Lose Weight Program > The Mental Side of Losing Weight

Probably you have heard a good deal lately about psychosomatic medicine. The word merely implies that the mind and body function together as a unit and that treatment limited to either mind or body often fails unless the influence of the other is considered.



It might seem that psychosomatics has little bearing upon overweight. Yet physiologists are agreed that the overweight person always eats more than is necessary to satisfy body needs for calories. Why? Well, any person who is healthy enjoys the sensual pleasure of a good appetite, but in the overweight there seems to be an additional mental drive to excess.

Psychiatrists have been delving into the matter, and while we won't go out on a long, long limb by saying that all their findings apply to you, there's food for thought in what they have to say. What they say is that common obesity is often "the physical expression of a neurosis," or, in short, that there are emotional and psychological reasons back of the accumulation of fat and the difficulty in getting rid of it.

Out of the case histories of these investigators comes the observation that a large proportion of obese women have symptoms of anxiety, and very commonly they have a sense of guilt and depression, as when they fall off the diet wagon. Food gobbling serves as a kind of anesthetic, a trouble-soother, for the worried, nervous woman beset with problems that seem unsolvable or up against painful frustrations. A slice of pumpkin pie can temporarily mitigate unhappiness or boredom, but the body doesn't know the difference and counts the calories just the same.

Curiously, overweight often serves a subtle purpose of protection - quite unconscious, to be sure. One thing it protects against is men and marriage. This seems incredible, since one of the most powerful motives advanced for reducing is to obtain the slim figure that makes for personal attractiveness. However, the psychiatrists insist that many fat women were plenty attractive in their early years but "put on flesh" as an unconscious means of scaring away men who are threatening because they symbolize responsibilities of marriage for which, perhaps because of unfortunate early experiences of training, the patients are not ready. Frequently obesity begins after an unhappy love affair, food being a substitute gratification - a purpose it can also serve if one gets bad marks in school, is in constant hot water with the boss, is bored to death, or unhappy for a multitude of other reasons.

All this may have nothing to do with your own case, but it is fairly easy to demonstrate that emotions have a good deal to do with food intake. Have you never become so absorbed in a piece of work that you were astonished, upon looking at the clock, to discover that mealtime had come and gone hours ago? If you haven't, it's because no activity has ever taken you out of yourself. Grief often is accompanied by loss of appetite - a more powerful acute emotion takes dominance over routine eating.

Few overweight persons actually consult a psychiatrist and few of them need to. The main point to remember is that if you eat every time you think about it, maybe you can take your mind in hand and think about something else. Remember that, if you are overweight, your body isn't really making insistent demands for calories - you have plenty of them stored away - but your mind can easily persuade you that your system is crying for aliment.


Continue to The Simple Arithmetic of Reducing

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