Does Weight Loss Always Lead to Happiness?
[ad_1]
Catherine Wygal, 49, still vividly recalls the moment she hit the first tipping point in her lifelong efforts to manage her weight. On her college graduation day, about two decades ago, the largest men’s size gown available split down the seams because it wasn’t large enough to fit her 300-pound frame.
“This was my wake-up call,” says Wygal. “I went on the Atkins diet for a year and got down below 200 pounds [lbs] and I was riding high because I didn’t have to buy plus-size clothes. I was getting compliments, and it felt really good in the moment.”
Once Wygal reached her goal weight, she thought she’d finally be her healthiest and happiest self. “It was this fantasy of, ‘If I was thin, I would be able to get the job that I wanted, or I would be able to have a good family life, or I wouldn’t have any self-doubt,’” she says. “I thought once I have the metabolism of a thin person, that now I’m a new person and I won’t gain weight.”
Wygal isn’t alone. In Everyday Health’s Weight Loss Reframed report, which surveyed 3,144 people in the United States who reported trying to lose weight within the past six months, 79 percent of participants said they believed losing weight would boost their happiness, and 69 percent said having a so-called “normal” weight would make them happier.
But Wygal’s happiness proved fleeting — and her weight loss did, too.
“Almost as soon as I felt like I had accomplished my goal, I basically wanted carbs and cake and didn’t want to do Atkins anymore and I started gaining back the weight,” Wygal says.
At the time, Wygal was struggling not only with her weight, but with her mental health, too. She had been taking a full-time college course load and working a full-time job where she felt underrecognized and underappreciated. “I would stay up all night trying to finish projects, crying and eating,” she says. “I had no time for myself, and food was the only reward system that I knew to cope with the stress of it.”
She had never heard of emotional eating, and at the time, had no idea that her mood and food habits were connected. Although there’s no one academic definition for “emotional eating,” nor is it a clinical diagnosis, some use the term colloquially to describe turning to food to soothe negative or challenging emotions such as stress, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, or anger.
RELATED: Everyday Health’s Survey and Special Report: Weight Loss Reframed
‘I Just Kept Going Back to Food to Cope With Everything’
Wygal’s food habits didn’t always stem from emotional eating. She’d always loved food, and her impulses to overeat — simply because food tasted good — began when she was 4. Wygal’s first binge was on strawberry Nesquick, and she drank cup after cup until she was so full that she threw up, she says.
But as she got older, including both during and after her college career, she turned to food for comfort during times of stress. “As stress and work challenges and terrible family drama took over my life, I just kept going back to food to cope with everything. I was miserable,” says Wygal.
Along with work problems, one of her biggest stressors was when a close family member repeatedly commented on her food choices and portion sizes. “Once I realized people were judging my food portion or my food, that’s when I started actively secret-eating,” she says.
It was a habit Wygal wasn’t aware she’d developed until her forties, after she and her husband, Donald, had recently taken in their 8-year-old niece. “When our niece came to live with us and I was eating her food scraps in the kitchen when she was taking a bath or playing in the living room, that was the turning point of, ‘This is not okay to eat secretly and then hide the leftovers.’”
It was then she realized she wasn’t going to find the key to happiness and sustained weight loss by achieving some number on the scale or trying the same weight loss tactics that she’d already tried.
“I realized none of the diets or weight loss plans had ever made me feel good about myself for long,” Wygal says. “What I actually needed was to get new voices in my head that were kinder and more educated, and seriously change my mindset about my life.”
To do this, Wygal turned to podcasts such as HalfSizeMe with women just like her describing their shame over secret binging and emotional eating — and then joined the subscription-based HalfSizeMe support group on Facebook with other listeners who also related to these stories.
Suddenly, Wygal says, she had a framework to understand that her issues that were making her so unhappy weren’t really caused by her weight, but her inability to set boundaries in relationships.
“What got better was actually being aware of what was prompting me to turn to food when I was feeling big emotions,” she says. “I didn’t realize big stressor equaled, ‘Get a glass of wine’; or big stressor equaled, ‘Eat some snacks.’”
Listening to podcasts also helped her learn to replace stress eating with more helpful coping strategies when challenges popped up in her day-to-day life. “There’s something else I can do about that,” she says. “I can pause when I feel a big emotion, and I can go for a five-minute walk. I can get outside and get some fresh air for five minutes instead.”
Mental Health and Weight Loss Have a Complicated Relationship
Stress eating, a form of emotional eating, is very common. More than one-third of adults report overeating at least once in the past month because of stress, and nearly half of them do at least once a week, according to the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
Many people who stress eat, like Wygal once did, also say they do this specifically to distract them from their troubles, and that the behavior is a habit for them. “Food is a form of comfort for many people, so when a person is feeling depressed, anxious, or upset, food is often the first line of defense in providing temporary relief,” says Kirby Walter, RD, who owns and practices at The Nourish RD in Chicago, and works with clients on emotional challenges related to eating.
Beyond this, stress is also associated with higher intake of unhealthy foods and lower consumption of healthier options, some research suggests. “When these feelings and emotions are present, motivation is [often] very low and it can feel very difficult to do more than the bare minimum. This leads to a very low level of self-care, and takeout often replaces cooking and meal prep, which results in less nutrient-dense food choices,” Walter adds.
Eating to cope with stress or other challenging emotions can commonly derail weight loss efforts. According to Everyday Health’s Weight Loss Reframed, people who said their weight loss efforts were unsuccessful were also more likely to report eating when they felt stressed, nervous, or anxious, as well as having higher levels of stress and poorer mental health than people who lost weight and maintained their weight loss.
This can be one way our mental health can impact our weight, says Clare Llewellyn, PhD, a psychologist, associate professor of obesity, and leader of the obesity research group in the department of behavioral health and science at University College London in England.
Additionally, the stigma of living with obesity (discriminatory words and actions, such as negative comments, teasing, or even physical assault, targeted toward people with obesity because of their weight and size) can complicate mental health, Dr. Llewellyn adds. “The experience of weight stigma can cause people living at a high weight to feel depressed, anxious, lonely, and ashamed.”
While there are many ways people may cope with these negative emotions, some individuals will eat to self-soothe, Llewellyn explains. For Wygal, these behaviors provided a temporary relief and distraction “But then it cycled into regret, shame, negative self-talk, and then repeating the behaviors again for temporary relief,” Wygal says.
The trouble with this is it can not only cause weight gain, but it compounds the underlying challenging emotions that led to emotional eating in the first place.
“Emotional eating may bring some relief at the time, but it may also enhance feelings of guilt and shame afterwards, which can lead to further emotional eating,” Llewellyn says. “Comfort eating is one of the ways that poor mental health could lead to weight gain, but it can also perpetuate further weight gain and contribute to poorer mental health among those already living at a high weight.”
This all can create a cycle that can be really hard to break, says Walter.
Stress triggers surges of the stress hormone cortisol in the body, which can cause a cascade of other medical problems like high blood pressure and elevated blood sugar that can make it harder to maintain a healthy weight, explains Kirby. Stress can make it harder to sleep, and lack of sleep can negatively impact both weight and mental health.
“Losing weight is such a celebrated thing in our culture that people often see it as the answer to their problems,” Walter says. “However, weight loss is not a magic solution for happiness and whatever issues were present before the weight loss typically persevere even in a smaller body.”
In other words, weight gain caused by emotional eating and stress can’t be solved with weight loss alone, says Walter. It also often requires addressing and managing complicated emotions around food and weight, both Walter and Llewelyn say.
Why Addressing Both Mental and Physical Health Is Crucial
To lose weight — and keep it off — you need to pay attention to mental health, Llewellyn says. In fact, this may be more important initially.
“Participation in a weight loss intervention that involves major changes to lifestyle or diet is demanding,” Llewellyn explains. “It can feel difficult to engage with fully, or maintain, if someone is also struggling with mental health.”
Each person experiences weight loss interventions differently, and they could bring up very different feelings and challenges for each individual, says Ivonne Derks, PhD, a research fellow with the research department of behavioural sciences and health at University College London, who has performed research on the link between obesity and behavioral and mental health factors.
Attempting these kinds of behavior changes can bring up a variety of positive or negative emotions, according to a study published in Eating and Weight Disorders — Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia, and Obesity.
It could also bring about additional mental health challenges that could worsen any existing ones a person may have, adds Dr. Derks. “First, participation in weight loss interventions will put an extra emphasis on your weight and body size, for example by regular weighing,” she explains. “This focus on your weight and body can (further) enhance feelings of body dissatisfaction.”
Difficulties reaching goals or sticking to dietary guidelines, for instance, could also lead to difficult emotions like discouragement, embarrassment, shame, uncertainty, or feelings of failure, adds Derks.
“All of this, together with the major lifestyle changes that may require a lot of energy and perseverance, may result in increased feelings of depression and anxiety, regardless of initial mental health problems,” adds Derks. “This may be extra difficult for individuals who already experience mental health problems.”
Understanding and getting a handle on negative or challenging emotions related to weight loss can be helpful, not only for your overall well-being, but also in helping you achieve your goals. In the aforementioned study, positive emotions during weight loss were linked to behaviors like physical activity, whereas negative emotions were linked to behaviors like emotional eating.
If you’re struggling in any of the ways noted above, both Llewellyn and Walter recommend seeking professional help to address the root causes behind your emotional and weight issues. Your primary care doctor, a registered dietitian-nutritionist, or therapist can all be sources of support if you are encountering hurdles, emotional or otherwise. Signs a mental health professional may be essential to your weight loss team include:
- Having a significantly low or anxious mood for more than two weeks
- Disordered eating behaviors, such as obsessing over your weight or body size or restricting or purging food (such as by excessive exercise, throwing up, or taking laxatives)
- Isolating from family or friends
- Having thoughts of self-harm or death
In Wygal’s case, she found the tools she needed to recognize and address her own mental health issues with help from podcasts like HalfSizeMe and an affiliated support group of other women going through emotional eating struggles.
For Wygal, one of the biggest takeaways from that podcast was to start setting boundaries and advocating for her needs.
For instance, instead of eating in secret, Wygal learned to set boundaries with her close family member who frequently commented on her food and portion sizes. “The switch was actually saying, ‘When you comment about the size of my salad, it brings me shame, and shame makes me feel disconnected from you, and it makes me want to eat in secret. Please stop making comments about my food,’” Wygal explains.
In the long run, learning these skills and addressing her mental health is what helped Wygal curb her emotional eating and actually feel happy again. Although she’s not currently at her goal weight, she’s lost 120 lbs and kept it off for five years and counting. “I am much better able to take care of myself and not turn to food because I’ve set up systems to protect myself from feeling like I have to be trampled on and make everybody else comfortable,” she says.
Today, she lives in Los Angeles and works full time running her own podcast, We Only Look Thin, with her husband, who lost 100 lbs. The name of their podcast is inspired by what Wygal learned on own weight loss and emotional eating journey: “We look thin on the outside, but on the inside there’s still a lot going on,” she says.
They also host a subscription-based weight loss support group, WOLT Place, which the Wygals describe as a safe space for women to give voice to their own weight loss journeys and emotions around food.
Importantly, after losing 120 lbs and keeping it off, Wygal says she’s learned two key lessons: Sustained weight loss is an ongoing journey and the number on the scale is not the key to happiness.
“I am still working on my weight, and ‘maintenance’ is an active verb,” Wygal says. “I am still not the weight I want to be, but the happiness comes from being aware of my own needs and boundaries. And honestly, a lot of my happiness comes from helping other people with that, too.”
In the past when challenges popped up, Wygal says she used to view that as proof it was time to give up on her weight loss efforts and turn to food to cope. Now, when she faces life’s difficulties, she ensures she takes care of herself, both emotionally and physically.
“Life still keeps happening, but instead of saying, ‘Woe is me. Why bother?’ I say, ‘Okay. You still have to get up. You want to make yourself feel good. Set some boundaries. Get out and do some activity. Eat in a way that feels good. Keep showing up for yourself,’” Wygal says.
Everyday Health‘s Weight Loss Reframed Survey queried 3,144 Americans nationwide ages 18 and older who had tried losing weight in the previous six months. The study was fielded between July 10 and August 18, 2023, across demographic groups, genders, and health conditions. Survey recruitment took place via an online portal, in app, and via email. The margin of error for the sample size of 3,144 is +/-1.7 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.
[ad_2]
