I had a client named Tina come in for a consultation who was having a problem losing weight. She talked about how depressed she was because of the weight. When I begin to look at the pattern, what I found was that in her family to be connected they had meals together where there was lots of food where you were supposed to eat vigorously to show that you cared.

Years later, as an adult, even though she was living in Arizona and her family is all back east she equated the relationship so that food really meant being connected to family and she was kind of feeling the loss of her family every time she deprived herself of food. I really didn’t need to do any therapy. Upon realizing why she overate she said to me at the end that second session “well that’s kind of silly”. And I told her, no that’s just how you constructed it. So she responded, “Oh…well… I don’t want to do that anymore”. She had her moment of realization and she was done. End of therapy.

I got most of the initial groundwork out of the initial consultation and then I looked for patterns in the first session and by the second session she had really clarified what all of this meant to her, looked at it and said “I don’t have to keep doing that. That’s not helping me”. She was a successful case after that.

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If you relate to Tina’s story, if you suffer from depression due being overweight, if you have an eating disorder, help is available through professional services of a counselor, life coach or therapist.