A neuroscience approach . . .

You can stop overeating, but it is not by dieting. It’s by understanding the root cause of overeating: the specific wires in the brain that trigger it.

Instead of forcing yourself to eat less, our approach is to identify the wires that are triggering that desire to overeat. You will learn simple emotional mindfulness tools to change that wiring.

Weight loss becomes easier. Healthy eating feels comfortable to you. You notice when you are hungry. Stress eating, compulsive overeating and mindless eating all gradually fall away.

. . . to losing weight.

We will never suggest you that you write down your food intake, stick to a food plan or stop eating foods you love.

Instead, we will support you in learning tools that change the brain’s desire to overeat, so you feel present, aware, satisfied and in joy without overeating.

You will establish a new relationship with food. You will eat healthy without rigid diets, and find yourself having more peace, power and joy from within.

Take your power back

Currently, 71% of people are overweight. Most of us are frustrated by how hard it is to stop overeating and lose weight and many blame themselves for overeating!

Based on neuroscience, the root cause of overeating is in the brain’s strong chemical drives to overeat.

Those drives are controlled by our wiring, and by using simple emotional mindfulness techniques, we can change those strong chemical drives to overeat.

We call this program The Joy Method, because it not only changes our relationship with food, but increases our capacity to experience joy in daily life.

The program is highly effective and evidence-based. It applies Emotional Brain Training (EBT), the only non-surgical weight loss method ever to show lasting weight loss in a way that produces rapid results and is fun to use.

Change your relationship with food

Get your power back by taking the 30-Day Joy Challenge. It’s a 30-day program in which you learn one small but important skill each day for 30 days.

You train your brain to connect and create joy, then find the four brain wires that send you strong messages to overeat and change those messages.

As you complete the 30-Day Joy Challenge, you will experience so much joy that you will probably want to continue with your support and stop focusing on problems as your problem with eating will have faded. Continue with our advanced courses to raise your brain’s emotional set point, the most powerful thing that anyone can do.

The 30-Day Joy Intensive

We want everyone who has ever suffered from the frustration of overeating and overweight to learn these emotional mindfulness tools. We offer four options for you to learn them.

Initially, many people choose our online self-study membership to try out the tools. Then when they are ready, they upgrade to one of the three other memberships.

Our weekly groups are a good option for many people, as they are very convenient. However, most people choose 30-Day Joy Intensive because they want to see amazing results quickly, and access the low-cost ongoing support that is included in this package.

Whatever membership you choose, we welcome you to join others who are choosing a neuroscience approach to weight loss!

More people want natural weight loss

Our emotional brain controls our eating and our weight. To lose weight, we need to coax the memories in the emotional brain so that we naturally stop overeating and naturally release extra weight.

The emotional brain includes a mammalian brain that has survival memories that tell us to seek safety and loving connection with sugary, refined foods and a lower brain, a reptilian brain, that activates fight-or-flight drives to overeat when we are stressed.

If we try to lose weight without changing those memories in our emotional brain, it can work in the short term, but as soon as our life becomes stressful again, the emotional brain returns to triggering overeating, and we regain the weight we had lost – and more!

A fresh, new approach to stopping overeating and losing weight is to learn how to change those memories in our emotional brain.

By changing our emotional brain, the mammalian brain learns to connect to life's deeper joys rather than relying on sugary, processed foods to feel good. The reptilian brain calms down and is less apt to trigger stress eating, sugar addiction, and mindless eating.

As our brain changes, healthy eating and weight loss naturally follow. We adapt to a new way of approaching food that is flexible yet healthy and a body size that is comfortable for us, so that weight and food stop being issues in our lives – and we discover that we can have more joy than we ever thought possible.

Try EBT for 30 days

The Seven Joys

Joy is the warm glow inside that is not a momentary flash of pleasure but rather a feeling of lasting contentment based on experiencing the deeper meanings of life. There are seven of these deeper rewards, and as you work with your emotional brain to stop overeating and release extra weight, you will experience more them.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary is peace and power from within. As the emotional brain connects more deeply to the thinking brain, we are in a state of neural integration, where every cell of our body, our entire physiology, is at its best. Sanctuary is the first joy of life.

Authenticity

Authenticity is feeling whole and being genuine. As the brain connects more deeply, we feel free to be ourselves. The tendency to “split” and see ourselves and others – as well as eating and weight – as all good or all bad fades. Judgments stop and we warmly accept ourselves, others and life. Authenticity is the second joy of life.

Vibrancy

Vibrancy is being healthy with a zest for life. The connected brain makes us sensitive to our inner messages, so we give ourselves what we need and start discovering new interests and activities to delight our senses and improve our health. Vibrancy is the third joy of life.

Integrity

Integrity is a deep sense that we do the right thing. When we move forward and make decisions not just based on immediate benefits, but the greater good, we feel an abiding joy. The connected brain sends us messages that guide us in finding those right answers and following through with them with more ease. Integrity is the fourth joy of life.

Intimacy

Intimacy is giving and receiving love. When the brain is connected, the stress-fueled patterns of merging, judging, rescuing, people-pleasing and distancing fade. We can give love and receive it with less fear of rejection or surrender. Intimacy is the fifth joy of life.

Spirituality

Spirituality is how you define it, but it naturally deepens when the brain is connected. We are more aware of the grace, beauty, and mystery of life. Daily life nourishes our spirit, soothing and comforting us from within. Spirituality is the sixth joy of life.

Freedom

Freedom is the joy of having a brain that is so connected that we not only stop overeating and release extra weight but no other excesses take their places. We have the freedom to move forward with our purpose in life and make our dreams come true. Freedom is the seventh joy of life.

A Highly Effective Method

The cause of overeating and weight gain is the emotional brain in stress. The purpose of Emotional Brain Training is to give us simple tools to make peace with our emotional brain and enhance our resiliency. The whole range of stress-related problems can fade when we change our emotional brain.

Studies of people who have used EBT suggest that the strategy of addressing the cause of a whole range of problems can promote an improved quality of life and better health. Also, method research supports the idea that by changing our brain, we are likely to see improvements in our lives sustained after the treatment ends.

Emotional Brain Training (EBT)

You will be learning how to relax your emotional brain, the center of eating, weight, relationships, reward and the deeper meanings of life.

The skills you will learn, the brain concept you will use, and the approach you will take to eating and weight will all be based on Emotional Brain Training (EBT). You might wonder, “Where did this come from?” or “Why have I not heard about this before?”

EBT comes out of the scientific literature and has been developed slowly over many years. In fact, EBT started more than 30 years ago, when Dr. Laurel Mellin, the method's founder, sought to discover the cause of the drive to overeat in children. She is a health psychologist and faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco and an international authority on stress, obesity, and neuroplasticity.

Dr. Mellin traced research on drives to overeat back to 1940. A specific study by Baylor College of Medicine’s Hilde Bruch, MD, sparked her excitement about a potential solution. Dr. Bruch's research showed that it was the child's early emotional connections that could be the cause of that drive to overeat.

Dr. Mellin thought, "Why not develop skills of emotional connection? Perhaps that could change the drive to overeat." She developed tools that mirrored exceptional emotional connection, and when children who used them spontaneously improved their moods and drives, Dr. Mellin was intrigued.

She devoted her research to refining these techniques and extended their use to adults as well as to all stress-related problems. Her collaborators, including EBT scientific director, Igor Mitrovic, MD, Lindsey Fish, MD, and Lynda Frassetto, MD contributed to the method and it became fully neuroscience-based EBT in 2007. The EBT Team made advances in technology and simplified the method so that by 2017, the rapid-results 30-Day Joy Challenge was launched.

Now, two programs apply EBT. One is this program, The Joy Method, which addresses overeating and overweight, and the other is The Power of One for overcoming stress symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, relationship issues, and behavioral health. For more information about the EBT stress program, please visit the the Power of One website.