How Your Past Can Lead to Obesity

Obesity is blamed on many things related to our physical health: food cravings, metabolism rate, thyroid issues, lack of exercise, binge eating, etc. Yet examining obesity from a psychological perspective reveals that there’s far more to obesity than just the physical causes and effects.

A healthy diet and exercise would be sufficient means for an obese person to get down to a healthy weight if obesity were a physical problem only, yet this those two tactics alone rarely are enough for obese people to lose down to and maintain a healthy weight. In addition to diet and exercise, obese people must also remove from their psyche the reasons behind their unmanageable food cravings.

While we may not be able to recall the specific experiences or details of our childhood that played significant roles in influencing the adults we have become, there’s no denying that childhood is an incredibly impressionable time in our lives. Although people who experience psychological or physical trauma in their childhood’s often try to block them out of their consciousness as they mature, the truth is that the subconscious never forgets. In fact, traumatic childhood experiences often stay buried within our subconscious and influence our behavior long into adulthood. Further, our childhood fears and traumas can manifest as the desire to binge or make unhealthy dietary choices once we’re adults.

Because children interpret what happens to them differently due to their lack of comprehension, maturity, and life experience, their perspective of what happens to them figures significantly into how their perceptions manifest. For instance, those who suffered sexual abuse at a young age often develop deep-rooted fears and insecurities in their subconscious, which in turn manifest as a desire to become and/or stay obese in a subconscious attempt to be less attractive or desirable and thereby fend off any future abuse. In this sense, obesity can make a person feel safer and more secure since they shield them from unwanted attention.

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