6 Faulty Thoughts That Can Lead to Obesity

Millions of people struggle with being overweight and obese. Obesity rates in the US have been rising from 30.5% in 2000 to 42.2% in 2018. Currently 3 out of 4 Americans are not able to maintain their ideal weight.

And the obesity crisis is already affecting our children. 1 in 4 American children under 5 years is already above their ideal weight, and 14.9% are considered obese.

Among US adolescents, the rate is even higher, with 22.9% being obese and 16.6% overweight, reaching a combined rate of 40% that are not able to maintain their ideal weight.

A 2023 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that one in three adults and one in six children in the United States are affected by obesity. Obesity is a risk factor for several diseases, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some types of cancer.

We need to understand that diets alone may not be enough to control weight, because overeating that leads to weight gain is a symptom of something deeper. To deal constructively with overweight and obesity, it takes more than willpower, exercise, and counting calories.

Some people overeat because they have been emotionally abused or had intemperate role models in the family of their upbringing, as well as other factors that we will cover. Obsession is different from compulsion. Obsession is something that cannot be gotten out of one’s head, while compulsion is the repetition of a behavior.

Compulsions for anything, sex, food, work, illegal drugs, alcohol, shopping, corruption, compulsive self-humiliation, among others, serve to try to stop despair, the emotional pain that the person has not yet learned to deal with in a positive, constructive way. An adult who suffered greatly as a child because of quarrels between their parents, in some cases because of their divorce, may have become attached to food as a substitute for affection, care, and love.

This may have happened because they had easy access to food when their parents were not present or caring for them. The lack of healthy love from parents towards their child can, in some cases, lead to a compulsion for a certain substance or behavior in adulthood. Children need their father and mother to care for them because they are their caregivers, their protectors, their idols. When these parents are not available to their child, it causes a feeling of worthlessness. And the child may develop the thought that they are not good enough, because if they were, their parents would love them.

This is a flawed, distorted way of thinking, because the truth is that parents had limitations that prevented them from loving their son or daughter better. But since children need their parents, when they make mistakes, they think that their parents have failed them, because they themselves are not good children. This encourages self-rejection, self-contempt, and self-deprecation, which are attitudes that cause pain and can lead to compulsive behavior, such as compulsive eating. A girl was 3 years old when her mother left her at her grandmother’s house, saying she would return the next day.

The little girl believed her, but her mother only returned several years later. The grandmother was rude and constantly complained about having to take care of her granddaughter and would beat her. Sometimes this aggressive grandmother would hit the girl so violently that it left marks on her body. At school, the teacher would ask what had happened, and she would make up an excuse, saying that she had hurt herself while playing or that she had fallen. The girl was afraid to tell the truth, since if this would reach her grandmother’s ears, she might beat her even more. She was also afraid that her grandmother would no longer want her to stay there and that she would have nowhere to live.

Many children suffering in abusive homes run away or turn to drugs, become marginalized, abuse alcohol, become rebellious, and some become compulsive eaters. This girl started hiding food under her mattress, and in the middle of the night, when her grandmother was asleep, she would wake up because of her anxiety, fear, and sadness, and she would eat. The message was: “If I can’t get love from my mother or my grandmother, I can get food.”

The psychological beliefs that this girl learned from this conflicted upbringing and that entered her mind were as follows:

• First, I am a bad person, that is why they treat me badly, that is why my mother did not come back soon.
• Second, it is better not to trust people. My mother said she would come back, and it has been years since she left.
• Third, when someone leaves me, they never come back.
• Fourth, I am very demanding, so my grandmother treats me badly.
• Fifth, my grandmother is an adult, she knows more than I do, and she always hits me because I am bad.
• Sixth, I’d better eat because the food will never go away. My mother is gone. Food does not punish me. My mother and my grandmother do.

Over the course of her 30 years of life, this girl, as she grew up, had gained weight, lost weight, gained weight, and lost weight countless times.

She had more than one marriage, and one of them was to a husband who traveled for work. When he had to stay away from work for several days, she felt a painful loneliness, and thoughts that he would not return troubled her mind. To alleviate this, she ate. Food became her lover. As I mentioned before, compulsion is an attitude, a behavior, an addiction, an attachment to something that serves as a form of emotional survival.

Compulsion serves to anesthetize, tolerate, and numb the experience of mental pain. A person becomes compulsive because of past wounds that led them to think of themselves as worthless and therefore, unworthy of love. Compulsion can be a minor complication to deal with, compared to a major complication, which is deep emotional pain that the compulsion helps to avoid. When a person gains weight and starts to feel bad about themselves, they may use the fact that they are fat as an excuse not to get close to others.

They usually say something like, “Oh, I’m ugly, I’m fat,” and stay distant and isolated. In fact, this person may have this tendency to withdraw because when they approached important people in their past, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, etc., they were rejected. The problem, then, is not distancing themselves from people because they are fat, but because there is a wound in their past. There is still a need for treatment in relation to their memories.

The wound of having been rejected in some way made them feel bad, caused them pain, and led them to compulsive eating as a way to numb that pain. Of course, not every overweight person has dealt with rejection of parents; that’s not what I’m saying either.

• For some, it can help in the process of resolving this by first analyzing where the main fear comes from. Is it fear of being rejected, abandoned, unloved?
• Second, think about the feelings you had throughout your childhood and adolescence that were repressed because they could not be expressed in that family environment, perhaps for fear of retaliation or rejection. These feelings may include anger, hurt, fear, or shame.
• Third, choose to surround yourself today with good people who respect you, value you, and listen to you attentively.
• Fourth, give up any attempts to control others, as if it were possible to make people do what you want.
• Fifth, take care of yourself, learning to look after yourself better and take responsibility today in adulthood for doing something that promotes your well-being.
• And sixth, accept the losses, the pain, and the emptiness of the past.

Living in a way that protects us from pain probably distances us from people or keeps us tied to them in a more formal, superficial way, or with attitudes that may be aggressive or irritable. But when we allow ourselves to talk about our pain, exposing it properly, talking about it clearly, this can make it go away. With this, compulsive eating or other compulsions weaken and can be resolved. We will learn that it is no longer necessary to hide our feelings in order to survive. Like the girl who, unable to talk about her fears, talk about missing her mother in front of her aggressive grandmother, turned to food.

Lasting and genuine peace, joy, and serenity do not come from being slim after a diet, from plastic surgery, from finding a new love, from accumulating money, or from obtaining an honorable promotion with a great salary. Peace, joy, and calm arise in us when we forgive the people who have hurt us consciously or unconsciously in life, when we begin to respect ourselves and overcome thoughts of self-deprecation, when we open our hearts to trustworthy, ethical, and empathetic people, when we surrender to God without rebellion, allowing him to heal our wounds step by step, one day at a time.