Weight-Loss Apocalypse

When someone comes to me for help, they are seeking guidance for how to rid the horrific side-effects of dieting. These effects are described as chronic anxiety, paranoia, panic, fear, and obsessive thinking about size, weight, clothes, food, and restrictions. They are ridden with incessant pressure to fix their body, anxiety about food, and are heavily burdened by the daily task of starving in order to feel safe and adequate in their body. When you look at the negative emotions one has about themselves, it's clear why the abuse and dysfunction of dieting is rationalized as a worthy cause. The obsessive mental focus on restrictions, food, and exercise are promoted as “healthy”, with the underlying belief that all of the negative emotions will go away once their body is good enough. The problem with this focus is that it misdirects and projects the original emotions one has about themselves onto the body. But in fact, the emotions were there prior to believing weight-loss woul...

The link between body image and depression, low self-esteem, social anxiety, and eating disorders has been studied as a personal psychological problem for well over fifty years. Because the prevalence of eating disorders and body image based problems have skyrocketed over the last 20 years, the discussion of body image is now being looked at not strictly as a personal psychological problem, but rather an indication of a social problem. This is great news for us parents! As the body image epidemic grows culturally, we can recognize the problem and prevent it from spreading to our own children. But first, we need to recognize it in ourselves, and we need to understand what body image is. What is body image? Body image is defined as a person using his or her body to construct a sense of self. The image of who she is becomes psychologically constructed by how she looks, her attractiveness, her sexuality, how her body performs (athletically), or if her body is healthy. In short, body i...