Tag: emotional eating

Why Do People Gain All Their Weight Back After A Diet?

It isn’t that difficult to lose weight on a diet.  There are many diets that will produce a weight loss if followed rigorously.  The problem, as people with an emotional eating problem know all too well, is that when you stop dieting, the weight usually comes back even faster than it left.

Why? When you stop a diet—which is eating food you normally wouldn’t eat, in quantities you normally wouldn’t eat—you start eating the way you had before the diet.

But there is another very important reason for gaining all the weight back.

Many people who obsess about their weight believe that if only they could weigh what they wanted (which is much less than they currently weigh), their life would be perfect.  In other words, they attribute most of what doesn’t work in their life to their excess weight.

After people get down to the weight they thought would make them happy and it doesn’t, they would have to acknowledge that weight was not the real cause of their unhappiness, because they are still unhappy despite being at their “target” weight. For some people, it is too difficult to acknowledge this. So they gain back all the weight they lost so they can continue to blame their unhappiness on the number of pounds they weigh.

For such people, it is important to deal with the emotional aspects of their eating problem before they lose weight.  If they can take responsibility for what isn’t working in their lives and do something about it, they will be able to lose weight and not need to gain it all back.

For more details on emotional eating, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Your Overeating For Good, at http://emotionaleatingreport.com.

Copyright © Morty Lefkoe 2010

I Am Someone With A Weight Problem

 

Many people with an emotional eating problem can’t even imagine themselves not obsessing about food and eating all the time.  It has become a part of their identity.

As Geneen Roth put it in her book, Women, Food and God, as long as you have an eating problem, “you always have something to do.  As long as you are striving and pushing and trying hard to do something that can never be done, you know who you are: someone with a weight problem who is working hard to be slim.  You don’t have to feel lost or helpless because you have a goal and that goal can never be reached.”

I suspect that if you consciously identify yourself as someone with a weight problem long enough, you will ultimately create an unconscious sense of yourself as someone with a weight problem regardless of how much you actually weigh.

Check it out for yourself.  Close your eyes and look inside and ask yourself: What is my sense of myself?

Some people will have positive sense: I’m someone who is okay with myself; I’m fine just the way I am.  Others might have a negative sense: I’m someone who doesn’t feel good about myself.  There’s something basically wrong with me.  And others might have a sense of themselves as: I am someone with a weight problem.  I will never be okay until I reach a weight where I really look good.

Eating when we are not hungry is an attempt to not experience the “bad” person we mistakenly think we are. These negative feelings about ourselves are more than we think we can handle.  So in an attempt to go unconscious and not experience those feelings, we eat.

In fact we are not the terrible person many of us think we are.  Those negative feelings are nothing more than the feelings that come from negative beliefs about yourself, beliefs that have never been really the truth.  Beliefs like I’m not good enough.  I’m not important.  I’m not worthy or deserving.  I’m not loveable.

These beliefs were formed as a result of the meaning we gave to childhood interactions with our parents.  If the beliefs were eliminated, the negative sense of we have of ourselves would disappear.

We might experience ourselves in a negative way.  Yet it is not who we really are.  We have that sense as a result of beliefs and conditions.  And we might experience ourselves as someone with an eating problem.  That also is not who we really are.

For more information about overeating and weight, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good, at http://emotionaleatingreport.com