Business Profile: The Hungry Heart, Mount Kisco

Wappingers Falls native Jodi Darling knows a thing or two about compulsive overeating. For years Darling gorged, not because she was hungry but because she was turning to it for the wrong reasons.

Darling would engage in excessive periods of exercise that included one and a half hour workouts six times a week in an attempt to offset her consumption, only to return to her old ways.

Finally, she corrected her eating habits and vowed to help others overcome their own problems with food.

Five years ago, Darling, a per diem nutritionist at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, joined The Hungry Heart, a nationwide franchise that includes a step-by-step program to help emotional overeaters how to stop the diet/binge cycle, lose the extra weight and keep it off.

“Our goal is to help clients eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full,” said Darling, a certified clinical hypnotherapist and nutritional counselor with 16 years experience as a hospital nutritionist. That way a person can establish healthy eating patterns and learn to deal with life’s ups and downs without relying on food as a problem-solver.

The Hungry Heart was established in 1996 by Lauren Grant, a California woman who had struggled with binge eating and yo-yo dieting. There are eight franchises throughout the United States, including two offices run by Darling–one in Wappingers Falls and another in Mount Kisco.

While other programs focus on calories or points, Darling said there are no such strategies with The Hungry Heart.

“We actually dump the diet,” she said. “Diet is about control. The more we try to control food, the more it backfires.”

While Darling agrees there are numerous diet programs that work, trying to maintain one can be difficult, especially “when you throw life into it.”

“In fact, we believe in giving our clients permission to eat because dieting in many ways is deprivation,” she said.

When Darling signs up new customers, she doesn’t weigh them. Instead, she encourages them to participate in an eight-week program that includes weekly 75-minute meetings with a qualified counselor.

At the outset, Darling’s clients are required to answer a four-page questionnaire that requires information on medical history and lifestyle habits to determine eating patterns and what behaviors cause stressful conditions that ultimately lead to overeating.

During subsequent sessions, clients are provided with specific tools to help them overcome their difficulties with food, including hypnotherapy at the end of each session to reinforce the lessons. Darling works with other hypnotherapists and nutritional counselors Helene Haber and Angela Schiz.

For many of Darling’s clients, busy work and family schedules pose a hindrance to proper eating. Some eat late at night to satisfy cravings or to calm or distract themselves from life’s issues.

“What we tell our clients is take good care of yourselves during the day so that you don’t overeat at night,” Darling said.

Feeling guilty about overeating is perhaps most destructive.

“The second we judge ourselves, the more we will continue to eat or overeat,” Darling said.

Much of the counseling focuses on how clients previously approached food and the underlying issues that influence them most. Interestingly, many overeaters engage in the practice based on childhood habits, such as parents telling children to clean their plates because others are going without. Much of that, she added, is engrained in the subconscious.

“Fortunately, the beauty of the subconscious is that it can be changed,” said Darling, although it takes work to undo old habits.

Darling promises her clients that they can take control of their lives. While it wasn’t easy for her to break old habits, she believes anyone can do it.

“I want to get my clients to a good place,” Darling said. “It’s where I feel I’m changing lives.”

The Hungry Heart office in Mount Kisco is located at 100 S. Bedford Road.

For more information or to schedule a free consultation, call 914-220-8199 or visit www.hungryheart.org.