Question:
Who is the more disciplined: an individual who loves daily exercise and makes healthy food choices or someone who hates being overweight, doesn’t exercise and makes poor food choices?
Answer:
The individual who maintains an overweight lifestyle despite hating it is the more disciplined of the two.
The fact is; it’s far easier to maintain something you enjoy. It takes little or no discipline. To hate being overweight and yet to continue the patterns that create one’s loathing, well that sounds like quite a commitment, doesn’t it?
The answer seems pretty simple when looked at from that angle. It follows that there is a psychological accounting involved that is largely out of one’s awareness. Obesity and Eating Disorders can be caused by a variety of psychological (and some physiological factors) and most can be overcome and controlled. The psychological factors can include:
- Chastity Fat
- The physical protection conferred by size
- Some social invisibility
- An adaptation to trauma or sexual abuse
- And many others
From my own lifelong weight struggles, through my two years at MRFIT (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial), the largest NIH pre-AIDS project ever funded (designed to intervene in the major coronary risk factors), and beyond being chief psychologist and creator of the psychological program of the MNP (the national Metabolic Nutrition Program) where I personally treated over 3,000 patients and supervised the treatment of approximately 30,000 more, I have found one or more of these issues in play for the vast majority of persons 40 or more pounds overweight. MNP had the best weight loss numbers of its day and the best weight loss maintenance numbers as well.
Call for more information and/or an appointment and we can begin your psychological accounting and map out your road to wellness.