Achieving your ideal weight offers unique opportunities and difficult challenges. Food is your most consistent, dependable and enduring relationship. When you transform your relationship with food, you transform your life. Food, for many of you, is your relationship of last resort; it is your oldest and most predictable friend. You can completely isolate yourself and withdraw from every relationship. You can quit smoking or stop drinking alcohol and your life will improve. You cannot quit eating. You must repair the relationship. Let’s discuss how.
Obesity rates hit an all-time high in 2015-2016 at 39.6%, with 74.1% of Americans being overweight or obese. Weight loss related searches are the number four and the number ten “how to” Google searches. On the bright side, this is the first time in history where more people will die of complications from obesity than will die of starvation. I am not making light of a serious issue. The question is: How do we live a healthy life in a society, where for the first time in history, there is an abundance of food?
The Challenge
Food is great at immediately filling a void. Physical hunger creates a void which can also be described as tension. Tension always seeks resolution. When you eat for physical hunger and stop when you are satisfied, this is a healthy way to fill a void. This is a sustainable tension-resolution mechanism. When you try to fill other types of voids with food, this is when you get in trouble.
