Psychological Background Motivations For Weight Issues

By Marion Selzer

Guide for those affected - On the heels of emotional entanglements
Does this sound familiar: Although you have eaten enough and are actually NOT HUNGRY, you are magically drawn to your fridge or candy stash over and over? You simply CANNOT STOP until the potato chip bag is empty or until you have finished the entire chocolate bar? Especially if you want to treat yourself after a stressful day, or after a fight with colleagues, friends or your partner, food has an almost magical effect on your mood?

And even though your mind protests, you cannot resist the temptation? If you then tell yourself that everything will be better tomorrow, do your appetite and cravings make life difficult?
Or do you fight emerging cravings and your appetite by WILL POWER and DISCIPLINE? You make every effort to control your eating habits via the mind, without listening to your body’s feelings? And a LOOK AT THE SCALE decides your mood? If one, the other or both sides sound familiar to you, you must put SELF-DOUBT and GUILT aside. Those who suffer because they constantly EAT TOO MUCH, TOO LITTLE OR THE WRONG THING are not lacking in willpower or perseverance.

I also spent years trapped in the VISCOUS CYCLE OF of OVER- OR UNDER-EATING. I suffered from a bad conscience and tried to hide my behavior from others. Phases of gluttony were followed by times of a strict diet and sports programs, which I was not able to stick with for very long, of course. The result was even more guilt, my undermined self-confidence and the helpless question of HOW THE HECK I WAS GOING TO STOP THIS. So I looked through libraries for relevant books on this topic, got an education as a nutritionist and dietician and got some psychological training as well.

Therein, it became clear to me that PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS often lie hidden behind problematic eating behaviors.

WE DO NOT EAT ONLY TO GET FULL, BUT ALSO TO FEEL BETTER. When we feel sad, lonely or depressed, chocolate can be a BALM FOR THE SOUL. And in order to vent our frustration and anger, we need something of which we can take a hearty bite. This is a very natural process in and of itself. After all, we experience the intake of food via the senses, thus setting the body's chemical processes into motion that lead to the release of happiness and well-being hormones.

The problem arises only when we can no longer choose how much we take in at what time freely and begin to suffer the effects of our behavior.

Conventional DIETS SIMPLY DO NOT HELP in this case. To get these problems permanently under control uncovering the MENTAL FACTORS is often helpful. If we see why the request to eat pops up and understand what we actually need instead, we can then develop alternative strategies that satisfy us in a more comprehensive manner. Even though physical hunger can be satisfied through food, emotional hunger cannot really be satisfied in this manner.

IN THIS GUIDE, you will learn a variety of MEASURES that you can put into place right away and that will teach you how to figure out your emotional entanglements and help you detect the actual needs behind your behavior. Consistency, taste and the way we eat will be as much under the microscope as the shape of your body.

Taking a sensitive LOOK AT WHAT IS GOING ON WITHIN WITHOUT ANY JUDGEMENT and ACCEPTANCE of the impressions, feelings and thoughts that come up will slowly but surely transform your behavior. So that you find your way back to a HARMONIOUS DIET, which gives you pleasure and joy, because you are free to choose what kinds of foods to eat in what quantities at what time again.

Positive changes in health and figure included:-)

About the author:
In an understandable manner, Marion Selzer (Lawyer, mediator, nutrition and diet consultant, psychological counselor), who has found the way out of an eating disorder herself, provides val

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Feb 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9783958300798

Book preview

Conclusions

Introduction

Dear Readers,

if you are holding this book in your hands, you probably know situations in which you crave food without really being hungry. Perhaps to reward yourself after a hard day, to soothe your troubled nerves after an argument with your partner or family, to distract yourself or simply to feel better. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that. After all, nature has set it up so that food intake provides enjoyment and pleasure. Food can stimulate the secretion of wellbeing, happiness or stimulants and is therefore fully capable of affecting our mood.

The situation becomes more critical, however, if we constantly use food to regain our emotional balance and food intake thus becomes our main strategy to make us feel better. In this case, we do not eat because our stomach rumbles, but because we are tired, stressed or frustrated, longing for closeness and security or because we're bored. Food is then used to satisfy our emotional needs. A strategy that is doomed to failure. For food may cause short-term pleasure and satisfy us physically, but emotional hunger cannot really be satisfied by eating.

Needs, such as the desire to be understood, to be respected and accepted as a person as a whole, cannot be satisfied by cola, chocolate, burgers or fries just like the longing for more activity, adventure or a purpose in life.

However, if we did not learn how to truly take care of these needs, we do not admit to them or do not have the courage to tackle upcoming changes, it may be that food appears to us as the only way to balance our emotional lows.

The problem is that we then remove ourselves even further from our true needs on the one hand and our eating habits get out of control on the other hand. Sooner or later, we will realize then that we can no longer determine for ourselves when we eat what quantity of foods. A vicious cycle begins. While a part of us, which I like to call the inner connoisseur, demands for food during emotional lows, our mind protests loudly against it. After all, we know that too much or too much of the wrong kinds of foods has negative impacts on our health and figure. No matter how we choose in such a situation, there is an inner conflict going on: Either we remain emotionally unbalanced, because we do not give in to the desire for food, or else, we try to balance our emotional world through food and usually eat too much or the wrong things.

If we end up in this vicious circle, we feel anything but comfortable with our own behavior and suffer because we have lost control. Trying to get this under control usually fails. Sometimes we simply do not know how to go on. And as we look for the fault in ourselves, we get more and more frustrated and our self-esteem drops to zero. Trying to solve the problem with diets through the use of discipline and willpower only makes things worse.

If you should be affected by this issue, dear reader, you can safely put conventional diet and nutrition tips off to the side. These problems are not due to a lack of willpower or lack of discipline. They will not be resolved by precocious advice like „Just eat like a normal person." The reasons for such behavior go much deeper. Mental and emotional entanglements on the subject of nutrition are not uncommon.

Unfortunately, this aspect receives only little attention in many weight-loss or nutrition guidebooks or is even completely ignored. This is what I would like to provide you with during the following pages. This is not about introducing you to a new program that you can blindly follow and then count down the days until you can finally eat again as usual. No, I want to show you how you can transform yourself by working on your eating habits from the inside out and how your diet problem can even turn into a personal growth opportunity.

For this purpose, I will show you the ways and means that I myself have experienced as helpful in order to rediscover harmonious eating habits. For I was caught in this cycle for many years myself. Most of the time, I could not control my eating habits, even though I was unhappy with my figure. This continuous phases that would often last for weeks alternated with opposite phases. I heavily restricted my diet, placed an emphasis on a lot of physical activity and starved myself to loose the pounds I had put on before. I was never able to uphold the necessary discipline and willpower and always fell back into my old habits sooner or later.

During my search for a way out of this predicament, I became aware of one thing: That the more I am connected with my inner voice, the more certain it is that I will be led to an eating pattern, with which I feel completely comfortable. And the nice thing is that healthy eating always has a positive effect on one’s outward appearance and life energy as well.

To get in touch with my inner voice, the reclamation of my emotional entanglements with respect to the subject of nutrition was an important and essential step. Many may smile about this, but since we not only consist of a body, but there is more to us that what many refer to as soul, our behavior always has an influence on our emotional side as well - or expressed in other terms - on our mental and psychological wellbeing.

Mainly because food intake is also a sensory experience, emotional entanglements play a role when it comes to food very often. Without revealing the deeper, psychological and emotional reasons behind our problematic eating behaviors, we remain helplessly caught in the treadmill of waning and waxing.

It is therefore quite logical that weight loss programs that completely ignore this level of emotion are only successful so long as you can uphold the necessary willpower. Since this creates a sense of lack and having to do without happiness and enjoyment, one will not be able to keep up these efforts for very long and will fall back into one’s old habits sooner or later.

With the information presented here, you can discover the hidden reasons for your eating habits on your own and without outside help. Because I know from my own experience