This is a comment for everyone who has responded to this last  blog entry.  Thank you for taking the time to ask your questions and describe your situation.  There are some common themes here.  Most of you describe and understand your emotional eating patterns quite well, including the conflict between your.desire and need to be at a healthy weight and your desire and need to continue eating in the way that you have been as a kind of compulsion and self-medication.  You each ask, in your own way, what can possibly help?  You've tried so many things that don't work for very long and even when they do you go back to the old ways when life throws you a curve.  One of you even mentioned that being married has its own stresses and can be a very important cause of weight gain.  Others mentioned medication which causes weight gain and the changing metabolism around the time of menopause.

This is all true.  These are the kinds of things that trigger weight gain.  But what stops you from mastering these things and being able to control your weight despite these things is the fact that you feel defeated and no longer believe you can help yourself or that you can be helped by anybody else.  When that happens, you retreat to the familiar remedy which doesn't work.  You start looking at and asking me what you should eat because you stop thinking about Why you're eating.  Although nutritional information is important and contributes to your weight control success, it's not the key to controlling your weight.  The key to controlling your weight is learning a new way to control your emotions, and especially the emotions that occur during transitions in your life and when you are under a great deal of stress.  That is your challenge.

You simply cannot learn how to do that overnight.  Even a good therapist may not be able to help you do that because most do not understand the many layers of emotional eating conflict because that is not their specialty.  You have to sort this out piece by piece and step by step and that is why I created the shrinkyourself program and wrote the shrinkyourself book.  It is a process in which you can reach the goal but you will have to put in effort and there are times when you will have to struggle.  At the end it is worth it.  Even if you have diabetes now, the loss of weight can actually make the diabetes go away or diminish the need for  medication.

I want to  leave you with a clear understanding that despite your specific situation you all share the same struggle, and that is to learn how to think and understand yourself better so you don't have to use food to shut off your mind.  It can be done, but it is a process.  It's not what you eat but why you eat.  Once you have become an emotional eater, there is only one way to lose weight and keep it off, and that is to break that very destructive eating habit.

3 Reasons You Won’t Lose Weight
Today we are going to discuss the three reasons you won't lose weight: an overpowering urge to binge, an intense hunger when you know the hunger is not for food, and a mind filled with thoughts about food or worries about weight.

The good news: once you learn to control the emotional eating that causes these three obstacles... well, then you can take off the weight -- and keep it off -- for good.

Last week, in the first of this series about emotional eating, I left you with the dilemma of the divided self. One part of you wants to control your weight by eating in a healthy way while the other part of you wants to hold onto food as a form of self medication. You have to resolve this dilemma before you can control your weight.

Why you eat too much

If you were in treatment with me we would have a conversation about this. I would ask you to explore why you eat too much by observing when you do that. I would have you ask yourself is it because you are bored, or frustrated, or depressed, or anxious, or is it because you are around your family or some other relationship and don't know how to handle your emotions?

But you are not my office and you do not need to be there in order to have a conversation with yourself about these critical issues. With some help you can do it yourself.

To be more accurate you need to have a conversation with many of the selves within you but for our purposes today let's just consider that you have two people inside the same skull. Both skull mates are competing to control how much your hand puts into your mouth.

If these two roommates don't talk to each other they will just alternate in control and you will be a yo-yo dieter. You will diet and lose weight and then your other self will take over and you will gain all the pounds back plus about 10%. You may do this for decades with only fat and frustration as your reward for the thousands of days of dieting deprivation. Wouldn't you be better off talking to your skull mate?

Stop making you binge

Of course you would... but you'll have to learn how to do that. You can't simply tell your skull mate to stop making you binge or eat too much. That part of you does not like to be told what to do and has no interest in giving up food as an emotional relief. That part of you has a mind of its own.

Here is something you should know about your skull mate. He or she won't talk to you in words at the beginning so you have to understand how he or she expresses herself. There are three signature expressions of emotional eating.

The first, is the overpowering urge to binge. It is a sure sign that you want to shut off your mind with food.

The second is an intense hunger when you know the hunger is not for food (you may have just finished a meal and are already physically full). This is a sure sign that you are feeling empty about something and are “emotionally” hungry.

The third is having a mind filled with thoughts about food or worries about weight. These are space occupying mental entities that distract you from thinking about what is really bothering you in life. These are boring repetitive thoughts that weigh down your mind.

This is the knowledge you need to start your conversation with yourself. Every time you feel or think one of these three ways, the other part of you is talking and taking over. Your first task is to observe this and try to understand what is going on within you. Even though you will need more tools to come to a full understanding, you can begin with this knowledge.

In the next part of this series I'll describe a technique you can use to go the next step in your conversation with yourself.

Dr. Roger Gould is one of the world's leading authorities on emotional eating and adult development. The board-certified psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author, has pioneered the use of online therapy sessions focusing on weight loss and other issues. Dr. Gould is the founder of Shrink Yourself, a comprehensive program focused on emotional eating.

For more info and a FREE session, visit ShrinkYourself.com.

Your doctor told you to lose weight. Are you struggling?


So your doctor says to you that you should lose 10 to 20 pounds.  If you are a diabetic, he will tell you that you will reduce the amount of medication you need to control your disease as well as decrease the likelihood of complications.  If you have high blood pressure or heart disease, he will tell you that this will take the load off your heart, help you live longer, and many of your symptoms will go away.  If you have arthritis or joint pains, he will tell you this is the best way to help yourself.

You are convinced that you should lose weight.  If you are worried enough about your health or just plain ready to start taking care of yourself, you will begin a new diet and exercise routine.  But if you are like most people who have gone down that pathway it either won't last long or you may make some significant gains, feel better, but then slowly your weight will creep back up again.

But you might not even be convinced that you have to lose weight.  You heard the words, you understand the logic, but for some reason known only to you, you decide that you don't really have to lose weight .  You give yourself all sorts of excuses like it won't really make any difference, or it's impossible so why even try.

All this is very troubling and very frustrating.  We doctors are convinced that controlling your weight is one of the most effective things you can do to prevent  chronic heart disease and diabetic complications. Exercise and eating healthy to control your diet is in your immediate control.  Yet we find it so difficult to translate the intention of controlling our weight into a new habit of eating healthy.  Have you ever asked yourself why?

In this series of blogs I'm going to explain to you what is under the surface of this problem and what you can do to solve it.  This is an opportunity to use your mind to directly and profoundly affect your health.


I am still taken aback every time I think of the answer a patient once gave me when I asked her WHY she ate half a dozen donuts. She said, "what else could I do?" She couldn't figure out a better way of dealing with the demands of her 16-year-old daughter. She temporarily “lost her mind.” She was paralyzed. She was unable to think like the intelligent adult that she was.

I started asking other patients the same WHY question, and kept on getting the same kind of answer, in one way or another telling me that the strength of a craving, the lure of a binge, or the power of food over them, was overwhelming, and they too “lost their mind” to food.

Emotional Eating: Blessing or Curse?

I heard more and more people tell me that their mind was taken over by thoughts about food and weight. They told me that their mind was “occupied” by a force they couldn’t understand, and what they wanted as much as weight loss was liberation from this preoccupation. In fact, there are 17 million Americans who have this same mental struggle even though they maintain a normal weight.

So why do YOU eat too much after you have committed to a diet and told yourself you are not going to do that anymore? On one level the answer is simple and obvious. You eat too much when you think you HAVE to use food to reduce your stress level or get away from some uncomfortable feeling or thought because you BELIEVE that you don’t have any other way of doing that. Then food becomes a tranquilizer; an instant, always available, medication that shuts down your mind. At those moments emotional eating is a BLESSING.

But when those moments pass, and you realize you have a bad habit of using food as a tranquilizer TOO often, and you understand that this is the single most sabotaging factor in your weight control struggle that makes you break your diet every time, then you know that emotional eating is a CURSE, and you spend a lot of mental energy beating yourself up.

And if this habit of emotional eating is too embedded in your life, it is even more of a CURSE because on some level you understand that this habit so overloads your mind with obsessive thoughts about food and weight, that you can hardly think of anything else. It is a very bad eating habit that distracts you from vigorously pursuing your own personal development and the betterment of your relationships because it uses up too much mental oxygen. It is the addictive habit that causes binge eating and bulimia.

Control Your Binges

If you have struggled with your weight and quit as many diets as you started you are very familiar with what I have just described. Your problem is that you have not yet decided whether emotional eating is a BLESSING or a CURSE. On one hand you desperately want to control your eating; and on the other hand you want to be able to binge when the craving becomes so strong that you feel helpless and think to yourself, "what else could I do?"

You have a divided self because it is BOTH a blessing and a curse for you. You will be at peace with yourself about food and weight only after you have resolved the divided self conflict within you. If you don't resolve this conflict you won't be in charge of yourself and no matter how successful you are at losing weight by any diet, you'll always be worried about regaining it.

Large scale research on dieters tells us that you are in one of three equally large groups.

1.You only want a quick fix, fast-loss diet which means you would rather go through another cycle of weight loss and regaining than deal with this divided self conflict.

2. You have given up on all diets or weight loss approaches which means you have decided that emotional eating is too much of blessing to ever think of giving it up.

3. You recognize you need to make real lifestyle changes in regard to food which means you recognize emotional eating is more a curse than a blessing and you are looking for ways to resolve this divided self conflict.

I know this conflict very well. As a psychiatrist I have studied this with my own patients, written a book, and then created a program that has been used successfully by over 14,000 people. For those in the third group who are looking for lifestyle change, emotional eating can be controlled if one takes a careful step-by-step approach, at each step learning a critical piece of insight, and eventually replacing the initial helplessness thought "what else could I do" with the in-charge person who says “look at all the other ways I can handle this stress.” Then a new sense of personal power naturally emerges, and the cravings that were so strong in the past, actually disappear.

The discovery I have made is not that there is such a thing as emotional eating. We all know that. The discovery is that there is actually a way to replace the “blessing” of food with much better ways of handling life’s challenges. When you learn that well enough to act on it, your conflict is resolved, and the “curse” is gone; the "occupied" part of your mind is liberated.

In the next series of blog posts, I will tell you how that is happening right now with some of my patients and the members of my ShrinkYourself online program.

Four years ago I began to explore one very important psychological question; why do people break their promise to themselves to eat healthier and lose weight. The average American starts and breaks four diets each year. They often regain more than they lost in the last diet. It seemed obvious to me that this is the key to the obesity epidemic because as long as you eat more than you take in, you will always be overweight. In fact, just 100 calories a day too much means you will gain 12 pounds in one year.

What I discovered is already obvious to anybody who binges or knows they are an emotional or compulsive eater. Food has become a form of self-medication used when you are bored, lonely, angry, stressed or upset. It’s a tranquilizer that is legal, socially sanctioned, and readily available. When you are upset, food feels like the best friend that quickly turns into your worst enemy after you have eaten too much, and are down on yourself for breaking your promise to do it differently this time.

What is not obvious is how to stop the emotional eating pattern. I spent four years working out the answer to that question, which is now summarized in my book, Shrink Yourself; and a website with self help-programs that can be found at www.shrinkyourself.com.

In order to find the answer, I had to first understand why people hold onto emotional eating even though they are so desperate to lose weight. It is not a lack of will power. People who want to lose weight spend plenty of time in the gym working out, and go on restrictive, depriving diets; diets that I personally couldn’t stand. No, it’s not just about diet and exercise. It’s something much more psychological.

People hold onto food as a psychological prop because they don’t believe, deep down, that they have any other choice. They don’t believe that they can handle the emotional part of life without having food as a kind of emergency shut off valve when they are feeling too much, or they don’t like where their own feelings are leading them. In the book I call this the “Feeling Phobia”. You are afraid of certain feelings and food provides a safe haven.

The key to success starts with understanding that food serves this psychological purpose. Understanding that this is a learned habit. And understanding that people are scared to give up this pattern even if their health is in serious danger. Learned behaviors can be changed. That’s why I created a program that leads people by the hand, step-by-step, as if they were in my office, so that gradually over a twelve-week period they learn that they really don’t need to use food as a psychological prop anymore.

Just telling people this doesn’t work. Each person has to discover this for themselves. But when they do, they are free to eat sensibly and control their weight for a lifetime. Over 70,000 people have come to the website to learn how to stop emotional eating. I am going to use part of this blog to tell you the stories of some of those people who were ready to do the psychological work to free themselves up from this bad habit of using food for comfort that they learned a long time ago. By unlearning this habit, they opened up their lives, This is the other theme I will introduce here: how people heal themselves as they go through the life cycle. I wrote a book about that decades ago: Transformations; Growth and Change in Adult Life. I think that using food for emotional reasons actually slows down and interferes with growing through the life cycle because eating too much keeps you “stuck” for too long..


This short excerpt from Shrink Yourself tells you a little bit more about emotional eating:



Food starts off as being not just a source of life but an expression of love. At the heart of almost every culture, hospitality is shown by feeding people. And a celebration or a time of grief wouldn't be complete without food.

Using food for reasons other than for simple sustenance is a normal part of life. It becomes a problem when food becomes so closely linked with feelings that the two overlap and become one. The foundation for this starts in childhood: "When I was good I got a cookie;" "On summer nights we went to the lake to get ice cream;" "Sitting at the kitchen table eating bologna sandwiches and chips was the only time I had with my mother;" "When I misbehaved dessert was withheld."

Food was transformed from a simple source of nutrition to a reward, a diversion, a punishment, a love object, a friend. Once that happened, food became a way to control your emotions and to deal with your feelings of powerlessness.


Why Do You Eat?

When you've installed food as a preferred way to cope, you stop developing new ways to deal with stress, your weight becomes increasingly difficult to control, and ultimately you end up reinforcing your feelings of powerlessness.

In simple terms, when something happens to bother you (such as a person ignoring you), it makes you feel bad, and you suddenly have the uncontrollable urge to eat.

Then, when you eat more than you know you should, it's always followed by regret, self-hatred and extra pounds.

For many of you, the moment when something bothers you overlaps with the moment when you suddenly have the uncontrollable urge to eat. For instance, my patient Gloria, a married woman who is 33-years-old and 30 pounds overweight, told me about an eating episode that occurred after an argument with her husband.

I asked her why she chose to eat to deal with how she was feeling. She responded, "What other choice did I have?"

In the next half hour of the session, we developed six other things that she could've done instead of eating.

For example, she could have taken responsibility for her part of the argument or done something to relax, like going for a walk or taking a bath, to buy herself some time to think things through and clarify her feelings.


Why You Eat When You're Bothered

I was struck over the years by how many people were similar to Gloria. Something happened, and they felt that there wasn't any other choice but to deal with what happened by eating.

By choosing food, they totally relinquished their ability to solve problems and deal with their lives in a mature and empowered way. The only way to recover that power is to pause long enough to determine what other options you have besides eating when something in life troubles you.

Even though it may not be obvious that something happened that bothered you, if you suddenly find yourself starving when you know you've just eaten, you can logically suspect that you've been emotionally triggered in some way.

Extensive research has shown that you're not really starving in those moments. It's almost always emotional hunger that drives you: a fight with a spouse, an uncomfortable work situation, a lull in your work day, a needy parent or child, your life, your future, your past. It's something that sets off a brief episode of powerlessness.



This blog will be about finding the space between when something has affected you and your sudden urge to eat (which is not real hunger), and then exploring what goes on in your mind when you have that uncontrollable urge.

Up until now, the emotions and issues that fuel the urge to eat have been operating behind the scenes, sabotaging all of your good intentions. I will not only share with you stories about people have learned to manage their lives without food but I will also explain to you why overcoming your eating patterns is a critical component to getting unstuck in your life and moving towards having a life you love.