Curbing Emotional Eating for Permanent Weight Loss

I don't agree with a lot of the tactics in the Biggest Loser television show...however, I don't believe there is any one right or wrong way to lose weight...as long as it is done in a healthy way giving permanent weight loss results.

One of the points that was brought up in last night's episode is how essential it is to get behind the reason behind getting to be obese in the first place. Sure, it is possible to overeat because we like the taste of food, because we don't know about nutrition...sure it is possible to be fat because of this lack of knowledge...but is it possible to become obese just out of this type of ignorance?

I don't think so...and apparently, neither do Bob and Jillian.

There are emotional reasons for overeating...to become obese we have to develop a pattern of eating past the point of no longer being hungry. We are eating to feed something beside our physical body...

Often we eat to the point of discomfort or even pain.

Think of Thanksgiving dinner...the "gotta unzip my pants because I ate too much" feeling...now imagine that stuffed feeling every day...possibly even every meal. It is not by having a couple meals like that a year that we become fat. It is by practicing this pattern over and over that we become overstuffed, literally, and wind up obese.

We must curb our emotional eating in order to achieve our desired result--PERMANENT weight loss. It doesn't do us any good to lose a bunch of weight only to gain it back. I know. I've done it.

We get all excited at our "new" bodies and declare we will NEVER get fat again. And yet we do. Why? Because we did not deal with the underlying issue (or issues) that allowed us to eat all that food in the first place.

Learning about nutrition and exercise are just tools...they are both excellent tools...but there are a lot of us who DO know what healthy eating entails, who DO exercise (or at least know how to) and yet still overeat to the point of obesity.

It may be that some traumatic event happened in your life that left you feeling out of control...for some of the contestants on the Biggest Loser it was the loss of a family member at an early age. It may not have been as traumatic as that, or it may have been something that you saw, such as the story related on "Ruby"...or it may have been something that someone did or said to you...

And these things may not seem big from an adult's standpoint...from our current perspective we may be able to shrug it off...but it probably didn't happen to you as an adult! And sometimes the littlest things make big impacts on us as kids.

One of the reasons I stress getting the proper mindset for weight loss is because it is our emotions and our thoughts that got us to be obese in the first place, and we must change that foundation in order to build the new healthy, energetic, slender body that we desire.