Learned Helpless and Weight Gain -- VERY DEEP STUFF ON LOSING WEIGHT

Thanks! 

First of all, I am so, so grateful for the positive comments in the last few days on this blog. Like I said before, I am having trouble with this commenting system, so I just want to thank you on this post. THANKS! :)

And after I had such a victorious feeling on Sunday, I hate to bring up my next topic, but this is life. It has its ups and downs! I have good news and bad news. First the good news. I no longer have job stress. And now the bad news. I no longer have a job. As of today.

So,  I am back to deciding what to do with the rest of my life. Career decision. I need to go back to work again, but I am not sure where to go from here.

I saw something on Dr. Oz that was really interesting. You may have seen the show: it was about women who are very obese, and about some who were happy with being fat, and some that weren't. I'm not getting into the show itself, which was interesting, but one thing that the psychologist said on the show. He said that these women had been told they could not do anything. And I don't necessarily agree that all overweight women feel that they can't do things, but that is something that I struggle with: that feeling of helplessness.

I have just done some research on this. Before this, I had never made the connection between learned helplessness and being overweight. But there is a connection! Wow. This is a BIG revelation to me.

And this is very deep stuff. That's what this blog is about: some very deep stuff on losing weight. It obviously might not apply to many people, but it does to my healing and journey to wellness. And I found these articles on this topic:

1. From a site on eating disorders: Learned Hopelessness. This article says that women with eating disorders often feel helpless, and tend to default to "I can't, it's impossible," when things go wrong. And this feeling is connected to overeating.
   
   
2. Another article from the Institute of Psychiatry in London says that a study showed that women with eating disorders had a higher level of "learned helplessness" during childhood. Learned helplessness was the opposite of "childhood mastery."
   
   
3. And this is from another article from the same site on eating disorders. This article about natural eating, from the Cedric Centre for Counselling talks about how this feeling of learned helpless is the number one thing that leads people to disordered eating, whether it's binge eating, or anorexia, or bulimia. All of these disorders have a similar makeup. 

This last article talks about learning these attitudes a child: why bother? what's the use? Why try? I'm going to fail. I won't do it right. These are exactly the feelings that I struggle with, in my life, in many areas. And it is this feeling that leads to binging, and overeating, in many cases. These kind of feelings also lead to excessive stress, because so many situations make us feel that we cannot handle them. Hello! This so much applies to me. This is the root cause! I can't tell you excited I am to realize this. I will post more about this as I learn more, and ask the LORD to apply these truths to my heart and life.

I am going to learn more about this, and I thank God for this revelation. I don't know if anyone can relate to this, or not, but if you can, I'd love to hear from you. This is really hard stuff to talk about but it's real.