27 Mar Real Talk | The Psychology of Weight Loss
Dr. Murphy talks about the psychology of weight loss.
I’ve been writing a book about weight loss, and it’s become a massive undertaking. And the one chapter that I was truly dreading writing was the psychology of weight. And I think the psychology of weight follows, there’s a, it has turned out to be one of the most funnest things, even though I was dreading it, when I started putting my thoughts down on paper as how do you approach something like that? Because there’s all kinds of different reasons why we do the things we do. It still boils down to pleasure. We eat for pleasure. We eat because we’re hungry. When we eat, it’s a pleasurable response. That’s once again, back to dopamine. It goes back to addiction medicine. And I think there’s a lot more psychology to it than people truly understand. We eat for parties, we eat for depression, we eat for happiness, we eat because we don’t care. We throw caution to the wind. It’s a social event. It’s always, let’s go out and get something to eat. Let’s do lunch. I mean, it’s a social gathering. It’s what makes humans human, I suppose. But there is a lot of psychology to it. So I run into people that are professionals that do have to do a lot of lunch dates, and they have this problem. I’m asking them, skip the lunch. You don’t need it. You’re not going to die. The human body can go for an extremely long time without eating. It’s not a water issue. It’s a calorie issue. And it’s absolutely amazing how long the human body can actually go without eating. So what I would tell these people is come up with an excuse of like, I just ate a while ago. Oh, don’t tell them you’re not feeling well. Because then you’ll have a conversation of what’s the matter with you? Oh, you need to go see my doctor, blah, blah, blah. Just say, you know what? I ate lunch today. I was kind of on the road running behind. Just come up with some nonsensical excuse why you don’t want to eat today. Blend into the social fabric. Make it acceptable. But yet, no one needs to really know why you’re not. But it is a big problem with the social aspect of eating, I think. But there is an incredible amount of problems with the psychological aspect of eating, I believe.
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