If you asked almost any overweight person, "Do you really want to lose weight?" the answer is likely, "Yes, I would love to lose weight."
If most overweight and obese people would so love to lose weight that they spend billions a year on trying to lose weight, why is our country growing fatter? Why aren't people losing weight when they say that this is what they want to do?
Because, as much as they say the want to lose weight, there is something they want even more than losing weight: they want to fill their emptiness and avoid their painful feelings.
The problem is that food works so well to fill up inner emptiness and cover over painful feelings of loneliness, aloneness, heartbreak, sadness, grief, hurt, frustration, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, and so on. If you don't know how to stop creating your own emptiness and aloneness, and how to manage and learn from your painful feelings, you have to find some way of getting filled and avoiding pain. Food is an available and easy way of doing this, but it is really no different than any addiction. All addictions are ways of trying to fill the inner emptiness and avoid painful feelings - when you don't know how fill your emptiness and lovingly manage your painful feelings.
While some people manage to force themselves to lose weight through rigid dieting, most gain it back. Unless you learn to deal with the issues underlying food addiction, you will likely not be able to keep off the weight.
What creates the inner emptiness and many of the painful feelings that lead to food addiction?
INNER ABANDONMENT.
Most people have learned to abandon themselves in a number of ways:
1. You judge yourself, telling yourself that you are not good enough, and that you "should have