The Psychology Behind Weight Loss and Emotions

I come from an athletic family, and I was always involved in sports from a very young age. It’s simply been a part of my life. When I became a teen, I adopted lifting weights because I was self-conscious, lacked confidence, and didn’t have a healthy relationship with food.

Being half Hispanic, food was always a celebration around my house. We may have lived modestly, but my mom could make some of the best dishes that I remember to this day. Sometimes, however, I would overeat, because, in my mind, the next day might mean leaner eating prospects. I remember my dad proclaiming, “We’re gonna have to tighten our belts until payday!” That meant beans, rice, and tortillas one day, and whatever you could find the next.

On days my parents celebrated an incoming check, we had some great meals, and I would typically overeat and feel sick later. As a teenager, I spent countless hours trying to work off such tendencies, trying to outrun the calories. Even later, despite the fact that I had courses in college on nutrition and a pretty intense workout regimen, these old habits remained. There was always a faint childlike voice reminding me, “You had better eat up because you never know what tomorrow may bring.”

Through the years, I have tried to maintain a healthy lifestyle, but my relationship with food has remnants of that child within me that was always afraid of scarcity.

Having a Deprivation Mindset

It's taken me many years to understand that maintaining a healthy relationship with food and weight is not as simple as many would have us believe. Sometimes there is a deeper, emotional connection underlying all this. For those who struggle for instance with weight, food may hold deeper, unconscious roots. It may have embedded attachments to things we have experienced, to how we manage situations, anxiety, or how we grew up around food. In my example, Dr. Melanie Greenberg might refer to this as a “deprivation mindset.” As she explains,

Feeling deprived of important resources—love, food, money, and time—can lead to anxiety or anger and we may obsess about the thing we've been deprived of and begin operating in emergency mode (Greenberg, 2014).

Perhaps the last thing many of us ever ask ourselves in this country of abundance is if we feel deprived of food. As well, having immediate access to a trained expert to help do the necessary “vertical descent” work to uncover issues galvanized to food and eating is not always feasible. And in a country that promotes food 24/7 through food shows or the socialization of it (foodies), the design is to monetize desire, to want us to want more, making us emotional slaves to food.

Food can have a strong and powerful emotional draw that fills the void of sadness, loneliness, and despair or nursing hard, former experiences of emotional pain. Whatever the case may be, many people struggle with food. They may begin diets at the start of a new year only to have motivation weaken. Intermittent fasting, keto diets, diet apps for counting portion sizes, weight loss programs, gyms, and more may immerse us in a sick-cycle carousel of promises. However, even the most dedicated will find themselves struggling at various times.

How We Fail With Food and Dieting

A better place to start might be first exploring our emotional relationship with food and avoiding deprivation states. In this, renewal and reinstatement are two such ways in which conditioned responses recover, meaning, under certain conditions, we can resurrect those old habitual ways of behaving—in this case, overeating from scarcity as an example, where once initiated (renewal), the behavior may increase in frequency (reinstatement), happening with more regularity (Bouton and Swartzentruber, 1991). Renewal and reinstatement of former habits are about the recovery (resurrection) of formerly extinguished behaviors, and this is termed relapse phenomenon (Bouton and Swartzentruber, 1991; Podlesnik et al., 2017).

Renewal, reinstatement, and other relapse phenomena are now at the center of recent research inquiry because of their significance in helping understand failure rates related to extinction interventions such as dieting, weight loss strategies for eating, and more (Podlesnik et al., 2017). The recovery or re-engagement of former behaviors (i.e., former contexts and eating habits) that had been extinguished (through diets, etc.) has been studied relative to many socially significant behavioral phenomena, such as overeating, addictions, and substance abuse, to name a few (Spurlock & Lewon, 2023).

Researchers Spurlock & Lewon (2023), from their work, have described recent research that underscores how emotionally triggering events (deprivation-feeling states, celebrations, stressful situations) can function as motivating operators (MOs) and may instigate relapse both by a) triggering interoceptive (internal-emotional-biological) conditions that serve as a filtering context for relapse and, b) changes in the amount of operant responding (environmental contexts) in the presence of such stimuli.

Spurlock & Lewon (2023) also conducted their own study to test this interaction with a deprivation experiment involving mice amongst food and water access. The results demonstrated the strength of response under deprivation states that might reinforce stronger postdeprivation behaviors, where such triggers can largely reignite motivation and desire to succumb (overeating). Interestingly, however, state-dependent relapse was not observed in satiation (satisfied) states or when mice had been fed and given water regularly (Spurlock & Lewon, 2023).

Ways to Address How We Approach Things Like Dieting and Food

• Engage in reflection and deeper introspection. Ask questions like these: What was my relationship with food growing up? When I felt hungry, what was that like? What kinds of foods do I currently choose to consume and why? How do I engage food when I’m emotional—sad or happy? Do I ever feel deprived?
• Use cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) self-monitoring when you eat. When you eat, once you have consumed that first plate, assuming that it’s not overfilled, and you have a strong desire to go for another, ask yourself, Why? Why do I want a second plate? Yes, it may taste good; but, you are not deprived because you have just eaten, so it must be something else at work. This kind of disruptive introspection can help you begin to at least acknowledge the reasons why food may have a more complex meaning in your life.
• Don’t create deprivational eating states. This means you can eat things you enjoy, in moderation, thus recognizing that you are still free to eat foods you like, but doing so with balance. One burger, not two, maybe a small serving of fries, and half a drink. The strength of deprivation is then appeased.

I don’t diet anymore. Now that I understand my relationship with food, I am engaging in a healthier lifestyle mentally and physically. By exploring your own relationship with food, you may finally be able to unburden yourself and begin fostering balance and satisfaction. Yes, you may cheat every so often, but, more often than not, you will maintain a more consistent pattern with food in your life.