Repeated Weight Regain Is a Complex Problem

Today though I want to go back to the front end of those conversations and look at something that happens before we have been choose to take action and that is how we define our weight problem.

because the way we frame any problem will influence the kind of solution we look for, what we expect to achieve out of it, and how we judge the results.

And this is particularly important here because the biggest myth of weight loss is that weight regain is a simple overeating problem with a simple dieting solution.

And there's nothing further from the truth.

Yet much of the way we think about and talk about weight assumes that it is.

If the weight goes up, it's because we're eating too much.

So reduce the calories, lose the weight, problem solved.

This also leads to a binary way of judging the results.

The diet worked or it didn't, you succeeded or you failed.

And I think that goes a long way in explaining why so much blame and shame gets directed to body weight.

If the problem is straightforward and the solution is obvious, then when we carry extra weight or the weight returns, judgment very quickly turns personal.

But what if we've defined the problem incorrectly in the first place? Because by the time we reach midlife, we've had decades of experience solving problems, whether it's for work, family, even our health.

If something needs fixing, we work out what to do and we take action.

But not all problems are of the same type or respond in the same way.

and applying the type of thinking that works well for one type of problem can become completely inadequate and sometimes even backfire for another.

So today I want to look at three common types of problems, simple, complicated, and complex, and what that distinction tells us about the way we go about solving repeated weight regain.

Because weight fits very easily into this way of thinking, because both the problem and the solution appear obvious.

You see a photograph of yourself that you don't like, or you see a number on the bathroom scales that you said you would never return to, and almost immediately we're thinking about what you're going to do about it.

cut back on certain foods start going to the gym again stop eating junk food maybe even restart that diet that worked last time but of course at the top level there are always two parts to solving a problem and in this case we can investigate the weight and we can investigate the solutions And with so many weight loss solutions everywhere, thinking about spending more time investigating the weight part can seem unnecessary, because if you already know the answer to losing weight, what is there left to know about the problem? Yet the answer to that question really depends on how we define the problem we're dealing with.