We spend billions of dollars every year trying to answer the question: What makes people fat. Yet, no one seems to notice that we keep coming up with the wrong answer. It's not carbs, fat, thyroid problems, or genes that make people fat. Sure, those things can contribute but the main reason people are fat is feelings. There are over a dozen studies that were conducted over the past fifty years all over the world that say negative emotions are the number one factor in weight gain. I personally did an Internet survey asking 17,000 dieters why they broke their diets. Almost 100% said it was either because of stress, depression, or boredom.
Using food to deal with feelings is called emotional eating. It's defined as using food for relief or reward, and it's the number one reason that diets fail. We don't overeat because we lack willpower, we overeat because we're not willing to let go of the comfort that food provides.
I'm sure you recognize the pattern; you're bored or lonely at night and you wander into the kitchen. Before you know it you're eating a handful of chips, a spoonful of peanut butter and half a container of ice-cream and you weren't even really hungry in the first place. You have a fight with someone and find yourself at the drive-thru at In and Out Burger. Or you actually manage to make it through yet another unsatisfying work week and you reward yourself with a big Mexican meal with Margaritas on Friday night. We overeat to calm ourselves when we're anxious, depressed, or under stress. We eat when we don't know how to fill our time. We use food as a substitution for love, money, sex, stimulation, and success. And it works for a few minutes, and so our brains think it's an effective way to cope. But you and I both know, that after those few blissful bites, we're filled with regret and guilt, not to mention gained weight.
Food is the most readily available and legal form of self-medication, which may explain why so many of us are turning to it as our drug of choice. If we didn't reap an emotional benefit from food, we wouldn't be willing to sacrifice so much for it. The thing is that there is a way to break this painful cycle, but not with diet and exercise, at least not with diet and exercise alone.
We can start asking ourselves different questions. Instead of what should we eat, we can ask ourselves what are we really hungry for and how can we take the steps towards having a more satisfying life? Emotional eating is a learned behavior. We learned how to manage life by eating, and we can unlearn it. It takes being willing to face ourselves head on. We can't eliminate uncomfortable emotions but by learning how to deal with our feelings in more productive ways, we can eliminate emotional eating. Isn't time for an approach to weight loss that actually gets at the heart of the problem?