Using Psychology to Lose Weight
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What is it that makes a woman eat like there’s no tomorrow? Check out her backstory and you’ll find out. Here’s an example of the kind of backstory that I’m talking about.
A woman in her thirties, a wife and mother, had low self-esteem since she was a child. She remembered her self-esteem issues having to do with thinking she wasn’t good enough in many different respects. She was self-conscious, felt she stuck out like a sore thumb, and was convinced since age eight that she was too fat. This quite beautiful and very thoughtful woman was habitually critical of herself from childhood to adulthood. There was always something she did or didn’t do that she would criticize herself for. Her eating fell into this same category of something with which she could disparage herself.
What was this woman’s motive for such self-condemnation? The woman didn’t realize that the catalyst for having such a hurtfully, negative outlook had to do with her mother getting away from her constantly, the mother leaving the daughter to enhance her own life rather than “be there” for her daughter.
Overeating and snacking on fattening foods was this woman’s way of giving herself yet another reason for attacking herself and for feeling depressed about herself. Her focus on her weight, her body shape, and her shortcomings protected her from being aware of her mother’s repeated desertion. She didn’t want to think of her mother like this. The woman wanted to think of her mother as “being there” for her.
