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Weight Loss

Exploring our emotional relationship with food

Weight loss is one of the most common goals of men, women and a growing number of children, across the UK today.  Demographic and anthropological studies illustrate how our lifestyles have changed over the past few decades.  The advancements of modern living have taken their toll on our general health and wellbeing.  Most households have a car and so walk less, budgets are tight, so fee paying activities have decreased, we have developed a culture of fast living and even faster food and our children are more sedentary with the advent and growth of a technological gaming culture.  At least one of these factors affects most people.  All of this adds up to a less active population and the attendant weight gain issues.

The weight loss market is a buoyant one, with new diets, celebrity workouts and dietary products claiming to help us lose weight fast, coming to our attention through various media on an almost daily basis.  Many people enjoy initial weight loss, which in some cases can be dangerously rapid, but regain the weight after a short time.  So why don’t these approaches work in the long term?

Let’s look at this problem at its most basic level:

Calorie Intake (Food and Drink) > Calorie Use (Exercise) = Weight Gain

Calorie Intake (Food and Drink) < Calorie Use (Exercise) = Weight Loss

Calorie Intake (Food and Drink) = Calorie Use (Exercise) = Weight Maintenance

Easy?  Yes, of course and most people are fully aware of these balance issues.  So, with a nutritionally balanced diet and the right amount of exercise, which are essential components of a healthy lifestyle, why isn’t weight loss simple and easy?

The answer is that our relationship with food is an emotional one and there are psychological elements to our eating patterns and habits.  The emotional connection with food and drink is different for everyone and so can’t be addressed by generic weight loss programmes, it’s a very personal and individual state of mind.  Some people eat to relieve boredom, some to experience comfort and satisfaction, others to reward themselves or even to punish themselves, it’s different for everyone.  These patterns and habits can become so severe, that seemingly uncontrollable compulsions occur, leading to acute health problems.

At Quest for Success, we help you to identify and understand your behavioural and habitual patterns and strategies relating to food and show you how to change them into patterns and strategies that will be more helpful to you than the old ones. 

We will show you how to remove your compulsion to eat unnecessarily and how to control emotionally driven cravings for food. 

We can even show you how to remove your desire for specific foods which cause you a particular problem in your weight control and how to take control of your metabolic rate so that you can lose weight slowly and safely (Around 2lb per week is the recommended rate of loss). 

During the programme, you will also have the opportunity to understand problems which are not immediately obviously linked to weight control, but which may contribute to your emotional relationship with food.So, with a nutritionally balanced diet, appropriate exercise and a healthy psychological approach to food, you can start to lose weight right now!  All you need is the desire and determination to change and we will show you how.