OBSESSIVE WEIGHING: A SIGN YOU EAT EMOTIONALLY

You should see the weird looks I get when I tell my hCG protocol patients not to weigh themselves. And the responses I get are very predictable:  

         “But I read on the Internet I’m supposed to weigh every day!”

         “How am I going to know if I should do an 'apple-day' when weight-loss stalls?”

         “If I don’t weight myself how am I supposed to know if the protocol is working?”

         “The only reason I’m doing this is to lose weight, so what am I going to use as motivation?”

The amount of fear and anxiety people have after I suggest they not weigh is not surprising. In general, people only pay and enlist in diets because they hate how they look and are disgusted by their body fat.  Most people have physical ailments because of their obesity, such as sleep disturbance, symptoms of adrenal fatigue (tired, lack of motivation, etc.), heart burn, hair-loss, skin problems,  high blood pressure, decreased libido, hot flashes, high cholesterol, poor body-image, embarrassment in social settings, and many more issues associated with having too much fat and resulting fat hormones.

They’ll tell you these symptoms are profound reasons to lose weight, and they’ve convinced themselves these reasons are why they are enlisting in the hCG protocol. However, their main focus and source of motivation is centrally focused on watching the scale go down.  After the first week, they notice significant relief from most, if not all, of the symptoms listed above. Patients profess how amazing they feel. But if the scale doesn’t budge one day−they're discouraged, and if weight on the scale stalls more than a few days− they're irritable and frantic.  They quickly forget about how good they feel, and the incredible relief they get from their physical ailments. If weight doesn’t go down (no matter how physically theraputic the protocol is) they really don’t want to continue to restrict themselves from eating.

Once reward and motivation from the scale loses momentum, so does their desire to continue restraint, and in order to feel compensated for following the protocol, they rationalize a reward: cheating. What does this reaction to the scale tell you about their intentions? Do all of the hormonal ramifications that cause disease and early death, really have anything to do with why they are doing the hCG protocol? If so, why does the scale have such a large influence on motivation to continue the protocol or not?

You could notice the obvious improvements in energy, how much better you feel, how sleep has markedly improved, and how heart-burn and hot-flashes have disappeared, but if the scale doesn’t go down like you thought, the effort isn’t worth it. Worth what? If you’re not experiencing physical hunger, what are you giving up? Most likely, you are feeling emotionally deprived. This emotional deprivation is why people say it takes “self-discipline” to follow the protocol restraints, and why weight is used as bait or emotional reward.

Emotional delights, entertainment, fun, ego protection, and all reason we eat that have nothing to do with hunger, are what causes feelings of deprivation when dieting. People feel punished, even when there isn’t hunger, and there’s relief from hormonal ailments and symptoms that plagued their body. We’ve been confused to believe that weight is the problem, and not our emotional desires to eat.

Americans have been so misguided by the diet industry to believe that weight is a plague, and is the only reason you need to pay them to eat less. Yes, you pay a multi-billion dollar industry to eat less, to obsess over your weight, and to feel guilty about food. And you do this over and over again, even though this approach has never worked.

When did you start obsessing over weight? I bet it started with your first diet. They taught you weight defined success or failure and since then you’ve probably defined your value based on weight. Do you constantly feel guilty when you eat, and do you tend to binge eat whenever you don’t eat perfectly? The diet industry has caused major emotional problems by selling weight as the problem, and judging food emotionally.   

Because of how judgmental and extreme the diet industry is, most people feel vulnerability and guilt when they eat. When you emotionalize what you eat, you lose your ability to make rational decisions. For example, most people have enough intelligence to understand a bite of pie is very different than a piece of pie, which is very different than eating the whole pie. However, when you’ve been taught pie is bad, one bite is just as bad as a piece, and is no different than eating the whole pie. If you’re going to have a bite you might as well eat the whole thing! Sound familiar? If this is how you think, you’ve fallen victim to the diet industry, and as a result you may have an emotional eating disorder.

I suggest you stop weighing yourself so you can actually fix the cause of the problem. Monitor the profound physical relief you get when you stop eating emotionally, and how emotionally vulnerable you feel without eating. Change the definition of diet, so that success is measured in a decline in the desire and need to eat emotionally. Think about it this way: if you didn’t like eating excessively or emotionally, would you have a weight problem? Would you have to “battle your weight”? 

If you didn’t like eating for fun, for entertainment, and for emotional reasons you wouldn’t feel deprived by eating less and you wouldn’t need to weigh yourself as reward.  The goal is to eat less, because you want to, and with this−you’ll never obsess over your weight again.

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Posted by: Tukiyooo OBSESSIVE WEIGHING: A SIGN YOU EAT EMOTIONALLY Updated at : 7:35 AM

Monday, December 19, 2011