Stop Feeding your Brain

I'm an obsessive reader of research concerning the benefit and difficulty of losing weight.

My father and his two brothers died young from coronary heart disease. My father was 58 at the time of his death. He did not live to see his first grandchild.

We did not know about the harmful effects of diet and lifestyle when I was growing up. That is no longer the case.

Ironically, we have more knowledge at the same time that we have greater levels of obesity among young and old.

There are many theories of the causes of weight gain in this country, but they basically boil down to the inverse relationship between activity level and caloric intake - one goes down while the other goes up.

I also think that we are misreading basic cues. We may eat because we're suffering from unmet physical needs, such as sleep or sexual relations, or from psychological ones. We eat when we're stressed, overworked, frustrated, bored, depressed, lonely or angry. We eat to feed ourselves in a primal, primitive way.

Food = love, according to the emotional brain.

It takes conscious effort to sever this connection. When one does, however, one is on the road to solving much more than a weight problem.