As a young girl and well into my adult life, I had a bad relationship with food. I used eating for comfort and control, so I know how many of you feel.

But I found a way to change that relationship, and it’s my desire to share what I learned with you…to shift your view on how you relate to yourself, food, diets, and exercise. My goal is to guide you through a process of healing that create new beliefs so that you too can be set free from limiting thoughts that keep you from living the FITlife.

It begins in childhood for many of us. Close your eyes and picture your earliest memories in relation to food. Mine brings me back to sitting with my family at the dinner table and being told “Clean your plate” or “Eat all your dinner or no dessert for you” or the ever-popular “Don’t waste food—there are starving children in Africa.” That last one always made me ask myself, Who were these children in Africa? Did my family personally know them? And why didn’t we just send them our leftovers?

Of course, as an adult, I know world hunger is a very real problem. However, as a child, I couldn’t understand how eating everything on my plate would help a starving child halfway around the world. And I remember wondering why I had to eat even if I really wasn’t hungry.

Many of us grew up this way, being told to eat instead of learning to listen to our body’s natural response to hunger. We often associated food with responsibility or reward. How often were you threatened with punishment for not eating, yet offered a cookie if you cleaned your plate? Don’t get me wrong—our parents had the best of intentions. But, unfortunately, they were unaware how they were creating a pattern of behavior that for some of us would become a lifelong limiting belief.