Think about the main reasons why number of people are overweight today. Overweight people fall into one of two different sections.
Either they have an unhealthy lifestyle – working long hours, eating out constantly, not getting enough workout – or they simply eat too much, often in a compulsive way.
This type of eating – eating when one isn’t hungry, e.g., or eating for emotional reasons rather than physical hunger – is really a type of habituation. It should be understood as an addiction, and it often is.
For example, the group Overeaters Anonymous performs on many of the same waysas AA or other twelve step programs. Extreme eating is treated like an addiction because that’s exactly what it is.
But if that’s the case, it’s very easy to understand why this addiction might be difficult to treat than some others. The way to deal with an addiction is to stay away from the behavior that’s out of standard – alcoholics can’t touch alcohol, for example. The idea is to not do it at all until the addiction becomes a thing of the past – in fact, for many addicts, they can never indulge in their addictive behavior again, not even one time.
With food addiction, though, that’s obviously impossible. People have to eat – there’s no getting away from it. That’s why food addiction, though it’s an addiction to a non-lethal substance, may be the toughest of all to deal with. And that’s also why companies such as Slim-fast, who produce and market meal replacements for people to use while dieting to lose weight, actually do succeed in helping some people.
The concept behind meal replacements is that you don’t truly eat at all for a good part of the day – instead, you have a special shake or other product that gives you all the nutrients you need, and stops you from starving. This works in two ways: first, it measures the calories you take in, therefore that the these products are pretty low calorie. Second, it breaks the wheel of addictive behavior because you’re not actually eating. You can get rid of the behavior much as an alcoholic can (and must) get away from alcohol, and that gives you a better possibility of breaking the addictive act.
Though most meal replacement plans suggest that you eat one ‘normal’ meal daily, some folks who are serious about weight loss don’t do even that. That’s precisely how Oprah Winfrey once lost a lot of weight – about fifty pounds. She said that she found it easier eat nothing (subsisting on diet shakes and bars) than to control her eating. When you know that you won’t be eating properly it takes the guesswork out of it. Everything becomes very straightforward, and it’s a fact that many people have lost weight using this method of weight loss.
There are negative issues, though. For one thing, while a weight loss program is supposed to advice you about how to eat for good – to establish healthy habits, in other words – using meal replacements clearly doesn’t do so. Once you go back to eating real food, you might discover that your problems with measuring your food intake are still there. Though you will have lost weight, you are more likely to get weight back if you haven’t studied healthy eating habits.
Also, there’s a risk that some people will keep on using the meal replacements for extended periods of time, just because it’s easier and more convenient. Thought they are made to give you a minimum level of calories and nutrition, diet bars cannot substitute for real food over an extended period.
Anyway, if you know or think that your problem with food resembles an addiction and compulsion, it may be worth your while to think about using meal replacements for a while in order to lose some weight. Try to make the time you spend using products as productive as possible, though. Really come to terms with your past behavior, and study what it feels like to be full but not stuffed. Figuring out the answer to these and other aspects of healthy living will help make your weight loss permanent.
