Interesting article in my local paper today

DECEMBER 03, 2013 - Sydney Morning Herald

Are slim people happier?

Dr George Blair-West.

Slim people are happier people. Moreover, their happiness is more profound. Despite the eternal stereotypes of the ever-smiling, rotund, fairy godmother, and the paunchy, ho-hoing Santa Claus, the research supports a rather different reality. This, however, is not a story of causality. This is a story of association. Losing weight will not make you happy, but happy people are generally slimmer. So, what is the relationship between happiness and weight loss? The link is the elusive word ‘meaning’.

As a doctor and psychiatrist, I subspecialise in only three areas of psychiatry: the psychotherapy of weight loss, trauma therapy and relationship therapy. The most difficult of these three areas, not by a little way, but by a very long way, is obesity. If only losing weight was a simple as ‘just eating less and exercising more.’ Of course, if it was, we would not have the obesity plague that we’re faced with currently. The truth is that most people know precisely what healthy eating looks like. Moreover, they want to lose weight, but something sabotages the process.

While we continue to think of obesity as a condition in its own right, rather than as a symptom of an underlying problem, our abject failure in treating it will continue to haunt those of us in the medical and related health professions.

You do not need to be Freud to know that a significant amount of overeating is self-medicating unhappiness in all its forms – stress, anxiety, depression. (‘Comfort Eating’ should go down in history as one of the greatest over-simplifications of all time.) chocolate (the other major food group) is the most widely used antidepressant on the planet. The first step in therapy then, is helping people to develop alternative and more effective ways of managing these emotions – this is ‘Treating Obesity Psych 101’ – it is also just the tip of an iceberg of considerable complexity.

Over more than a decade, as I have drilled deeper into the minds of my obese patients, another issue emerged. For many people food and eating was the most meaningful part of their day-to-day life. If you are going to put somebody, for whom food is the high point of their day, on a diet, please do not be surprised by the inevitable failure that follows.

(Mind you, this does not stop health professionals from making this mistake over and over again. The unfortunate cost is the creation of confusion and a failure mindset in our hard done by patients.)

My intrigue with what I was seeing clinically took me to the profound research, spanning the last 20 years, of Professor Carol Ryff at the University of Wisconsin, USA. In one particular, well-designed study she looked closely at two groups of women. With 135 in total, members of both groups rated themselves as ‘happy’.

This was no airy-fairy investigation of warm fuzzy feelings. Ryff was interested in the correlation between hard biological markers like cortisol (an immune system marker), HDL cholesterol and body weight, with two different forms of happiness. One group were defined by being satisfied with their life, enjoying its pleasures and generally having a subjective sense of well-being. The other group had a deeper sense of well-being built around the desire for personal growth, meaningful experiences and relationships, along with a sense of purpose in their life.

Ryff found statistically significant differences when she looked at those who lived with meaning and purpose in their life. Not only did they have lower weight, but their good cholesterol levels were higher and their cortisol levels were better. In short, happiness built around meaning and purpose is not a luxury in life – your weight and your health depend on it.

I was surprised to find that, much more than most challenges in therapy, my patients really struggled with trying to find what was meaningful in their life – let alone the purpose this would guide them to. Too often they would make the challenge more problematic by adding the ‘ion’ to what is fundamentally a ‘quest’ - making it a ‘question’ – a question they could not answer. At school, a question without an answer equalled ‘idiot’. Like most of us, when faced with a question we do not know the answer to, my patients pushed it away. Once they understood it was a journey, a Quest, they needed to pursue over time, they settled into the process.

Slowly but surely as my patients found more meaningful pursuits in their life than eating, they began losing weight. More importantly they lost the weight and kept it off, while at the same time saying to me, ‘This is strange, because I don’t feel like I’m on a diet at all.’

Finding meaning is not about quitting your day job and going in search of your soul in a third world country. This journey begins at home. It begins with a detailed examination of what you found meaningful in your past and which aspects of your life and work now are meaningful. I also get my patients to look at their dreams for the future, some of which they have held since they were children. Once we have found what is meaningful we look at what purpose this guides us to.

This all takes time, self-exploration and regular reflection. Managing the powerful physiological and psychological forces that drive overeating, requires us to bring out the big guns. There are no bigger guns than meaning and purpose.

Dr George Blair-West is the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning The Way of The Quest that explains the ‘how to’ of finding meaning and purpose. His first book, the best selling Weight Loss for Food Lovers: Understanding our minds and why we sabotage our weight loss has been translated into Dutch and Chinese. For more information about his latest work into the motivation and mindset of weight loss visit www.weightlossforfoodlovers.com

Edited December 4, 201312 yr by Sydney Susan

What is interesting to me is that I had many life changes in the same general time frame. I was not happier, but i think I had more day to day meaning when my kiddos needed me, when I thought my sig other needed me. I had a dying sister that needed me. I had a sick mother who needed me and when she passed, her husband with no family of his own needed me. i had a more important career job where I at least felt needed (probably false, but it is how i felt)

Now, nobody really needs me and i sometimes feel like there is less purpose, less responsibliity and certainly more fun. That is not necessarily all a good thing, BUT it isn't all weight related, some of it is other life circumstances. Well, and I am kinda enjoying the more fun part!

I do think I am finding what my new life looks like, why it is it's intrinsic value and contribution, but goes way beyond my weight.

What is interesting to me is that I had many life changes in the same general time frame. I was not happier, but i think I had more day to day meaning when my kiddos needed me, when I thought my sig other needed me. I had a dying sister that needed me. I had a sick mother who needed me and when she passed, her husband with no family of his own needed me. i had a more important career job where I at least felt needed (probably false, but it is how i felt) Now, nobody really needs me and i sometimes feel like there is less purpose, less responsibliity and certainly more fun. That is not necessarily all a good thing, BUT it isn't all weight related, some of it is other life circumstances. Well, and I am kinda enjoying the more fun part! I do think I am finding what my new life looks like, why it is it's intrinsic value and contribution, but goes way beyond my weight.

This part I can understand well. I had my son when I was only 23 so I've been a mother forever. He needed me, then my husband did, younger one came along etc and it's been a large part of how I see myself. Work too is a large part of my self-definition and purpose.

I do sometimes wonder how I would have found meaning, and in what other way I would have found purpose if I had not had children. Of course people do it all the time, but I've not done that in so long, it would be akin to defining a new life and a new me when that time comes.

And yes I do think purpose grounds us like nothing else can. Have any of you read "the meaning of life?" Written by psychologist after being in a concentration camp about how people find the will to go on. And to paraphrase him, he said something like, as long as there is a WHY for living, people will find some kind of HOW to continue living.

I love, love, love that book…if you mean "Man's Search For Meaning?" Viktor Frankl?

And yes I do think purpose grounds us like nothing else can. Have any of you read "the meaning of life?" Written by psychologist after being in a concentration camp about how people find the will to go on. And to paraphrase him, he said something like, as long as there is a WHY for living, people will find some kind of HOW to continue living.

I love, love, love that book…if you mean "Man's Search For Meaning?" Viktor Frankl?

What is it they say about great minds??? I almost referenced Frankl in my last post, as I also love Man's Search For Meaning. His story is incredibly moving, and his experience was the foundation of Existential Therapy, which he developed.

I don't have kids. I have found meaning in my family, work, my faith, social justice, and music. I agree that our lives need purpose. I also think that often when we are obese, it detracts from the value we get from the rest of our lives. It is an ever-present "yeah but". "I'm successful but I'm still fat." "I provide for my family but I'm a failure with my weight". And on and on. And sometimes the obesity gives us a scapegoat to blame all our problems on. If we "fix" it quickly, such as with bariatric surgery, it can be quite shocking when our lives don't turn into a perfect fairy tale.

I have a friend who is coming off of benzodiazepine addiction (all prescribed through her doctors) and we just were talking about how the only constant is that most people eventually have some really difficult, insurmountable shitted to surmount. In her case, everything came kind of ridiculously easy to her until this happened.

Don't know if difficulties (in the best case scenario) become meaning, or a reason to hang on. But it is interesting.