How do people get to be tremendously fat? I don’t mean a little chunky, beefy, or heavyset. I’m talking prodigious, massive, positively huge.

I was one of those people (very recently, in fact).

I believe severe obesity is, for many people, the result of something I call (for lack of a better name) the obesity cycle:

The Obesity Cycle

(and how to escape it)

1. Fear of failure

Sure, packing on pounds is a failure in itself. But a slow, consistent failure is easier to digest than the dramatic failure of giving up in the middle of an extreme diet. No matter how you gained the weight, it only takes a few failed diets before you start to think that perhaps diets aren’t for you and that you’re destined to be obese for life. It gets worse. Many binge dieters don’t just gain back the weight lost during extreme diets. They typically add a few extra pounds for good measure! This creates a situation in which logic dictates that going on diets will lead to even more weight gained.

Escape phrase: “My failings do not make me a failure.”

Escape route: Use tiny triumphs to remind yourself that you can follow through and do what you’ve promised yourself you’d do. Try walking for ten minutes every day for a week. Once you can do that, add more difficult challenges. Don’t feel stupid for being happy that you’ve done something small. YOU DIDN’T FAIL. Revel in it, remember it, and use that thought to push for greater wins. You can do this!

2. Low self-esteem

You don’t have to be fat to feel badly about yourself. You might not have as pretty a face as you’d like. You might not be as smart as you’d like. There are so many reasons to feel poorly about oneself! At least, there are if you decide to dwell on them. If you don’t feel like you are worth taking care of, guess what happens? You stop taking care of yourself. Low self-esteem is a popular way to enter the obesity cycle and it’s one of the most difficult to escape. Why? Because it’s all in your head. There isn’t a person in the world who can truly convince you that you are worth taking care of. You have to choose for yourself.

Escape phrase: “I am deserving of care, love, and forgiveness when I forget to show care and love to myself.”

Escape route: Ask yourself, ”am I unhappy because I’m overweight or am I overweight because I’m unhappy?” Then again, you might be the jolliest fat person in the world… or at least pretend to be. We know you cry yourself to sleep at night under a blanket of potato chip bags and snickers bar packages! I’m not a psychiatrist and I can’t offer you some 35-step plan to emotional nirvana. What I can offer you is the affirmation that you are worth taking care of. You are worth the ups and downs, pain and joy, laughter and tears of this adventure toward recognizing your value as a person.

3. Emotional eating

You eat when you’re happy, sad, alone, in a group, bored, excited… you pretty much eat as your primary physical response to stimuli. This is the part of the cycle that leads to a lot of consistent weight gain because it involves us using food to chase the pain resulting from failures and low self-esteem!

Escape phrase: “I give myself permission to express my emotions and will strive to seek real solutions to my problems and not try to hide my pain with food.”

Escape route: Watch this video and read the included article for a possible solution to your emotional eating. Some cool people left amazing comments that you might find helpful as well!

4. Poor body image

This is the part where a lot of people break into diatribes (angry speeches) about how the media is to blame for the way we view our own bodies. Some of that might be true for the people who need to lose 5lbs in order to look like a Victoria’s Secret model. I daresay none of it applies to the excessively obese among us (myself included). But we act like it does. We look at magazines, watch movies, and browse websites filled with images of people who don’t look like us. We think, “wow, if I looked like Brad Pitt then women like Angelina Jolie would want to date me.” Is it true? In part, yes, and we all know what you do when you’re feeling like crap because Angelina isn’t calling you: You put as many cheeseburgers between you and Brad Pitt as possible. This makes you fatter and gives you more reason to feel like a big fat failure.

Escape phrase: “If I had [insert celebrity name]’s body would I actually take care of it or would I soon be overweight again, eating chips and wishing I looked like [insert celebrity different celebrity name]?”

Escape route: It’s diagram time! Take a piece of paper (or open new document on your computer) and write the name of a celeb or person you wish you looked like. Now write down what you think it would feel like to wake up in the morning (alone) as that person. I think you’ll be surprised by how well you take care of your celebrity body in contrast to the way you treat yourself on a daily basis.

When I’ve asked overweight friends to try this exercise, every single one of them made their celebrity body eat a healthy breakfast and work out in the early morning. Not to get all woo-woo on you but this might just be a situation in which visualizing yourself as the person you want to be can lead to your becoming that person.

5. Isolation

It is a very, very lonely thing to be extremely overweight. When you stop caring about yourself, feel like a failure, look different from others, and you consistently feel like crap… it’s easy to see why you’d feel alone. It’s awkward to eat with others because you imagine they’re all watching you eat and judging you. Everybody is watching and thinking badly of you when you’re very heavy. Well, at least that’s what you’ve convinced yourself of. The more alone you feel, the more you eat to stave off the pain. This, as you well know deep inside, is not going to work in the long run.

Pass phrase: “I will no longer allow my weight challenge to dictate how I interact with my community.” (If you’re 600lbs and want to go rock climbing with your friends… you’ll want to modify this phrase a bit until you’ve dropped some weight.)

Escape route: Choose a non-eating activity that involves other people and participate in it regularly. If you’d like to really set yourself free, pick something that none of your friends do. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to try your hand at comedy? Sign up for a night class and really get into it! This has two benefits. The first is that you’ll be doing something you enjoy that involves human interaction but not eating. The second is that the people who have only known you to be very overweight will be the quickest to notice when you lose weight. Call me crazy but there’s nothing quite so cool as having a new friend remark on your seemingly improved health!

Do you have any questions, thoughts, additional wisdom or a story of your own to add? I’ll look for you in the comments!

::raises hand::

Well, I was. The only emotions I have about eating these days are joy and exultation. I really like eating. I had a problem though. I was eating whenever I felt stressed, frustrated, or anxious. Get this, I even ate when I was disgusted with myself for losing control over my body and turning into a mega chubster.

Talk about a vicious cycle!

I needed a solution. I found it in exercise. This should make sense to you at a very basic level because most of us, at one point or other, have expressed our feelings about a stressful situation in a physical way. As kids we were pretty good about letting our stress out. We screamed, slammed doors, knocked things over, lay down and pounded the floor with our fists (my favorite), or just sobbed wretchedly.

Then we grew up. We learned that if we wanted to be like Mr. Knightley we’d have to stop knocking things over and screaming when things didn’t go our way. (Okay, that may have just been me?) We learned to internalize everything. Nobody told us that we could let out our frustrations in a productive way. If they did, we were already too deep in the double fudge chunk ice cream to hear them.

You don’t need to be overweight for this to apply to you. I have quite a few slim friends who eat, drink, or smoke when life is jerking them around.

It’s easy to be an emotional eater. Life is stressful, you have to eat anyhow, and the process of eating gives you something to do while you’re thinking about life. Sitting down with a big dish of ice cream to watch Love Actually for the 35th time might sound good at first. Do you really need a high cholesterol catharsis though?

I decided I no longer needed Taco Bell grilled stuffed burritos in order to feel better. I was getting super fat. I needed a change. But what was I to do? How was I supposed to handle stress if not by eating?

I still had three options:

1. Cry – Oh yeah, sob like a big angry, frustrated baby. There is no shame in tears if things are bad and you need a physical release. It’s not socially acceptable for dudes to cry so gentlemen will want to grow lachrymose behind closed doors. Ladies, if you like to cry a lot, please invest in some quality waterproof eye make-up. A beautiful woman shedding a few tears isn’t frightening. A sobbing raccoon is terrifying.

2. Scream – You’ve probably met at least one screamer in your life. Something about the restaurant industry tends to attract screamers in droves. Screaming at people isn’t cool. Screaming in an empty building, at a sports event, or in your bathroom because life sucks–all quite cool.

3. Exercise – This is my favorite solution to pent-up stress. Want to feel better with just a few minutes of effort? Get your heart rate up and keep it there until you start to break a sweat. Emotional exercising has a few benefits:

• It won’t make you fat – To the contrary, you might get quite fit from this if your life is very stressful.
• It gives you control – You’re no longer the victim of uncontrolled eating. You are choosing health. You have the power.
• It makes you smarter – Increasing blood flow to your brain has a way of helping make sense of priorities and difficult questions.
• It makes you sexier – Instead of being angry and snapping at people, you’ll now have a glint in your eye and a glow to your face. Yum!
• It makes food taste better – When you stop using food as a medication, it regains some of the joy that made it so attractive in the first place. Mashed potatoes with tears in them are too salty, man!

It’s working for me. Food tastes better, I’m losing weight, and my general mood has improved. You see, I’m a rather lazy chap and if I know I’ll have to go for a run if I stay grouchy… I choose happiness. =)

I hope you’ll try it. If you struggle with emotional eating (skinny people fess up!) I hope you’ll take a moment to share your thoughts? I’d love you for it!

If you’d like to receive future Primal Stride articles by RSS or email (it’s free) I’d really appreciate your support!

Confessions:

1. I’m terrified of making videos. I don’t have the software or know-how to tweak videos into delightful goodness… so I just talk into a cheap camera.

2. I laugh at fat jokes. Yeah, I’m a fat person. If anything, that should mean I get the jokes and find them more amusing than anybody else? I share one joke in the video… did you laugh?

New Year’s Resolutions:

What’s yours? Are you trying to lose weight, work out more, or just live a healthier lifestyle? Check the video for my thoughts on how to make your resolution stick to your ribs. =)

Have a great holiday and remember, if you have any chubby friends who need a buddy to slim down with, send them on over! It’s not insulting to care about your friends.