The Real Way to Lose Weight and Keep It Off

I’ve been working with over-eaters for many years, and I’ve learned a secret about weight loss:

It’s not that hard to lose (even a lot of) weight. The trick is to keep it off.

Keep It Off: The Study

We’ve all seen people lose 100 or more pounds on reality TV shows or when promoting specific diets, only for the weight to gradually creep back, until they’re just as heavy as before or even heavier.

A recent study done at the University of California showed that most diets will lead to short-term weight loss, but that within five years at most, the person will gain back the weight, and even gain more weight than before.

The authors’ conclusion was that in every case, the dieters would have been better off not to have gone on the diet in the first place, as yo-yo dieting is much worse for our health than just being overweight.

So, if diets have been proven to fail, and even be bad for our health, what should we do? When it comes to weight, how can we keep it off?

Keep It Off: The Solution

Whether we struggle with 15 extra pounds, 50 or 150, we want a real and lasting solution to our problem. No-one wants to be on an eternal seesaw of dieting and then gaining back the weight.

Fortunately, in my work as a psychotherapist, I’ve discovered the solution to this problem, and it came from understanding its real cause:

People overeat and are overweight because of their emotional wounds.

Specifically, hurts and losses from childhood traumas will create emotional wounds which stay with us into adulthood.

These emotional wounds create problems in our adult life, such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and addictions, and these problems drive us to find healing.

There’s a five-year-old self in each of us, and it’s that part of our psyche that carries the emotional wounds and needs to be healed.

The five-year-old self believes that it can find the soothing, nurturing and love that will heal its emotional wounds, but sometimes, it mistakenly thinks that this can be done through over-eating.

Food was our first source of soothing and nurturing, and when our parents fed us, we felt loved. For many of us, it’s easy to associate eating with self-healing.

Eating gives us a short-lived sense of relief, but ultimately leaves us dissatisfied (because it can’t really heal our emotional wounds), so unfortunately, the more we eat, the hungrier we feel.

Keep It Off: Why Dieting Does Not Help

Dieting doesn’t help, because it takes away our false solution and doesn’t replace it with a real solution. The five-year-old self feels deprived and frustrated, and even if we’ve kept up the diet for a while, eventually our will-power breaks down.

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We can give up our favorite foods only for so long, until our five-year-old self becomes so unhappy that the diet fails and we go back to overeating.

So, if we don’t see that our five-year-old self is using food for their emotional healing, we can never get off the roller-coaster of dieting and regaining the weight.

The answer isn’t more dieting. We have to give our five-year-old self what it really needs.

In order to lose weight and keep it off, we have to replace the extra food with real sources of self-healing.

In my book, Loving Heart, Quiet Mind, Healthy Body: Affirmations for Transforming Your Body and Your Life, (Part 1 of my “Short and Sweet Guides to Life” series) I take you through six simple steps to easy and permanent weight loss, offering a set of tools, including positive affirmations, that will finally heal your wounded five-year-old self.

If you’re ready to take the weight off and keep it off without going on another diet, please take a look at this book.

Reference: Traci Mann, A. Janet Tomiyma, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbara Samuels, and Jason Chapman, “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer,” American Psychologist 62, no. 3 (2007): 220-33.

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About the Author

Marcia Sirota MD FRCP(C) is a board-certified psychiatrist, that does not ascribe to any one theoretical school. Rather, she has integrated her education and life experiences into a unique approach to the practice of psychotherapy. She considers herself a realist with a healthy measure of optimism. Sign up here for her free monthly wellness newsletter. Listen here to her latest podcast. marciasirotamd.com