Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

Would you buy a product that had a 95% failure rate?

Not one of us would buy a car or a computer that was known to fail 95% of the time. So why then do so many of us pay enormous amounts of money and give hours of our time to diets with a 95% failure rate??

It is a fact that 95% of the overweight people who try any diet program end up fat. That means that the diet did not work. It failed.

The problem is that 99% of all diets deal with the surface causes of weight loss. It is like putting makeup over skin cancer. You don’t see the lesion anymore but nothing has been done to cure the disease.

If you are someone who has lost and then re-gained weight for years, I know how you feel. I walked the road of diet failure for years. Then I lost 65 pounds and have kept 55pounds off for 8 years. Here is what worked for me.

When I stopped looking for the right food and exercise combination, I was finally ready to explore the essential truths about real, long term weight loss. That’s because long term weight loss is not really about exercise and counting calories. Longterm weight loss occurs when and only when we discover and learn to manage the internal issues that are the real source of our eating habits.

Nothing else will work. Internal issues drive your “bad” eating habits. They become so intense that they rise up and take over and then you find yourself eating out of control.

Why are these truths forbidden? There is one simple reason: They are not fast, not easy, and not quickly profitable. Therefore, even the few diet “experts” who know these truths usually avoid them because most Americans want “quick and easy. No one is open to the real and effective facts about this subject until they have been thoroughly frustrated by the surface-oriented programs that promise a fast and painless (but guaranteed to fail) program.

What are the internal (real) issues that actually cause weight gain?

1. Food Addiction: If you think of your weight problem as a very difficult addiction, you will be immediately on the right track.
2. Inadequate Mothering: Most overweight people use food to “mother themselves because they did not get enough healthy, nourishing mothering as children. They then go to “comfort food as a temporary substitute for the missing sweetness, nourishment, care, love, attention, affirmation, acceptance, and validation that their own mother was unable to provide.
3. Fear of Strong Emotions: Out of control eating is directly connected to our fear of feeling any intense emotion. We then “eat to kill the difficult emotion, usually with comfort food.
4. Loss and Deprivation of Spiritual Needs: Spirituality is a basic human need. If we neglect this essential part of life, we often confuse soul needs with food. Since spiritual needs are intense, their neglect can cause an intense drive to eat as a temporary substitute.
5. Inadequate Stress-Management Skills: Life is tough and most of us lack certain coping tools. We then use food as a comfort mechanism.
6. Childhood Traumas: If you are more than 70 pounds overweight, there is a significant possibility that your weight gain is related to your unresolved childhood pain. Inner work is the only solution to this.

For more in-depth and tough-minded help with the real causes of weight gain and loss please contact me at my website below.

[Ed. note: Dr. Matthew Anderson is an author (The Prayer Diet), counselor and national columnist/expert on weight loss, motivation, self-management and relationships. To find tough-minded, outside-the-box guidance for taking charge of your life and/or your weight including Eating to Kill, click here.]