I just wanted to share this article on Emotional Eating* with you all. I read it years ago and it was the start of my weight loss journey which saw me go from 262lbs to 140lbs which I still maintain quite easily today. I came across it looking for something on my computer today and thought I'd share it. Reading it was really a bit of a lightbulb moment.
I tried to lose weight many times. I would succeed for a bit and then sabotage myself. Rinse, repeat. I had all the books and knew exactly what I needed to do but I just could not get it right. In the end what worked was a low calorie diet and CBT + therapy. Making the decision to really tackle the problem is not easy and the process of discovering why you have this problem and coming to terms with that and what changes it may entail in your life (in my case it was leaving an unhappy marriage) is also not easy, but once I made the decision the actual losing weight bit was very easy. Willpower ceases to be that much of an issue when you are no longer in conflict with yourself and when you value yourself more than you value food as a coping mechanism/way to numb your emotions and all the other reasons people self-harm using food.
I hope the article is useful or interesting to at least one person :) If you have several stone or more to lose and you have the means to I would urge you to consider finding a way to really tackle the underlying emotional issues with a therapist. It is difficult and painful and scary, but the best gift I could ever have given myself and I really do believe that it is crucial to losing weight, improving your life and keeping it off for good this time.
- The article itself is written by someone who runs some course or other an is mentioned in a couple of lines at the very end. I'm not advertising it and not even sure it would still exist (think it's American) years later anyway.