You may be overweight, and you might reasonably assume that your problem is with weight or eating. After all, when you force yourself to eat less, you lose weight.
Your solution, then, is often to go on yet another diet that promises success. And if you follow that diet, which usually isn’t easy since you’re fighting your body, you’ll probably lose weight…but for how long? The frequently quoted 95% rate of failure to actually keep the weight off for even a year is pretty discouraging.
So looking at overweight as a primary problem, and treating it with the latest diet, is an approach that seems to be doomed to failure.
So what works?
Actually, overweight, and the overeating that often appears to cause it, is actually a symptom of a problem. For any lasting weight loss, the underlying problem needs to be identified and addressed.
But what is the underlying problem?
As is the case for any chronic illness or condition, not everyone has the same underlying problem or problems causing it. If there were one simple solution for overweight or illness, someone would certainly have found it by now.
A person who follows a low-calorie diet but still doesn’t lose the weight has a different issue from someone who simply can’t follow the diet in the first place due to overwhelming hunger. The person who feels better on a particular diet needs a different approach than the one who feels fatigued and irritable on the same diet. The person who craves fatty foods has a different issue than the person who craves sweets or salty foods.
It can take some detective work to find out what is causing your overweight, the difficulty losing the weight, and the strong food cravings that can torpedo your attempts to gain control of your weight. To complicate matters, there might be more than one cause. However, once those causes are taken care of, your weight will usually settle back to where it should be. Keep in mind, though, that your body’s ideal weight might not be what you think it is, since we’re influenced by a culture that reveres thinness.
All weight problems are not created equal
Not only does everyone with a weight problem not have the same underlying issues, not everyone with a weight problem has the same symptoms. And the symptoms are where we start
Overwhelming hunger
If you eat as if you’re starving, there’s a good chance that you are. Yes, you get plenty of calories, and you certainly don’t look like you’ve been missing any meals, but seemingly uncontrollable overeating can come from nutritional deficiencies. Your body will do anything it can to keep you eating in the hopes of getting those nutrients.
What nutrients can be deficient, and how can you determine this? Take a look at the kinds of cravings you have. If you crave fatty foods, you may have a deficiency of beneficial oils and fatty acids, and your body keeps trying to fill that void by going for whatever has a lot of fat, even unhealthy fat if that’s all that’s available. Often taking in beneficial oils, such as coconut oil, fish oil, and olive oil, can reduce the craving to manageable levels.
Nutrient deficiency is such a common cause of overeating and consequent weight gain that a good approach would be to eat as healthy a diet as possible, and your weight will then often take care of itself.
Other cravings
Maybe your dietary downfall isn’t fats, but you go after anything sweet. A person who craves sweets probably has a yeast problem that both causes and is caused by the craving and sugar-eating in a vicious cycle. If you give up the sweets and other yeast-feeders such as fruits, vinegar, white flour, and bread, this can help take care of the problem. It may not be easy to give these up, since an uncontrollable craving for them started the problem in the first place. But know that if you give them up for just a few days, the underlying yeast problem and sweets cravings will usually subside.
Salty foods might not seem to be related to weight problems, since salt doesn’t have calories. But salty foods tend to be fatty foods: think chips, fries, salted nuts. A craving for salty foods is often caused by mineral deficiencies, which can be remedied by taking a mineral supplement such as Kona Gold. Another cause of salty food craving, as well as sweets and caffeine cravings, is adrenal insufficiency, which can be remedied at CAM.
In many cases a craving is caused by what can be called allergic addiction. Yes, an allergy to something can cause you to crave it. Common allergens are wheat and milk, both of which are found in abundance in the high-calorie foods that many people crave. Allergy evaluation and treatments, available at CAM, can help with this.
It might not even be about food
Even when dieting seems to help the overweight, your underlying problem might not even be about food. Some people are overweight because they are holding on to water or fat as their bodies try to dilute chemical toxins to minimize the damage they cause. In such a case, addressing the toxicity through sauna or other detoxification in addition to minimizing food and other toxins can lead to rapid weight loss.
If you have food or other allergies, your body might be retaining water because, to your body, an allergen is a poison, and the body reacts accordingly. Allergenic foods should be identified and kept to a minimum.
In many cases, especially among women, low thyroid function is causing the problem of weight gain and difficulty losing it. Other symptoms of low thyroid function are fatigue, brain fog, dry skin, thinning hair, low body temperature, feeling cold, and depression. If low thyroid function is your problem, it can be identified and properly addressed.
Where do you start?
First you need to go to a knowledgeable practitioner or a clinic such as CAM to find out what’s causing your weight problem in the first place. Usually the first step in evaluation is questioning, blood tests, and computerized testing. Next you are usually asked to follow an eight-day detoxification cleanse; any reactions to it, good or bad, will tell your practitioner whether the primary cause of your problem is food-based or in your gastrointestinal tract. Such issues include nutritional deficiencies, food allergies, digestive problems, and microorganisms. If you lose a lot of weight on that eight-day diet, this could be from release of water used to dilute food toxins and allergens, and would indicate that this is where much of your problem lies.
If you don’t feel or look any different after the cleanse, your weight problem might well not be food-based, and thyroid function, toxicity, and other issues will be looked at.
The bottom line, though, is to find out what is causing your particular problems with overeating and overweight. Only then can you have real hope of taking care of the symptom of overweight.
