Myth #1: Emotional eating is different from other types of eating.

All food is emotional, driven by a stream of unconscious emotions. Any attempt to eliminate the emotion of eating will increase the unconscious motivation to eat foods that are more emotionally charged with high sensory content. That’s why substituting chocolate for broccoli always fails, although this strategy could work if truffles were invented to fill the shortage of vegetables.

Myth #2: When I lose weight I will value myself more.

Weight-loss programs reinforce this message, both directly, by asking you to “think about how you don’t like looking in the mirror,” and indirectly, by their emphasis on “goals” and “rules.”

Oh, they say, “You have to accept yourself fat” and “Keep going even if you slip,” and that kind of thing. But no amount of verbiage can counteract the emotional effect of goals: You’re a loser unless you reach them.

When it comes to weight control, overeaters tend to feel like losers anyway. But just in case that’s not enough to guarantee failure, the goals and rules that characterize weight loss programs have a built-in failure mechanism, simply because all winners are also losers. In anything that continues for a long time, such as lifelong motivation to eat, we lose as much as we gain. It is a simple regression to the mean; if you get enough observations, say scores on a test, the mean score, ie the mean score becomes more frequent while the deviations from the mean become less frequent.

If you “win” by reaching your goal weight, statistics predict that at some point in your life (sooner rather than later) you will probably “lose” to a relapse. Hence the old joke: “I lost 200 pounds this year, but I gained 210.” Goals and rules about eating are more likely to stimulate core pains (guilty and inadequate) than core value and thus lead to failure.

But the worst part of this myth, that you will value yourself more when you lose weight, is the sad distortion of a simple reality: you won’t lose weight until you value yourself more. When the core value controls unconscious motivation, behavior automatically changes from what prevents core wounds to what heals, corrects, improves, builds, and rebuilds. Ask yourself this question:

Who is more likely to overeat and attack food (or a terrible spouse or abusive person, for that matter) the valued self or the devalued self?

Myth #3: We overeat out of boredom.

The natural motivation of boredom is to find something of interest. If you want to avoid boredom, you don’t eat, you become interested in something. Bored people overeat only if their boredom threatens them with deep wounds. If my boredom means I’m unimportant or inadequate, my brain mistakes the drop in energy and well-being for hunger, making it more likely that I’ll want to overeat. If not, I will look to engage my mind and body in something growth oriented.

Myth #4: We eat to feel comfortable.

This myth is so prevalent that many magazines have urged us to make lists of our “comfort foods,” things like cakes, oatmeal, chocolate, chicken and dumplings, ice cream, etc. Well, if these foods really had any significant comfort qualities, the manufacturers of alcohol, Valium, and Xanax would be out of business.

That some people feel comforted after eating certain foods has nothing to do with the food and everything to do with its core value. They feel like they are “taking care of themselves” and significantly do not overeat. If the core value motivates eating or anything else, the likely result will be comfort and general well-being.

But if core pains motivate “eating for comfort,” the result will be guilt and shame. When you think about it, it’s kind of silly to say that you eat to feel comfortable when the result of overeating is severe physical and mental discomfort.

Myth #5: We eat out of love (because our mothers expressed affection with food).

This is an especially damaging myth. The same people who defend it, by the way, tell overeaters that they had absent mothers who eat out of affection because their mothers did not express love with food. Well guess what; expressing affection with food is quite common. In general, most mothers use food to express affection to children, including those who are growing thin, although fathers who worry about what kind of food are slightly more likely to produce eating disorders.

Empirical facts aside, “affection eating,” like “comfort eating,” belies common sense. Overeating leads to self-recrimination and hatred, but certainly not love. Has anyone felt love for eating too much? If we did, we’d savor it, drag it out, drag it out as long as we could. However, overeaters, particularly those who crave food, tend to eat at a pace: fast and furious. Some actually keep eating only to feel so bad about themselves that they will eventually stick to their weight loss goal. Of course, there is only one thing that self-hatred makes you cling to and that is self-destructive behavior.

We don’t eat out of love because core pain is not an attempt to feel valued, accepted, or loved. Quite the opposite, core wounds are about feeling worthless, acceptance, and love. A feeling of unworthiness causes a serious decrease in well-being and energy, and therefore makes the urge to eat stronger. But as long as we keep eating, at least we can accept ourselves as worthy.

So much for the main myths about overeating. The following article deals with reality.