The real reason we are overweight...

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.