Why does my weight always come back?
If your weight keeps coming back, you’re not alone, and you’re not failing. Most women who’ve been dieting for years face the same pattern: you lose weight, maybe even feel hopeful… then the weight slowly returns. This isn’t because you’re lazy, weak, or lack discipline. It’s because you’ve been trying to fix the wrong problem.
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Diets work by controlling food. But food was never the core problem, it was the outcome of something deeper. At Weighting for Happiness, we call this the Eating System. It’s not a habit. It’s not a lack of knowledge. It’s a complex system made up of emotional patterns, unconscious rules, early life experiences, and survival responses.
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If that system remains untouched, any diet will only offer temporary results. The system eventually reasserts itself, often through automatic eating behaviours like relief eating or constrained eating—and the weight returns.
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To stop recurring weight, you need to understand how your Eating System works. That includes identifying the full range of eating types - not just dieting and overeating - and uncovering what role food plays beyond fuel.
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You can’t fix what you can’t see. But once you do see it, real, permanent change becomes not just possible - but predictable.
Why can't I stop bingeing?
When used as a clinical term, binge eating refers to a diagnosed eating disorder.
However, the term ‘bingeing’ has become overused and generic and applied to any form of overeating.
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Relief eating, by contrast, is a semi-automatic response driven by the need to restore balance in the Eating System. It’s about eating until a sense of relief is reached.
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The generic use of ‘bingeing’ narrows the focus to just the eating component. Where relief eating has three stages:
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Hungering – The system signals imbalance, creating an urge to eat.
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Eating – Food is consumed almost automatically, until a level is reached.
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Resolution – Balance is restored, bringing a sense of relief.
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When relief eating is part of your life, understanding what’s triggering the imbalance is the first step toward making different choices.
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If you'd like free support to understand if you are Relief Eating rather than Bingeing, sign up for our Learning Lab and download the Guide to get your answers.