I was always on the big side of the spectrum. It runs in my family’s genetics, and I’ve always loved food. When I was little, I was active enough in playing with my friends and biking around the neighborhood that it didn’t really matter that much, but as I got older and more sedentary, weight started piling on slowly but surely. And when I went through a 3-year depression cycle from 19–22 years old, it got really bad.

But after five more years (I am 27 now), I’ve finally found the key to living a healthy life with a body that matches. And the things I’ve learned along the way have totally changed my view of health and wellness.

I’m not done losing weight yet, but the changes so far have been staggering already. I’ve felt it in every aspect of my life!

Here’s My Secret

I always found it amusing, as someone who has lost weight multiple times in his life, how others always seem to ask the same question: “What’s your secret?” As if weight is this mysterious black box and that you need to ascertain an esoteric key to this box in order to lose weight and be healthy.

But I’ll tell you my secret(s).

There are two things that have lead to my weight loss: letting go of judgements about my body and weekly cognitive/emotional therapy.

Judgement is the Enemy of Progress

I can tell you the exact moment my weight loss journey began. It was night time in March 2021. I don’t remember the exact day, but I had just taken a shower and decided to look at myself in my full-body mirror wearing nothing but underwear. I was about 315 pounds, the heaviest I’d ever been.

For some reason, in that moment, I decided to do something radical: I told myself (and my body) that I was good enough. I remember speaking out loud, directly addressing my body, and telling my body that it was good enough and I was done judging and criticizing it.

That was day 1 of my weight loss journey. Nothing I’ve accomplished since then would have been possible without that moment.

When we judge our bodies and focus on our bodies’ perceived shortcomings, not only are we getting mired in a negative pool of emotions (which is not good for us), but we’re failing to recognize and respect everything that our bodies do for us.

We wouldn’t be able to breathe fresh air without our lungs, we wouldn’t be able to walk through our toweringly beautiful cities without our legs, we wouldn’t be able to have sex without, well, you know. We wouldn’t *exist* without our bodies.

When we learn to respect and appreciate our body, our body will respect and appreciate us too.

Your body is a miracle of literally billions of years of evolution. Your consciousness is 20–100 years old (however old you are). Why do we believe that we have any right to criticize something that is millions of orders of magnitude wiser than we are?

When you think about all the things that your body does every day just to keep you running, you quickly realize how little ground you have to stand on when criticizing it.

And when you stop criticizing it, your body becomes your ally instead of your enemy.

Ironically, I’ve never really told my body, “I want you to lose X pounds” in this journey. Instead, I’ve respected my body and told it that I’m just along for the ride wherever it wants to go. In other words, I let my body lead me to the place it knew we really wanted to be. I gave up control and judgement and just listened instead.

By listening to my body, I began to intuitively adopt healthy food habits like: eating slower and more deliberately, getting less food than I think I want and waiting 15 minutes after finishing to decide if I want more, enjoying a small amount of things like ice cream without needing more, etc.

Those things led to weight loss.

And in case you’re wondering, my exercise habits have not been very consistent throughout this whole time. My weight loss has been 100% caused by dietary and mental wellness changes.

Get the Roadblocks Out of the Way (Therapy)

Health is holistic. What I’ve found is that physical and mental health are highly correlated with each other. You cannot really be physically healthy while emotionally unhealthy and vice-versa, at least not for long.

So what that means is that getting on top of your mental and emotional health is a great way to encourage your body to improve its physical health as well. Your body strives for balance, in my opinion, so when you get on top of your mental health, your body wants to keep up with your physical health too.

How you get on top of your mental health is up to you. For me, it came down to two things: a great therapist who understands me well and a willingness to address any issues that come up head-on and not run away from them.

Too many people go to therapy but don’t actually make progress. Either the therapist isn’t a good match for them, or they aren’t really ready to tackle the most important problems.

Some indicators that your therapy relationship isn’t working out: therapy feels like a chore, you’re not telling your therapist everything, you don’t feel lighter (or at least different) when you leave your session, and/or you don’t look forward to therapy every week.

For me, therapy is like the anchor of my week. In fact, it’s one of my favorite parts of my week. I almost always keep those nights free so that I can spend the night processing what I talk about that week if I need to. I always feel like I’ve learned something about myself or feel lighter when I leave. I *never* skip it of my own accord, and I’m always bummed when my therapist has a week off. And, most importantly, I don’t hold anything back. I talk about even the most uncomfortable stuff with my therapist and always try to address issues as head-on as I can.

Lately, this has also led to me sharing more with other people in my life and building a strong inner trust circle that I’ll be able to rely on even when my relationship with my therapist has run its course. This part is key to the longevity of your mental health: we can’t do this thing called “Life” by ourselves.

Therapy worked wonders for me, and it might work wonders for you too.

Of course, there are other ways to work on your mental health, but this is the one that worked for me (and I’ve heard countless stories of it working for others too). I know therapy isn’t cheap and isn’t always accessible for everyone, but if you can get access to a therapist, you absolutely should.

Regardless of how you get there, your goal is to address the underlying issues which are causing you to put on and retain excess weight. Especially if you’re obese or significantly overweight, I can almost guarantee you that there are some underlying emotional issues that are causing you to use food as a medication or are causing depression/anxiety which can dampen your willingness to go out and do stuff (meaning you’ll be more sedentary which leads to weight gain). That was definitely true for me, and therapy helped me confront those issues so that I was no longer using food as medication.

There’s a Difference Between 20 Pounds and 100 Pounds

Duh. But I feel that it’s important to point out that there’s a real difference in being overweight and being obese. I am obese (though rapidly approaching the non-obese territory), and so I needed to do a lot more cognitive and emotional work to deal with the issues that were preventing me from getting into shape. If you’re just a little overweight, then chances are you can make some lifestyle adjustments in order to correct back to a weight you’re more happy with. You might still benefit a lot from some emotional work, but chances are that you won’t necessarily *need* it in the same way.

Obesity is a Mental Health Issue

In this journey, I’ve come to recognize obesity is a mental health problem, because obesity is, generally speaking, caused by a food addiction. As I mentioned earlier, our bodies are way smarter and wiser than we are, and as a result of that knowledge, I believe that our bodies also have a keen sense of what weight we should be at (roughly speaking) to be healthy.

Being, for instance, 100 pounds overweight is not healthy. We know this, we’ve studied many of the health effects of obesity and found out how damaging it can be. So knowing how unhealthy it is, one must ask the question: “Why would our bodies allow us to reach this unhealthy state?”

Many choose to believe it’s an ancient scarcity complex: we didn’t have access to so much food in our caveman years, so we evolved to store as much as possible.

I think that’s bullshit.

We also know that food lights up your dopamine and other neurotransmitters, and especially certain kinds of foods have similar effects to taking drugs like cocaine, at least in terms of their impact on neurotransmitters.

My theory is that our body will allow us to get into a state of obesity if, and only if, there is a more pressing emotional issue which is throwing us into a state of chaos where consumption of food is used as a tool to balance that chaos. In other words, the same reason people get addicted to drugs: to numb or run away from uncomfortable feelings/experiences.

To me, this theory is far more intuitive and far less hand-wavy than the food scarcity model. It also lines up very well with my own journey.

You see, as I dealt with my mental and emotional health issues, I started to naturally want to eat less and rely less and less on food for comfort and emotional safety. Over time, food became as much, if not more, about the nutrition and fuel than the experience itself.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy, or seek out, good food of course. I still want to eat food that tastes good. But I find myself preferring, for most of my daily food intake, things with more body and nutrition, like veggies, filling and fueling carbs like rice and whole wheat bread, and nutritionally-dense proteins like salmon and chicken.

One of my favorite meals lately: a veggie-packed half rice/half salad bowl from a local take-out spot.

More than anything, the emotional work I’ve done has allowed me to build a balanced relationship with food where I can enjoy the foods I love like fries and ice cream while still overall eating a very nutritionally-balanced diet. I’ve left the food addiction behind.

So What Now?

Okay, so you’ve stuck with me so far, and maybe I’ve even convinced you that obesity is a mental health issue and that your emotional health cannot be ignored when you want to improve your physical health.

Do you want to lose weight?

If you’re obese, consider therapy and other mental health and wellness tools first. See if you start making changes by addressing your inner-most issues. Don’t put pressure on yourself to diet or exercise yet, and just start working on the mental health first. Make sure you make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to get into the most uncomfortable issues you have to deal with, even if you need to build up to it a bit.

Once you start seeing some changes in your mental health, think about how you eat. If you’re like me, then once you start working on the mental health, you start to want to eat differently, completely organically without any conscious effort on your end.

Listen to your body. Trust your body. Respect your body.

If you’re just a little overweight, you’re more than welcome to still do those things, but what you’ll benefit most from, probably, is just trying to build a few new healthy habits like a daily walk, doing some pushups during the day, etc. Perhaps trying to eat a little less of your favorite calorically-dense foods would be a good place to start too.

Until next time, thanks for reading!