5 Reasons Why You Keep Overeating and Gaining Weight (and How To Fix It)

Your overeating is not the problem but rather the consequence of unease.

There’s nothing more frustrating than eating less only to binge at night or during the weekend and then feel sad for failing to control your eating.

I know that feeling of powerlessness over food all too well having been an overeater myself for forty years. My clients keep telling me that they try their best to eat in moderation yet they keep losing their control.

Does this sound familiar to you?

You’re particularly worried that your health has deteriorated over the past months and fearful of what the future may hold if you don’t slim down. Slimming down and making yourself a priority should not need to be agonizing!

To overcome the limbo you are in, it’s important to understand why you keep overeating and gaining weight – and what you can do about it. And that’s exactly what this blog post is here to help you with (and at the end I’ll give you a heads-up on something I’ve created to boost your clarity and motivation to take action.)

Why am I sharing this? I truly believe that understanding the root cause of your dysfunctional relationship with food will help you reflect about what is not happening and get you ready to apply new strategies to slim down and find inner harmony in the new year.

Don’t just take my word for it, I love this quote from Aristotle:

Slimming down will involve knowing yourself, understanding the root cause of your dysfunctional relationship with food and becoming aware of the blind spots behind your chaotic eating.

So are you ready to find out the 5 reasons that keep you overeating and gaining weight and how to fix it?

5 reasons that keep you overeating and gaining weight and how to fix it

1) You are at war with your body

It breaks my heart to see overeaters exerting more willpower to control their eating just like I did in my 40 years of overeating. By focusing on willpower, overeaters perpetuate a fight with their body and miss the opportunity to understand the limitations and true needs of their beautiful imperfect body.
You might be rolling your eyes at me right now.

You might feel frustrated for being stuck in an inconvenient body. You may be feeling unworthy and wondering that being fat actually proves what you have always suspected and feared: you are defective. You may not believe you are worthy of respect and feel you need to loose weight first in order to gain some self-respect.

How can you take care of something you don’t love? And then you wonder why you don’t show up for yourself?

Loving yourself is better than not loving yourself. Rather than hate, can you try the way of self-love? This beautifully imperfect body is the only body you’ve got. Slimming down will involve you loving and taking care of your most cherished property: your actual body with all its limitations.

How would you feed your most cherished property? Wouldn’t you invest time in cooking healthy meals for your precious body? Wouldn’t you treat it with kindness allowing it to rest and recover?

2) You escape from your discomforts

The second reason why you keep overeating and gaining weight is that you most likely escape from your body’s discomfort and seek safety in food.

You do not have any issue showing for yourself when your nervous system is calm. You lose control when stressed out. In reality, you’re most likely pushing through until your discomfort becomes unbearable and then you binge.

Imagine if you could detect early signals of distress and manage them before they get to a binge.

In my book “Beyond the Emptiness: How I Found Fullness Outside of Food”, I describe my pain growing up and living 40 years as an overeater and the circumstances that kept me in this vicious cycle. My struggle with food was not the actual problem but rather a defense mechanism against a deep seated unease. I share how I transformed on a physical, emotional and spiritual level to lose 1/3 of my weight. Sustaining this weightloss for 7 years involved learning how to manage my discomforts and take my body from turbulence to tranquility. Click here to get a free excerpt of my book.

3) Your food choices keep fueling your obsession cycle

Young girl looking at fruit and cake lined up

If you’ve reached this point in reading and feel that you are indeed being loving towards yourself and you have learnt how to connect within and calm down, and you’re thinking none of this is helping you gain control over food and slim down, how about this one: your food choices keep fueling your obsession cycle.

You are perhaps trying to eat all kind of food in moderation yet failing miserably. I can bet you are not obsessed with cucumbers or lettuce. Moderation is easy when it comes to eating vegetables and protein.

You mostly binge on sweets, salty crisps and junk food high in fat. Those binge foods activate in your brain signals of more and more and then you wonder why your willpower is not working.

How about you try instead to eat an abundance of vegetables, fruits and protein?

4) You are not eating and resting enough during day time

You might be wondering: well I am healthy all day then I get home at night and binge. My question to you then: are you eating wholesome meals and resting enough during the day?

Planning and preparing your food ahead of time is a great way to ensure healthy food is available when you're hungry and tired. I call those food gifts to my future busy and tired self. How does a home-made lunch gift sound in your busy day? How would it feel to come back home to a ready to eat dinner that was earlier prepared by you?

You may also want to take multiple pauses from work during the day to avoid over-exhaustion by night-time.

5) Food is your only source of pleasure

My question to you: what activities other than food are you doing to get pleasure in daily life? If you are overeating and keep gaining weight, my bet is that food is your sole source of pleasure.
It breaks my heart to see overeaters’ happiness and mood totally depend on the way they eat and in this process they miss out on rejoicing other pleasures in life.

Your senses are a great conduit to pleasure and the good news is you’ve got 4 other than taste:

Take a pause and use your eyes to admire your plants
Indulge in touch by caressing your face and hair
Give your ears some pleasure by listening to children playing
Revitalize yourself by applying a nice smelling oil on your body

The more you practice attuning to pleasure, the less you will need food as your only source of pleasure. I hope this blog has given you a fresh perspective on why you keep overeating and gaining weight.

Having read this, if you’re thinking:

I would like more insights on the root cause of my dysfunctional relationship with food.
I am keen to reflect further about the nature of the relationship between my mind, body, food and life
I am eager to identify and explore new options to slimming down and achieving inner harmony
I am looking for some food for thought and inspiration
I am excited to show up and make myself a priority as I enter 2024

Then I’ve got you covered!

Food for Thought is an online 90 minute coaching session that helps you understand the root cause of your dysfunctional relationship with food so that you know what strategies to apply to slim down and find fulfillment in life.

It’s going to show you what to prioritize in your effort to slim down and find inner harmony especially when it comes to the mind, body and soul aspects of your eating behavior that make you constantly hungry for more food. As you begin 2024, I want you to begin investing time and energy in areas you have neglected. If slimming down is something you really want to nail then you should book a Food for Thought session with me. Find out more here.