Obesity is All in Your Head

When you think about it weight loss is very simple. You just reduce your calories and increase your physical activity level and you'll lose weight. But that's the problem - it's easy when you think about it. In our minds, all of the necessary information exists - but when it comes down to practicing what is obvious to nearly everyone we drop the ball.

People go for fad diets like the flat belly diet or the Japanese banana diet or even the cabbage soup diet because they are looking for a shortcut. They are trying to find something they can stick to or something that gives them results. The problem is that none of these diets address the reasons people are overweight.

People are overweight because they are consuming more calories than they burn off. But that isn't the real answer to this question. If someone said, "This man is dead because he has a bullet in his head" it wouldn't truly answer the question of why the man was dead. Identifying lack of exercise and poor diet as the cause of obesity and stopping there is in the same spirit as stopping a murder investigation upon finding a bullet in the dead guy. Sure, he's dead because of the bullet, but why? What caused this to happen?

We don't stop with the bullet in the dead guy and talk about preventing murder by making efforts to not put our heads in the paths of bullets. We don't blame the bullet and the gun. We hunt down the culprit so we can take away his ability to strike again.

Poor diet and lack of exercise are just the bullet and the gun. Who or what is pulling the trigger?

Let's establish a few things first. People who are overweight do not want to be overweight. They are, by and large, not a bunch of lazy people, they are regular, hard working folks just like everyone else.

Obesity is caused by emotional illnesses. It should be treated as such. We don't ill-judge people who suffer stress and get ulcers or experience a traumatic event and develop post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD and then suffer panic attacks. We shouldn't judge overweight people for their disorder, either.

Many of you are going to disagree with me on this but I hold to my theory on this - I believe that people gain weight and don't manage to control it, not because they are gluttons or because they are lazy but because their mental state drives them to unhealthy behaviors. Much as an obsessive compulsive person might wash her hands until they bleed, excessive body weight may be the symptom of any of a number of emotional problems. Unless the underlying cause of excess weight is not healed, either the weight loss will not be permanent or the emotional issue will find another unhealthy way to express itself.