THAT'S MEN: OBESITY HAS more to do with mood than appetite, with your brain more than your stomach.
Understanding this principle is the first step to doing something about it. In fact, it might be more important than any other measure an obese person could take.
As counsellor Mary Jo Rapini puts it in an article on psychcentral.com, the obese person knows the difference between healthy and unhealthy food and may have made many attempts to adopt a healthy lifestyle.
The question the obese person needs to ask is: what do I get out of obesity? What’s in it for me?
Do you overeat? Are you afraid you don’t measure up at work, at home, in social gatherings? Are you using food to fill the gap? Maybe being obese means people expect less of you? Maybe that’s the payoff?
If factors like these are behind your overeating, you need other, better ways to handle your feelings about yourself and you need to change your thinking about yourself. Otherwise, efforts to cut down on food intake may be doomed to failure.
Loneliness and boredom contribute to obesity too – but why are you lonely? Why are you bored? What is stopping you from handling your boredom or loneliness differently?
Knowing the answers to these questions is a prerequisite to getting the weight off.
Sometimes obesity has darker origins. People who have been sexually abused may eat to put on excessive weight, which has the effect of making them less attractive – the cause and effect are clear in this case.
Nor is fighting the obesity a simple matter for people in this situation.
A huge amount of the harm done by the abuse has to be reversed if the person is to change his or her behaviour.
For instance, if a man or woman has put on weight in order to be less attractive and if a diet regime makes them more attractive, then, as Rapini points out, an expression of interest from another person may drive them back to excessive eating as a way of dulling anxiety.
None of which means we should go around making assumptions about why individual people are obese.
Obesity, for instance, can be a family style. In a resort in Lanzarote, during the blessed days of the Celtic Tiger, I watched in awe as entire obese families helped themselves in the all-you-can-eat restaurant – the cost of eating for the week was included in the accommodation price.
They floated between buffet and table in what seemed like a state of contentment as they gathered up helping after helping. It was fascinating to watch obese parents and their obese children in this setting.
My guess is that these were not families in which problems were thrashed out in the open – all difficulties were buried beneath a mound of comforting food.
Diabetes, early heart attacks and so on are an occupational hazard of living in such families, but if that’s what you have grown up with, getting yourself slim as a greyhound may require a level of change that most of us might find impossible to attain. Because it’s not just a matter of eating differently.
You have to become someone else, someone who develops an entirely different way of dealing with life’s difficulties and challenges. That’s a very tall order – try it sometime.
I should acknowledge that having a genetic predisposition to obesity doesn’t help, but predispositions need to be triggered, so we’re back to the question: what do you get out of it?
Neither does the gradual disappearance of manual labour for men as every task, even sweeping up leaves, is taken over by machines. But the machines are not making people dangerously fat.
The essential point in all of this is that obesity is an area in which treating the emotions, and the mind, can be more important than treating the body.
Mary Jo Rapini’s article is at bit.ly/jorapini
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.