Motivation

I really need lots of help.
I'm an emotional eater due to stresses in my life at the moment. I need to get healthily for my children and myself.

How do I motivate myself to eat well and exercise. I find I dwell on my issues too much and can't move off the sofa.

Any advice would be good

This may sound rude, but it is true in my opinion. You have motivation. You state that you want to get healthy for your children and yourself. That is very good motivation. USE IT!

Stress is something everyone has to some degree. Use that as well. Turn it around. When you feel stressed, get up and move. Exercise instead of sitting on the sofa.

Eat healthy for your children AND for yourself! Diet soda instead of sugared soda. Yes, I know it has an aftertaste. You get use to it. Apriva is good in iced tea. I drink that a lot. Walmart sells an instant tea that is artificially sweetened. I drink that sometimes as well. Diet 7-up isn't as bad as the colas to some.

I was diabetic. Now I am "glucose intolerant". I take no meds for this. I try to eat a high protein diet. I make that a goal. If I am under my calorie, carb and sugar limit and over my protein limit I am overjoyed!

I am also a cancer survivor. Believe me when I tell you that chemo is as close to death as you can get and not be there. I felt sick and tired and just wanted to sit on the sofa. That's what I did because I had no energy to do anything else. Afterward, I was taking meds for the diabetes and gained weight. This made me feel sick and tired as well. My doctor changed my diabetes med and that made things worse. I didn't feel like eating. So I didn't. I lost weight but still felt sick and tired. Finally I got sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. I told my doctor that something had to give. My blood tests were not that bad for my sugar so the doctor took me off the diabetes med. I started to feel better and better. That's when I decide that I WOULD NOT go back to being diabetic and feeling sick and tired. That's some of my motivation. Find yours and hold onto it!

I really need lots of help.
I'm an emotional eater due to stresses in my life at the moment. I need to get healthily for my children and myself.

How do I motivate myself to eat well and exercise. I find I dwell on my issues too much and can't move off the sofa.

Any advice would be good

The way I look at it, your "motivation" is what got you here in the first place. It's needing to be healthier for your kids. Unfortunately, motivation isn't going to get the job done. It's a fickle thing that comes and goes. Some days, you feel great, you make all the right choices regarding your eating, you feel fit and energetic and ready to take on the world. Other days, you don't. You feel like you'll never get fir/lose the weight/whatever, you still want to get healthy, but it feels unattainable, you don't want to count calories or hear another word about weight loss, you just want to eat what you want to eat, as much as you want. Ok, maybe that's just me.

The thing is though, you really can't rely on this elusive motivation to keep you going. It's a feeling, one that comes and goes. Nice when it's there, but you really can't rely on it. What you need is commitment. You need to make that decision that this is important enough in your life to commit to it. You need to decide that you're going to do this, however long it takes, and however many times you slip up. You're going to keep on going.

Look at other areas in your life. You have children, so I'm guessing you do things all the time for them that you don't necessarily feel like doing at the time. You get up early with them (or through the night), you feed them, you dress them, help them with homework (depending on ages of course). If you're in a relationship - is that always something that feels easy, or do you sometimes have to put effort in to make it work? Do you work? (Or have you in the past?) Millions of people get up every day and go to jobs they hate not because they feel like it, but because having a job and being able to pay bills is important to them. So decide: is losing weight and getting healthy important enough to commit to it every day?

Once you commit, then you need to work on creating habits that you can stick to. Losing weight isn't easy, and you do have to make some sacrifices, but at the same time, it doesn't have to be torture. My biggest advice to anyone trying to lose weight is to not make extreme changes that you're only likely to stick with for a few weeks or months. What changes can you make that you can stick with forever? You don't have to cut out all the foods you love, or do hours of exercise that you find boring. Start with logging your foods and meeting your calorie goal. If you want to make changes to your diet (whether it's eating more fibre, or more protein, or cutting down on sugar, or reducing processed foods, or whatever) make changes slowly, and only make the changes that are important to you. Don't rush to cut down carbs just because someone else says you need to for weight loss. Decide what (if any) changes you want to make, and make them gradually.

Same with exercise. I saw on another post you said you "force" yourself to do exercise because you know you "should". How long is that going to last, realistically? Find things that you enjoy doing. Whether it's walking, or swimming, or dancing, or exercise DVDs, find something that you like, or at least don't hate. You don't have to exercise twice a day (per your other post). In fact, to lose weight, you don't have to exercise at all. Your intake is more important. Exercise has a ton of benefits though (including helping to regulate emotions). So try to make it fun, or find something that you can learn a new skill with at the same time, and can see your progression. Find other reasons to exercise beyond just burning calories. If you're inclined to sit on the sofa dwelling on your problems, then the important thing is going to be just getting off the sofa. Make a promise to yourself to get up off the sofa, get out of the house, or put on your workout clothes, something to signify activity. Even if you don't go and exercise intensely for an hour, it gets you into the mindset of being active, and not sit stewing in your problems.

To counteract emotional eating, you really just need to find other ways of making yourself feel better. Its not easy, and will take time, but it can be done. Logging on MFP has helped me a lot because I might feel tempted to overeat, but if I log it in my diary first, I see the effect it will have, and that makes me think twice. I also try to remind myself that whatever I'm feeling, whatever bad situation is making me feel bad, eating is not actually going to solve the situation. Overeating makes me feel better for a very, very short period of time, before I end up feeling worse because of regret, and whatever made me feel bad in the first place is still the same. then, finding other ways to soothe those feeling has been important. Whether it's having a bath, or talking to a friend, or going for a walk. Food it the easiest thing to reach for, but you can start making the effort to do different things, until they become more habitual. If the emotional eating is too difficult to conquer on your own, it's definitely worth considering professional help if that's an option for you. I have to add that I don't consider myself to not be an emotional eater any more, it's just that I keep it under control. I think it's normal to have some emotional connection to food, no matter how often we tell ourselves "food is fuel". We have natural chemical responses to tasting, and smelling food, and it's ingrained into most cultures as a way of celebrating etc, so don't feel less of a person for being an emotional eater. It's problematic, but it doesn't make you a bad person, and it is definitely something you can learn to tame.

And you know, just don't give up. It can be really hard, especially if you're an emotional eater, but don't let one bad day escalate into a bad week or a month or two before you get back on the mythical wagon. Just keep going, keep making the better choices. Gradually, they'll become habits.