For the Love of Food – or Not…
Often times, obese members of society are stereotyped as lovers of food. Many diets have been designed to “curb your appetite” (Dexatrim) or let you “eat as often as you like” (Atkins.) The extremely obese population, who desire to lose more than fifty pounds, cannot generally find success in this type of diet program. Why?
Severe obesity generally stems, not from a love for food, but for a lack of love for oneself. A diet which keeps one from overeating does nothing to reduce one’s stress, or increase one’s self-esteem. Increased stress levels result in an impaired metabolic rate and an increase in fat cell production. Most instances of overeating are not even related to one’s appetite. Rather, someone who suffers from extreme stress or depression may have been turning to food to comfort oneself.
The best medication one can take is a healthy dose of self-esteem. This may mean seeking some variation of professional help. Not everybody needs a shrink, per say, but if someone is experiencing marital distress, marriage counseling is highly recommended. Those experiencing the empty wallet, empty bank account syndrome should most definitely gain financial counseling. If someone hates his or her job, career counselors are readily available from a variety of sources to help people change careers. Classes or training for a new field are also advisable.
The most common issue in personal dissatisfaction, leading to low self-esteem and obesity, is a consistent failure to accomplish one’s dreams. In the most simple forms, achieving goals seems easy, but it is the ultimate dream which always seems impossible towards which all smaller goals should lead. When this does not happen, discouragement sets into the human heart.
For instance, suppose you are a single parent, living off Welfare, but you want more than anything to be a professional writer. The first thing you should do is look at the prize: a professional writer. Then you need to know what qualities and training a professional writer must have in order to be hired. This can be done by sifting through the job boards and classified ads. From this point, you should work your goal steps backwards until you are at your present situation. Once this is done, you will have a road map leading you from Welfare to working professional.
When you work your plan from the end result to your current position, you will always be headed in the right direction as you proceed through the steps. Therefore, if you are obese, and you want to lose weight, you need to observe several people who are at the proportions you would like to be. These become your survey subjects. What characteristics, in general, separate you from them, besides the weight factor? You should be able to compose a list of factors common to most, if not all, of your survey subjects. These factors become the requirements of the “advertised job.” Now all you have to do is work backwards to develop a plan.
It is not usually for the love of food that we, as a people, grow obese. There are many underlying factors which slow our metabolisms, but we can change. We can work backwards to set appropriate goals to correct individual problem areas, so we can move forwards, toward our dreams.