Emotions Can Sabotage Weight Loss Progress

How many times have you, after a particularly hard day, reached for some chocolate or ice cream? It’s common for many people, but for those trying to lose weight, it can be detrimental to their long term success, and most weight-loss programs never even address it.

They focus on choosing healthier foods and exercising more, but they never answer a key question: how can people who have eaten to cope with emotions change their eating habits, when they haven’t learned other ways of coping with emotions?

Researchers at Temple’s Center for Obesity Research are trying to figure out the answer as part of a new, NIH-funded weight loss study. The new treatment incorporates skills that directly address the emotional eating, and essentially adds those skills to a state-of-the art behavioral weight loss treatment.

“The problem that we’re trying to address is that the success rates for long-term weight loss are not as good as we would like them to be,” said Edie Goldbacher, a postdoctoral fellow at CORE. “Emotional eating may be one reason why people don’t do as well in behavioral weight loss groups, because these groups don’t address emotional eating or any of its contributing factors.” Read more

The Power Of Food

Most of life’s circumstances are beyond our control. Family, work and busy schedules can bring all of us a certain amount of stress and anxiety. In my work with patients with difficulty managing their weight, stress is often reported as the number one thing that triggers emotional eating, which means reaching for food for comfort and support rather than asking for help. Why? Because asking for help is hard. We tell ourselves stories about what it means to not have it all figured out, and then feel embarrassed, ashamed and just plain afraid of what others will think of us because we are facing the same challenges we faced six months or a year ago.

What I’d like to emphasize is that most people are just so over scheduled, over committed and exhausted that asking for help also feels like one more thing to add to an extremely long “to do” list. However, research suggests that people are more likely to stick with any weight control program when a calorie controlled meal plan is combined with some form of group support. In fact, it doesn’t have to be professional support, although that is a reliable source, it could be a committed team of family and friends who are emotionally available and know your struggles. The key factor in making a support system work for you is finding and educating people about how they can support you no matter what challenges you are facing. Here are a few simple steps that might make getting started easier: Read more