If you’re a regular reader of Fearless Fat Loss, I know you don’t expect that I’m going to give you a new, magical cure for your overweight, an easy solution for weight loss 😉 However, it might surprise you that I do actually have the magic solution for weight loss, it just might not be what you expect, or where you would expect to find it.

The magic cure won’t cost you anything except the price of your time, your emotions, your honesty, and probably a notebook and a pencil. It doesn’t involve buying into a new diet or exercise machine, but it does involve work, hard work. It also means getting to know someone very special who holds the magical key to why you are overweight today. Please allow me to introduce this wonderful, special, and unique person to you – please insert Your Name here.

That’s right, this isn’t a joke, you are the one who holds all of the answers to why you are overweight today. Now, I do need to clarify a couple of things here – if the only reason you are overweight is because you don’t understand how unhealthy and non-nutritional processed food is for you and you continually choose the wrong foods (non-nutritional, processed, and/or fast foods), and you only eat when hungry, stop when you’re full, and do not overeat, then you aren’t the one I’m talking to.

This post is for you if you are an emotional eater: you use food to cope with life and your upsetting, icky, “don’t want to go there” emotions, you eat whether or not you are hungry (most of the time you aren’t hungry), and you overeat. You eat unconsciously without a thought to what is driving you, and you eat to deal with any emotion that you don’t want to feel or think about at the time. You eat for boredom, procrastination, fear, happiness, sadness, or loneliness; you eat for any reason besides the biological feeling of hunger and to fuel your body.

There was a reason that you became an emotional eater and started abusing food because of your emotions. This could have started last week, or years ago. It might have been a traumatic event in your life, or a learned behavior that was passed down in your family (you don’t feel good? then eat!). We can only deal with today however, and today your job is to go inside and discover what the cause of your overeating is, the overeating which leads to the symptom of overweight.

Now you might say that you overeat because you’re depressed about being overweight. But are you eating because you are depressed, or depressed because you overeat and are overweight? This is a critical distinction, and if you are clinically depressed, this is something that you need professional assistance with. If however, you are feeling down because you have allowed yourself to become overweight, then it all comes back to discovering why you started using food for your emotions in the first place so that you can break this cycle today.

If you do not go through this process of inner discovery, you are only putting a band-aid on your symptom (overweight) when you put yourself on another diet. You are only attacking your overweight (symptom), instead of healing the underlying cause of your symptom. This is a major reason for so many repeat dieters who are emotional eaters – they still haven’t healed their bottom line habit of using food to cope with life.

Does this mean that learning how to eat properly and exercise regularly doesn’t have any value? No, not at all, but until you are right with yourself and become conscious of why you overeat, a diet just isn’t going to help you in the long run. There might be exceptions to this, people who have done their inner work either along the way or after they got their body in shape. They realized that they better get their mind and emotions in line, otherwise they would end up back where they started, but these would be exceptional cases.

Yes, there still other factors involved in weight management, such as nutrition, exercise, learning about addictive ingredients and your trigger foods, learning how to eat for health and exercise productively, as well as other topics. However, if you do not break the cycle of emotional eating and choose to feel those feelings instead of burying them under food, you will more than likely end up regaining the weight you lose, and possibly even more. A diet only solves the problem of the outer, physical symptom (your overweight); it doesn’t solve the inner, emotional cause that drives you to use food and emotionally eat.

I encourage you to get to know yourself and raise your consciousness about why you overeat, why you eat for emotional reasons, why you eat when you aren’t hungry. If you can master this and understand what is motivating you to eat for reasons other than biological hunger, you will be well on your way to a lifetime of successful weight management.

This post is meant to raise your awareness of your emotional eating. Tomorrow we will look at a tool that you can use to help yourself become conscious of why you are using food for your emotions.