“It’s always like this,” one client said to me. “I do good for about three weeks then I mess up.” She had tried many diets in the past and always fell off track a few weeks into her efforts.
I found out she began feeling resistant and resentful about dieting soon after she started. “I want to eat what I want to eat,” she told me. She soon stopped following her food plan and quit journaling.
Yet she also professed how much she desperately wanted to lose weight.
“You need to figure out why you’re feeling resistant,” I told her. “It seems will power is able to hold you to your diet for a little while, but then that wears off and something else is going on.”
“Food means a lot to you,” I said. “To give it up that food isn’t just giving up food. It’s giving up what that food means to you.”
I asked her to take this week and think about how she’s feeling and what her thoughts are about food. Food is obviously much more than nourishment. It’s an emotional bridge she is hanging on to tenaciously and is afraid to give up. Dieting makes her feel angry and resentful because she feels something valuable is being taken from her.
Until she begins to uncover her emotional attachments to food, it will be very difficult for her to progress.
How about you? Do you say you want to lose weight, yet feel angry and resentful about making changes?
Try to uncover your emotional attachment to food. You may need a counselor to help you work through this.
