Taken from: The Weight Loss Paradox, Zac Alstin.

(reading the full version is recommended, available here for kindle and in print.)

I realised I was unhappy

We’ve seen that being overweight is a result of overeating, and that overeating is when we eat to
satisfy fake hunger rather than real hunger. We’ve also seen that real hunger is your body’s actual
need for energy or sustenance to continue whatever work or task you are doing.

But what about fake hunger? What is it, and why does it afflict us so strongly – some of us more
than others?

Fake hunger is about using food and the process of eating to distract or divert us from less pleasant
experiences and feelings. If you learn to distinguish between real hunger and fake hunger you can
start to notice what is going on in your body and your mind when fake hunger arises.

It’s not easy to notice, because by definition fake hunger is about distracting and diverting your
attention. But as you try to resist the temptation to eat for fake hunger, you will inevitably start to
pay more attention to the thoughts and feelings that fake hunger is trying to distract you from.

Fake hunger arises when we are bored, lonely, sad, depressed, anxious, or when we feel that there
isn’t enough pleasure in life. Fake hunger is an unconscious way of distracting ourselves from these
bad feelings, turning our attention instead to the reliable, rich, immersive sensory experience of
eating.

Consider how powerful the experience of eating can be: 40 Eating involves our taste, touch, sight,
smell, and even our hearing. Junk food in particular is engineered to exploit our preference for
certain sounds, flavours, textures, colours, and mouth feel.

Eating also engages more abstract, subconscious cues like a sense of achievement in obtaining food,
even if it’s going to McDonalds or the supermarket instead of our original hunter-gatherer activities.

Eating is both active and passive – we enjoy the flavours and sensations, but it also keeps us busy.
We feel engaged not just by procuring and preparing food, but by holding, chewing, and swallowing
it.

On top of all that, we often eat while watching TV or movies, letting our higher cognitive powers be
further distracted while we overwhelm our bodies with an immersive sensory experience. That’s
why eating is such a powerful distraction. Eating can wipe away anxiety, fear, loneliness, boredom,
sadness, and make up for the absence of other pleasures.

But the problem with distractions is that they are only temporary. They don’t actually meet our
needs. Eating might divert us from loneliness and boredom, but they don’t satisfy the desire for
friendship and company, or a meaningful activity.

Once you start to challenge these distractions and diversions, you will find yourself experiencing
painful thoughts and emotions - the reason why you’ve embraced the distraction of fake hunger for
years.
 41 But it’s hard to knowingly embrace a distraction. A distraction only really works if you let it
distract you. The knowledge of how fake hunger works undermines the power of the distraction.

The truth is that you overeat to distract yourself from painful thoughts and emotions. But in the
process, you harm your body, which only brings more painful thoughts and emotions. In other
words, the distraction is only partial. You can’t truly distract yourself from your painful feelings. In
the end the painful feelings are still there, plus you have to deal with being overweight as well.

I learned to face painful thoughts and feelings

Distraction doesn’t make your problems go away. But facing our problems can seem overwhelming,
especially when we’re used to hiding ourselves in immersive experiences like eating. It might sound
paradoxical, but it helps to know that you can’t escape negative emotions. If you can’t escape them,
you might as well face them.

Besides, facing them is probably the one thing you haven’t tried. You’ve tried distracting yourself –
for years that’s how you’ve responded to bad feelings. Are you happy with the results? I wasn’t
happy. I was sick of being overweight, sick of eating to distract myself, and therefore the only
remaining option was to face the negative feelings head on.

The way to face negative feelings is to feel them without turning to distractions. Face those
thoughts and feelings, because they are there, hurting you, whether you face them or not. As the
philosopher Eugene Gendlin wrote: What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And
because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.

People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.4 4
[Link]

43 If you are feeling lonely, it is better to admit that you are lonely and feel that feeling, than to
quickly eat something and distract yourself with sensory overload.

If you are feeling depressed, it is better to recognise how you feel than to busy yourself making a
snack that will later contribute to your being overweight, and thereby indirectly make you more
depressed in the future.

If you don’t have enough pleasure or enjoyment in your life, it is better to face that fact than to try
to find pleasure in eating. Eating is, after all, not a very meaningful source of pleasure. In each
instance we use the immersive experience of eating to flood our senses and distract us from other
thoughts and feelings. But as a consequence we are unable to learn from those thoughts and
feelings, or to improve our lives based on what they are telling us.

Your feelings aren’t just reactions to your circumstances, they communicate something. They carry
meaning. Ignoring them is like ignoring pain signals from your body.

If you are lonely, maybe there is nothing you can do about it. Maybe there are absolutely no
avenues for you to become less lonely. But that’s highly unlikely.
 And even if it were true, it would still be better to own that loneliness, to know what it was and face
it, than to divert your attention to food instead. There’s greater strength and dignity in knowing
yourself, even if the things you learn are painful. And by all means seek help from mental health
professionals if you 44 decide to face these painful feelings. You don’t have to do it alone.

People know about “comfort food” but fake hunger isn’t really about comfort, it’s about distraction.

Comfort originally meant to console, and it came from a Latin word that means “to strengthen”. But
eating to distract yourself doesn’t strengthen you, it actually weakens you because it robs you of
your ability to face your feelings honestly. Distractions don’t really console us either. You console
someone when they’re sad or grieving. But fake hunger is all about distracting us from the sadness
or grief so that we aren’t even aware of it anymore.

Using food to distract us from our feelings leaves us internally divided and ignorant of what is really
going on inside us. We think we want to lose weight, we think we’re miserable, we think dieting is
hard, and we look for excuses or tricks or secrets that will help us become thin without really
changing anything else in our lives.

That’s why dieting is so difficult, why people can’t stick to it. No matter how much we might hate
being fat, our overeating has its own motivations that are even stronger and more entrenched.
Sometimes people manage to change. They reach a point where they just push through and change
their lives. Or maybe new circumstances give them an impetus to change.

45 But many of us never reach this point. For us the only hope may be to understand fully what is
going on in our lives, why we eat too much, and what it would mean for us to genuinely change.
Once you understand it, the answer is clear. It was never about losing weight. It has always been
about happiness – about the sources of pleasure and the painful feelings in our lives and whether we
learn to face them and grow, or distract ourselves instead.

If you face your painful thoughts and feelings you will no longer need to distract yourself with food.
If you stop distracting yourself with food, you will stop overeating. If you stop overeating, your
weight will naturally return to balance.

Taken from: The Weight Loss Paradox, Zac Alstin.

(reading the full version is recommended, available here for kindle and in print.)