Every year you commit to lose weight, and every year you fail to keep that commitment. This article will explain how to permanently lose weight and keep your commitment.
The problem
The problem isn’t what you think it is.
The problem isn’t that you lack discipline. You can look at several areas in your life and see that you are very disciplined, when you need to be. It’s not that you’re lazy, you show incredible resilience and determination when you must.
So what’s the problem?
The problem has to do with your relationships, yes, your relationships. And I’m primarily talking about your most sacred relationship, your relationship with food.
You may be thinking, “I don’t have a sacred relationship with food,” “What’s so sacred or intimate about food?”
Let me explain…
When you get married, you enter into a close relationship with the person you married, obviously; however, your relationship with food is in many ways even more intimate than the marriage relationship.
Another point…
If you become pregnant, and birth a child, that is without contradiction a very intimate relationship, but even your relationship with food is of greater intimacy than a mother-child relationship.
How can this be?
Because although you and your spouse may be “close,” you are not your spouse; your child may have come through you, but your child is not you. However, when you eat, that food (to put it quite simply) mixes with the cells in your body, and in a very literal sense becomes you. Your body consists of the food that you eat, you become what you eat – your fingers, your eyes, your feet, your skin, your stomach, your face, your fat – would not exist if were not for the food that you eat, you become what you eat.
This is a very intimate relationship; a mingling and a mixing and a miraculous transformation from food to humanity – how sacred, how intimate.
Now here’s where the problem comes in.…this intimate relationship is very special to you – too special!
If you struggle to lose weight, if you lose weight and re-gain it, if you’ve done a dozen diets, if you would love nothing more than to be thin, but can’t figure out how to get there, then this article is for you.
Your relationship with food doesn’t just involve you and food mingling to become one – like other folks. For you, food is a comforter – food makes you feel better when you’re sad, or when you’ve had a hard day. It lifts you up out of a dark place and lets you know that everything’s going to be okay. When you’re sad, food is there for you. When no one else is there for you, food is there for you. When everything else is out of control, food is never too far away to hear your cry for help, to soothe, to save, and to heal. It’s an inexpensive friend, a lover that’s always there to meet your every need. When you’re sad, when you’re bored, and especially when you’re happy, you can rely on food both day and night.
Food is a friend that will come to the movies with you, in the form of popcorn; it will travel to your hometown for Thanksgiving, no questions asked. Food will go where ever you want it to go, it’s a faithful friend – it’s a friend that sticks closer than a brother.
Although food is a faithful, dedicated, trusted and kind friend, this friend comes with consequences that you are all too familiar with, consequences that you would prefer not to live with; the consequences of fat, embarrassment, and destruction.
So it’s a relationship that must be changed, if your life is going to change.
And this is the hard part…
When you’ve been “shacking-up” with food for 20 years, it’s hard to kick that “bugger” out of your life; but you must.
Let me give it to you straight, as I’m not the best at beating around the bush; you may want to sit down.
Here it is: Your entire issue is that you’re addicted to food. You’re addicted to food the way an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol, the way a crack addict is addicted to crack, the way a gambler is addicted to gambling.
The only difference is the choice of your poison, but your addiction is an addiction all the same, and the solution will be the same.
If a gambler and an alcoholic are trapped in a life-long disease, then you too are trapped with a life-long disease — it’s the disease of over-eating.
If the alcoholic has an inappropriate relationship with alcohol, and he does, then you have an inappropriate relationship with food.
The alcoholic is addicted to the sugar in the alcohol, and you’re addicted to the sugar in food, these diseases represent two sides of the exact same coin.
The outcomes are different – but the poison is the same. One poison will make you stumble in the street; the other will clog your arteries and make your skin stretch to levels it was not designed to stretch to. Both will embarrass you and will mock you and will continue to harass you without the slightest hint of remorse.
So what do you do?
Do you let this disease inexplicably disrupt your life….or do you take action. Most people will be forced to cope with the unwelcomed disruption that this addiction offers. However, there are a select few who are willing to put this disease in its place.
There are a few, who decide to deal with this disease in the same way that the effective alcoholic deals with his disease, aka ….in a very serious manner.
The alcoholic gets help!
A Religious Perspective on Overeating
So why do humans crave food, or alcohol, or sex to the excess – why can these cravings never be satisfied.
The religious person would tell you that you were “made to crave.” They would say that you were created with a void that only a daily relationship with your creator can fill.
The religious person would say, “Because you don’t have such a relationship with your creator, you must depend on other sources of fulfillment to help keep your sanity, to help you cope, to keep you from losing it, to give you a reason to go on.”
They would claim that false fulfillments such as food, sex, alcohol, and gambling have horrific side-effects, while a relationship with your creator will only make you better (much better). They would claim the only hope for a life “free” from addictions is to switch addictions; to switch from a food addiction, to a “creator addiction” – as only the one who created you could possibly fulfill you. They would claim that freedom only exists as part of a daily walk with God.
An Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) Perspective on Overeating
The AA perspective is slightly different, the AA member would tell you that there is no freedom for you – they would say that you never get free from your disease.
After being in AA for 20 years, you still must go to the meetings and say, “My name is Mr. Self Development, and I’m an alcoholic.”
And the reason that you must say that you’re an alcoholic is because the moment that you forget that you’re an alcoholic, the moment you forget your disease, you’re subject to return to the bottle. You must constantly remind yourself of your disease, lest you forget. This approach has worked for countless numbers of people.
So the AA proclaims that they can get you “clean,” but “freedom” is elusive – you’ll have to manage your disease for the rest of your life.
I would liken the AA approach to weight watchers or Overeaters Anonymous (OA) – you succeed through proper and consistent management (with support), day-by-day.
In Closing
You must break the addiction to sugar in order to have any hope of success. These solutions are not perhaps as glamorous as the quick fixes promised by magazine covers, but unlike the magazine covers, they will provide lasting results. You may need to sit in a room with some fruits and vegetables and nuts for a few days and shake until your body begins to recover from the sugar addiction, but if you take your addiction seriously, help is to be had.