestion is that if you are sufficiently motivated, you will not be plauged by many eating impulses and you will attain all the benefits of adhering to the plan.

Our observation is that this approach may work for awhile, but most people find that when their weight is down and health indicators improve, the motivation to stay with the food plan often fades and eating more impulsively returns - and so does the weight.

OUR PROGRAM focuses on the second part of the equation. Our fundamental premise is that for people needing to sustain enduring regulation of their eating in some specific fashion, impulse management is the crucial factor. Urges to eat impulsively are in effect a competing motivation, at times overriding an otherwise fierce and steady dedication to controlled eating.

Learning to understand and manage eating impulses sits at the very foundation of successful eating management. This is the entire focus of this website. We do not prescribe what you should eat. We do not think finding the "right" eating plan is the key to long-term eating regulation. Our focus is guiding you through the work of installing and maintaining a systematic approach to impulse management.