A Radical New Approach to Weight Loss

This is a radically new way of understanding how our efforts to lose weight actually feed chronic unhappiness and uncomfortable feelings which lead to excess weight gain.

How many times have we said, Today is a new day. I am finally going to stick to my diet, take all the weight off and keep it off once and for all!" We are filled with good intentions and enthusiasm. All is well. Perhaps we take off a substantial amount of weight until something changes (often in the late afternoon or evening) and, all of a sudden, our mood begins to plummet. Our enthusiasm wanes and is rapidly replaced with doubt and desperation.

At the very earliest stages in which our mood starts to spiral downward, it's our desperate attempts to alleviate it that make matters worse. Our habitual efforts to extricate ourselves, far from freeing us from our drive to overeat actually keep us locked in the problem we're trying to escape. In other words, nothing we "do" at that point seems to help because trying to problem-solve and fix what's wrong with us just digs us in deeper. The ongoing mental obsession about how fat we are, the self-criticism about our weakness when it comes to food, the desperate attempts to talk ourselves out of our cravings - all are mental gyrations that lead us nowhere but downward. Food becomes our "solution", as a distraction and temporary mood lifter with its surge of energy from high fat and/or sugar. We unwittingly end up using food as a coping mechanism and mental pain reliever, feeding the very cycle that we are trying to break! At this point in the cycle, there is often dissociation (dream-like state of unawareness) and then a
"waking up" to "Oh, no! I can't believe I did it again! I just blew my diet. What's wrong with me?" This leads to remorse, guilt and shame. If any of this sounds painfully familiar to you, it is possible to make a radical shift in your relationship to the habitual negative thoughts and feelings which you then try to self-medicate away with food. This shift is what a mindful approach to eating is all about. There isn't anything "wrong" with you other than the fact that your well-intentioned efforts have just not worked. They have kept you stuck in the mud of excess weight.