Lose Weight and Keep It Off

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By Marcia Sirota, MD

I’ve been working with over-eaters for many years, and I’ve learned a secret about weight loss:

It’s not that hard to lose (even a lot of) weight. The trick is to keep it off.

Keep It Off: The Study

We’ve all seen people lose 100 or more pounds on reality TV shows or when promoting specific diets, only for the weight to gradually creep back, until they’re just as heavy as before or even heavier.

A recent study done at the University of California showed that most diets will lead to short-term weight loss, but that within five years at most, the person will gain back the weight, and even gain more weight than before.

The authors’ conclusion was that in every case, the dieters would have been better off not to have gone on the diet in the first place, as yo-yo dieting is much worse for our health than just being overweight.

So, if diets have been proven to fail, and even be bad for our health, what should we do? When it comes to weight, how can we keep it off?

Keep It Off: The Solution

Whether we struggle with 15 extra pounds, 50 or 150, we want a real and lasting solution to our problem. No-one wants to be on an eternal seesaw of dieting and then gaining back the weight.

Fortunately, in my work as a psychotherapist, I’ve discovered the solution to this problem, and it came from understanding its real cause:

People overeat and are overweight because of their emotional wounds.

Specifically, hurts and losses from childhood traumas will create emotional wounds which stay with us into adulthood.

These emotional wounds create problems in our adult life, such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and addictions, and these problems drive us to find healing.

There’s a five-year-old self in each of us, and it’s that part of our psyche that carries the emotional wounds and needs to be healed.