Solving weight regain - Relief eating v's Comfort Eating
When Losing Weight can Create Another Problem
Judith was good at dieting. She was an engineer, a researcher and a planner who liked to understand things properly. Give her a diet and she could investigate it, learn the rules and apply considerable discipline to following them.
What she couldn't understand was her Relief Eating and her Comfort Eating were two different things.
It seemed inconsistent with the woman she knew herself to be. If she was capable of bringing order to complicated problems elsewhere in her life, why couldn't she control this? Looking only at the eating makes that a reasonable question. Looking at the pattern across time produces a different one.
Judith could lose weight. As her body changed, people began to notice and compliment her. Her eating would eventually change too, and the weight would return.
It looked like self-sabotage.
Systems thinking encourages us to resist stopping at the obvious explanation. When something keeps recurring, we need to look at the conditions surrounding it and what changes elsewhere in the system when we intervene.
For Judith, losing weight changed more than her body.
The counterintuitive part of Judith's story
Judith had grown up in an unpredictable home with an aggressive, alcoholic parent. Staying alert to changes around her was useful. Drawing attention to herself wasn't.
Food had its own complicated history.
She wasn't allowed to help in the kitchen or learn to cook yet was mocked for not knowing how to. Meals were frightening rather than comforting. When she found comfort, it was safer to find it privately.
Decades later, Judith was still eating chocolate behind a closed door.
Those details altered the way we could look at her adult eating. Instead of treating chocolate as an isolated problem, we could see connections involving food, privacy, comfort, visibility and agency.
Weight itself also became more complicated.
Judith wanted to lose it, but being in a larger body appeared to provide some distance from being noticed. We began describing it as an invisible cloak, or a soft coating on a hard problem.
This doesn't mean excess weight serves that function for every woman. Judith's story isn't a template.
It demonstrates something about complex systems: something can cause problems and perform a useful function at the same time.
When the solution creates more pressure
Imagine an elastic band.
One end is attached to Judith's established system of protection and private comfort. Dieting pulls the other end towards weight loss.
At first, it works. Judith loses weight.
But as she becomes more visible, tension builds elsewhere. Eventually her eating changes and the system moves back towards its previous state.
Then the regain is interpreted as failure and the prescribed response is familiar: another diet. This is a classic systems problem. A solution improves the outcome we are watching in the short term without changing important conditions that contribute to the problem returning. Worse, repeatedly applying the solution can sometimes intensify the very problem we're trying to solve.
Judith didn't need another lecture about discipline. She needed to understand the system producing the repeating result.
That led to very different experiments. An opaque black box created a physical boundary around sweet foods without banning them. Looking more closely at Comfort Food uncovered the importance of a simple cheese toasty, one of the few foods Judith had been allowed some control over as a child.
The apparent problem had been chocolate.
But the larger pattern contained much more information.
Relief Eating v's Comfort Eating
That is the advantage of examining repeated weight regain as a system. Instead of repeatedly asking how to stop the most visible behaviour, we can begin looking for the relationships, feedback and root causes that keep recreating it.
Listen to the Podcast on Judith's Story and understand the difference between Relief eating v's Comfort Eating at:
Also available on YouTube and Spotify
And start here to understand the role of your Weight Eco System and solving weight regain.
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