RYW 142: Why Fear of Weight Gain Fuels Food Noise and Self Sabotage

So when I work with clients, I notice that they're often two slightly different groups of people.

So as I go through these, just see which one you naturally gravitate to.

there are those who are carrying a amount of weight, maybe a significant amount of weight that they would genuinely like to lose for very valid reasons.

And they're putting a huge amount of effort into making that happen.

So they often arrive, certainly in my world, feeling very frustrated because they've tried so many different approaches.

Nothing seems to have created that lasting change that they actually desire.

Then there's another group who may be a fairly socially accepted size.

They might not have a large amount of weight that they actually need or want to lose.

And in fact, some of them are already at a weight that other people would absolutely consider completely quote unquote normal.

You already know that I hate labels, but I'm using them for the understanding of what I'm trying to express here.

However, beneath the surface, there is this like tremendous amount of fear around the possibility of gaining weight.

Now, interestingly, that second group was absolutely me for an awful long time.

I'm kind of looking back on it now.

I can really see that I did spend an extraordinary amount of mental energy trying to prevent weight gain.

So at the time I would have told you, well, I want to lose a bit of weight.

And I always had this obsessive idea in my mind that life might feel slightly better if I could just get a little bit leaner, if I could be a certain number on the scale.

What I couldn't see though back then was how much of my behavior was actually being driven by fear.

Okay.

So that thought of putting on weight and created so much anxiety for me but again at the time I didn't actually realize that that was what was going on my mind would it would immediately start racing ahead into the future and I would begin like calculating what I needed to do how I needed to compensate if I thought I'd overeaten or how quickly I could like get things back under under control if I had sort of gone off the plan so to speak and um and I guess when I sort of started doing my own personal work around this I became quite fascinated by a question um and the question was what exactly am I afraid of you know if I had gained weight what did I actually believe would happen and the answer was was particularly obvious at first because the brain often disguises deepest fears as practical concerns.

So it can often present them as like a sensible reason or this like logical explanation.

Yet when I kept exploring it for myself, something much more interesting started to emerge.

So for me, the fear had very little to do with weight itself.

It was connected to what weight gain represented.

So it was very much connected to the meaning that I had attached to it.

Somewhere along the line, I had learnt that maintaining control over my body from a weight perspective was indirectly, or rather directly, sorry, linked to being accepted, to being valued, to being appreciated, feeling good enough.