Can Your Thoughts Make You Fat?

Yes. The reason so many of us fail at sustaining weight loss is that we look in the wrong place for a solution. Food, my friends, is not the culprit. I know that we would all like it if this were true. Losing weight then would be a simple matter. We would just stop eating. But as you know from painful and frustrating experience, it just doesn’t work that way.

We cannot ultimately blame our fat-condition on overeating. Yes, we do put on weight when we overeat, but what causes us to eat far beyond our physical needs? Until we find the answer to that question, we will be locked in an unending cycle of gain and loss and gain again.

To discover the answer to this perplexing problem, we must do a little psychological detective work. We have to work backward from the action of overeating. The following series of statements illustrates my point.

“I am over eating. What is the source of this action?”

“I feel anxious and I am eating to make the anxiety go away.”

“What is the source of my feeling (anxiety)?”

“My anxiety is caused by a thought -- “I am overweight, therefore people will not like me.”

The sequence of internal events has happened like this: The action (overeating) is caused by a feeling (anxiety) that was, in turn, caused by a thought (people will not like me). We can learn to manage our overeating if we learn to manage our thinking. Changing our thinking changes how we feel. Fewer difficult feelings mean less overeating.

If this sounds a bit complicated then take a look at the list of thoughts below. Think about how these thoughts might affect your feelings and subsequent eating habits.

Thoughts that make you fat:

1. LIFE IS SCARY AND HARD. This is a thought that will affect every area of your existence. If you think this is a statement of reality, you will probably feel anxious almost all the time. You may also feel overwhelmed and unable to cope with life’s demands. Nothing contributes more quickly to binge eating.

2. MY NEEDS ARE NOT IMPORTANT. It is a physical and a psychological fact that everyone has needs. Needs are not like desires or wants. Needs MUST be met. If we neglect them, they will eventually rise up and demand attention by forcing us to overeat.

3. MY FEELINGS ARE NOT IMPORTANT. This thought seems to go hand in hand with being significantly overweight. Almost every individual I have ever met who was 30 or more pounds overweight was a victim of this kind of thinking.

The problem with this thought is it causes you to deny one of the most important aspects of your humanity. Feeling is a basic ingredient of being healthy and alive. To ignore what you feel is as problematic as ignoring your thirst.

4. RELATIONSHIPS ARE SCARY AND HARD. This is similar to No. 1 above. How you think about relationships will shape your experience of them. If you think they are impossible, they will tend to be that way. Painful relationships create painful feelings and painful feelings are an invitation to overeat.

5. ALL THOUGHTS RELATED TO SELF-HATE. Thinking negatively about yourself never helps you lose weight. In fact, self-hating thoughts usually contribute to eating habits that cause weight gain. Beating yourself up is not a good idea. It will make you over eat.

I did not make this list to imply that dealing with these thoughts is easy. Obviously, it isn’t. But we have to start somewhere. An old and wise Chinese proverb states, “A journey of a thousand miles is begun with a single step.”

Significant weight loss sustained over a lifetime is an immense journey. However, the journey is easier if we pay attention to our thinking and make our best attempt to change. If you have gotten this far, there is hope, and a little hope is all you need to take just one more step. That will make all the difference.

If you want more tools for weight loss and successful living please email me at tamara@athealth.biz.