Would weight loss and dieting be a lot easier if you did NOT have food cravings and a high drive to overeat?

Of course it would!

But few understand the most important source of food compulsion.

Two weeks into the nutrition changes I coached her to make, Melinda reflected in astonishment, “I’m just not feeling like I have to eat all of the time like I did. Somehow I don’t have the NEED to eat that I did! I get hungry, and I eat, but the compulsion to eat … the drive to eat … is just not there like it was. This is going to make weight loss … and more important, last weight control … MUCH easier!”

Interestingly, few professionals can help with this type of quick resolution of food compulsion. Why? They fail to understand the most important cause of food cravings and overeating. The only place an overeating condition … emotional eating … food cravings … compulsive eating … shows up for diagnostic purposes is in “The Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders” as “Binge Eating Disorders”. The entire professional world believes that overeating is psychological in origin!

If we’re smart, we should ask, “Why is this the case?” This is the case because, as you likely know, this food compulsion feels like it is emotional in origin. You have the “angst”, the thought of food enters you mind, you eat something starchy sweet (the thought of broccoli or eggs never enters your mind under these circumstances!), and the “edge” is gone from the angst.

While I am not arguing that there is no emotional component to overeating, I am arguing that there is a critically important, and often overlooked, physiological component. As a psychotherapist using psychotherapy, I NEVER achieved the quick results that Melinda achieved! Using simple and relatively easy nutrition techniques that regulate the body’s pancreatic function (the organ that controls blood sugar), the average person experiences a 50-75% decrease in the following:

q Food cravings
q The overall drive to overeat
q Difficulty with carbohydrate
q “Emotional” Eating
q Tendency to binge
q Fatigue
q Depressive tendency

“ So why does the professional world not know this?” You ask. It is a good question. First, compulsive eating “looks, feels, smells and tastes” like it is emotional in origin. The old saying “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck … then it’s probably a duck” is likely the reason why. In this case, it’s usually NOT a duck, at least not completely.

Further, research supports my contention that there is a CRITICALLY SIGNIFICANT physiological dynamic giving rise to overeating in most cases. I have located a cluster of scientific journal articles that reflect this understanding. An example of this understanding from the scientific journal, Obesity Review in November of 2002, follows:

“Short-term feeding studies have generally found an inverse association between high glycemic index foods and satiety.”

In other words, what we eat affects our level satiety (sense of fullness) and ultimately how much we need to eat!

In summary, I cannot tell you how many women have sat across the table from me and sobbed. They sobbed because they had believed for years that their inability to control food occurred because they were weak … or flawed … or somehow broken. No one had showed them how to control the underlying physiology with relatively easy nutrition techniques. For the first time, they saw that their compulsive eating had NOTHING to do with a character weakness, and everything to do with what they had been eating and how it affected their bodies!

That’s the way it looks from here at The Castle …

Gary Avignon, a psychotherapist of almost 20 years, specializes with the psychology of nutrition, compulsive eating and weight loss. He is the author of a revolutionary new book, Weight Wizardry 101: Introduction to The Psychology of Successful Weight Control. YOU can nab Chapter One, “The Single Biggest Secret That Causes Diet Failure”, for *FR*EE* for a limited time at http://www.theweightwizard.com.