I was very excited to learn about, and to try, the new mood tracker on MedHelp (http://www.medhelp.org/land/mood-tracker). It’s easy to use, and quite attractive, but more importantly, it has the potential to be extremely useful for so many members of MedHelp, especially those who are taking psychotropic medications.

I am the mental health expert who answers questions on the mental health forum, and so many of them are about the effects and side effects of medications for mood and anxiety. If those members had been using the mood tracker they would be able to see how their moods changed in response to the medications and separate that out from how their moods changed in response to the daily events at work or home.

That’s a very important distinction that most people don’t make, or find it hard to make. We want anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication to do more than it can.  It isn’t a magic pill…it can only be a powerful influencer of brain chemistry that elevates mood and diminishes anxiety. It can keep you from being overwhelmed by these powerful emotions, but it is not a substitute for the good hard problem solving that is required to meet the challenges of daily life. The pills can work on your brain but you have to work on your life.

The temptation is to become too dependent on the medication to fix you and become lazy about the work you need to do to stay on top of things. If you become lazy, or something happens that you don’t want to deal with, the frustrations pile up inside you. You feel down and temporarily defeated. You jump to the wrong conclusion and conclude that your medication isn’t working, ask to switch it, or add another or increase the dose, when instead you should be working on the frustrations that are creating addition internal tension.

When this happens, patients often find themselves on too many medications with too many side effects, and too many changes. I see this all too often.  It can be avoided.

If you are using antidepressants or anti- anxiety medications, I encourage you to try this new tool . It will help you observe and record  and remember your observations. Then when you have to sort out what is causing a mood change, you will have the information you need to decide whether a medication adjustment is required;or you have to some more psychological work and clear thinking to meet the challenges of your life.  That’s a distinction that can make a big difference!

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.