I want to take a new approach to weight loss because my motivations just aren't working for me. I have this fantasy about being thin and how all my problems will disappear once I reach my ideal weight, but I am beginning to think that's not true. I want to be thin because I feel like it will add worth to myself or make me feel confident, but I don't know if that's true either. Everyone says that first you have to love yourself enough to take good care of yourself. The motivations behind my weight loss are all wrong.

"Dieting" has actually become a punishment. Since I was "bad" and got myself to this weight, now I must be punished by forcing myself to go the the gym 5-6 days/week. I also must go on a diet where I have to count every single calorie that enters my mouth. Then when I fail, which inevitably I will, I feel even more worthless and punish myself again, but this time by binging on food. When I am done with the binge, I am consumed with even more guilt for undoing all the work I did to try to lose weight in the first place. The next day I pick up the pieces and try again. It's a constant cycle.

My new motivation is to end emotional eating and to learn to love myself as I am. I was successful at it once. However, my motivations were in the right place. I was so tired of feeling out of control that I decided to take a new approach and focus instead on my health. I was dealing with bulimia at the time and I wanted nothing more than to stop. I partially blamed my eating disorder and low self-esteem for the end of a three-year-long relationship. My depression over that made me never want to make that mistake again. I never realized how my low self-esteem could negatively impact not only myself but someone else as well. I didn't want that.

So, I freed all foods and tuned in to my hunger signals and into the reasons why I wanted to eat when I wasn't hungry. It worked for awhile, I even dropped some weight, but there were times when I would gain and I didn't quite know how to handle that. It brought back with it the urge to diet. I almost feel like the more pressure I put on myself to lose weight, the harder it is. Maybe if I would have just accepted the gain as it was, maybe it would have eventually gone by down naturally. Instead, my self-esteem plummeted and I started experiencing guilt and anxiety around food, which led to more concerted efforts to lose weight.

The only problem is now I have been trying to lose weight for over a year and despite being a regular at the gym and attempting to eat more healthfully, I still have not dropped a pound. I've probably binged every week for a long time and sometimes more than once a week. My emotional eating has gone off the radar. I no longer feel in control of it. In fact, it is quite the opposite--I feel like it controls me.