It's All in Your Head

There’s something I’ve encountered over and over again in articles about losing weight: the idea that an overweight person will never be successful in keeping the pounds off for good unless she comes to grips with her relationship with food. (I use the word “she” deliberately because this advice seems mostly directed at women.)

The theory is that the obese person’s messed up relationship with food causes them to overeat in destructive ways. We are told that this over-consumption is an attempt to fill a void, heal a past trauma, or find solace from a deep loss. It is a psychological crutch, and once the fat person is able to deal with the real issue, she will no longer feel the need to stuff her face with Hershey bars.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it.

First off, it sounds an awful lot like a one-shot fix. But rather than a magic pill or a magic surgical procedure, this is magic for your head. Get in touch with your bruised inner psyche and presto chango! Thin forever! Well, um, not quite. Dealing with obesity may require coming to terms with the fact that you sometimes eat for reasons other than hunger, but that doesn’t mean it’s all in your noggin. It does mean that you need to change what are likely very ingrained eating habits, which may make the goings-on in your head even more squirrelly!

This idea also focuses the blame on the fat person and their perceived gluttony. But consider, for example, that to reach a point where you weigh 100 pounds more than you should, you need to eat an extra 350,000 calories. That’s the equivalent of about 6500 cups of steamed chopped broccoli. You would have to eat almost 18 cups of that broccoli on top of your regular meals every day in order to gain 100 pounds in a year. Could you stomach that? However, those 100 pounds are also the equivalent of only 200 of Red Robin’s highest-calorie cheeseburger options. You could probably manage that, couldn’t you? Would the current obesity rate, especially the rate of extreme obesity, be skyrocketing if our environment didn’t provide nearly non-stop mega-calorie temptation?

Then there’s the matter of biology. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the hormones regulating appetite, hunger and satiety work differently in overweight people than they do in non-overweight people. Some researchers have begun to believe that the digestive system of obese people is actually broken, along with the homeostasis mechanism that is supposed to regulate metabolism to keep weight stable, not unlike how it keeps our body temperature steady at 98.6°F. Even the most well-adjusted person in the world will have trouble maintaining a healthy weight if their gut is busted!

There’s also the insinuation that obese people must be mentally warped. Good grief! Fat people already have enough to deal with without being treated as not quite right in the head. This idea that our weight is the result of psychological failings does nothing but keep us in a state of self-flagellation and shame, which just makes it that much harder to seek out the help needed to learn a better way to eat.

I think the best way to fix your relationship with unhealthy food is to treat it like an abusive boyfriend. Ditch the jerk and find something better. But that does not require tinkering with your head. It does require the determination to find a piece of paper on which to write a new and improved grocery list. Plus a healthy dose of self-respect.