Hi, I’m Brittany; I’m the founder of the Skinny Genes Program. I’m also a weight loss coach. I struggled with food cravings and emotional eating … and a million ineffective diet strategies … for 15 years until I discovered a solution that allowed me to lose weight in months. In conjunction with a behavioral scientist, I developed The Skinny Genes Program to help women look and feel amazing about their bodies and their lives.   I am trained in Energy Psychology, and Emotional Freedom Techniques, certified as a master in NeuroLinguistic Programming, and I’m a certified Energy Coach. My approach to weight loss is to help women uncover the underlying emotional drivers which cause them to crave certain foods. I teach women how to apply certain techniques to quickly and effortlessly eliminate the cravings and emotional eating.

In 2007, I left my career as a finance executive to work with women and to fine tune the Skinny Genes Program. Since then, I’ve helped many women achieve their goals.
 
I’ve been invited to speak about my unique technique at numerous institutions including Stanford University, University of California San Francisco, and Google. I am currently working on my first book.
 
My signature seminar has been developed into an online 6-week program, which will be offered in January 2012. You can get on the waiting list here.

If you would like to work with me privately, you can contact me directly at brittany@brittanywatkins.com

I am a woman who lives my truth. Ten years ago, I made a decision to always be honest with myself and others, regardless of the consequences. In that spirit, I will share with you my personal journey that brought me here today.

At the age of 15, I came home from school to find all of my belongings on the front porch with a note that said “you no longer live here.” That was when my weight struggle began.

I shuffled around from friends’ house to friends’ house until their parents started asking questions.

‘Doesn’t she have a family?’

‘Where are her parents?’

‘Why does she have such a big suitcase?’ ‘How long does she plan on staying with us?’

That last one would be my signal to hit the road again. I didn’t want to impose, and my family life was too complicated to explain.

Being on your own at a young age does something to you … It forces you to grow up quickly, develop serious survival instincts, and learn to be “emotionally independent.”

Lacking a consistent pillow to lay my head on at night, I knew I had to do something fast … so I made a decision: rather than relying on someone’s short-lived charity, I’d put on my game face and figure out how to survive on my own. I found an apartment, a job and enrolled myself in home study.

But despite my warrior façade, at night, the pain would hit me. I felt rejected, unloved, abandoned and lonely. I was just a little girl and had no one to depend on. So, in order to cope with the emptiness, I tried to “fill myself” with love … and began to over-eat.

Of course, I didn’t want to be overweight but I couldn’t control myself. So I started working out obsessively. I binged at night, trying to fill the void that was my broken heart. Then, I would wake up in the morning, disgusted with myself, and hit the gym.

I established a routine: wake up guilt-ridden from the previous night’s binge; and vow that today would be different, the start of a new, healthy me … and then I would dive head-first into the a new diet, a new work-out program, any and every quick-solution du jour that promised to make me look like a super-model and make all my problems disappear.

Of course, nothing worked. Diet after diet, binge after binge … none offered permanent results. There were fleeting moments of success … after all, you can’t eat just cabbage soup for three weeks and not lose weight. But the emotional urges that tortured me at night would always return, along with the weight.

Geneen Roth’s book, When Food is Love, was the first thing I discovered that helped me understand why I couldn’t control myself around food … but it didn’t offer a solution.

There were a myriad workbooks and questions to reflect on, but regardless of how introspective I got and how hard I applied myself to getting to the core of the matter, when that craving hit, and it was time decide whether to hit the treadmill or the refrigerator … I just couldn’t walk away from the only thing that made me feel safe.

Five years ago, my therapist (who is the only reason I am not holed up in a halfway house in East Los Angeles, bless his soul) attended a seminar where he was introduced to a cutting-edge technique called EFT. He thought might be immediately effective in addressing my emotional eating disorder.

He said, “This stuff may seem a bit woo-woo but it’s proven to have tremendous efficacy. I’d like to try it on you.” Of course I was game … I’d try anything to cure me from ten-years of eating disorder hell.

So we tried it, and it worked. We tested it on my recollection of arriving home to my belongings on the front porch, and five minutes later, I was laughing about a memory that would typically, unfailingly bring me to tears.

And so the Skinny Genes journey began.

I learned the process so I could apply it to myself, in any situation that conjured up anxiety … when I was feeling lonely at night, when I was anxious about a test, when I got a craving for chocolate.

My life started to change. Issues I had been struggling with in therapy for years, resolved within a few days. My nightly emotional binges became rare occurrences, and when they did come, I could used EFT to immediately neutralize them. And soon, I realized, my clothes were falling off me … I was losing weight without consciously making an effort!

I also started making huge advances in my career. I became one of the highest-paid executives at a large, national bank. I bought myself a fancy car and a big house with a view overlooking a golf course (actually, I bought three houses … but who’s counting?). I was 24 years old, rolling in dough, loving life, skinny, and happy. I felt like I had the world at my fingertips. Then the real estate bubble burst … and so did my ego … and my inflated bank account.

I decided I wanted to do something to make a difference in the world. I no longer wanted to sell something just for the sake of a paycheck. I wanted to do something that came from a place of love that I had discovered within myself.

In 2007, I resigned from my corporate career and immersed myself into the exploration of weight loss and psychotherapy. I studied anything I could get my hands on that was an “alternative solution” to the status quo diet techniques. I took courses and got accreditation in Energy Psychology, Emotional Freedom Technique, NeuroLinguistic Reprogramming, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Quick REMap, Rapid Eye Therapy, and Reiki.

From these studies, emerged the foundational philosophies and science that would be used in the Skinny Genes Program. Yes, there is real science to back this stuff up, and now there are credible resources and studies showing the efficacy of these methods, which I have posted on my blog.

My mission is clear and my passion is unbridled: to offer women a simple, science-based solution that eliminates food cravings and emotional eating issues in minutes, not years. If a simple passion like that can bring peace, happiness and self-love to another person, as it did for me, my mission will be complete.