Weight loss through therapy: Why it’s all in the mind

When Carol Masika stepped on a weighing scale and saw 80kg, it wasn’t just a number but a wake-up call. A sedentary lifestyle and a heedless relationship with food had led her to Category 1 obesity. This means that her BMI was between 30 and 34. She has not always been like this.

Before marriage, Carol (then 65kg) had tried every weight-loss trend - be it a keto diet, calories counting when snacking, going to the gym, intermittent fasting, hiking, you name it. They worked—but only temporarily.

When she got married in 2022, she had a flat reaction toward keeping fit and dieting.

“I wasn’t as active as I was in the previous years. I became more sedentary and added weight. This time, it wasn’t easy for me to try a diet. It becomes harder when you are married because most of the time, sharing meals is a great bonding experience,” she explains.

A couple of months after her honeymoon, she noticed drastic weight gain and became even more worried when a doctor asked her to watch her weight.

“It kept getting worse. I signed up to a gym and that helped a bit but again, I fell off. “

Carol's breakthrough came through an unexpected avenue: rapid transformational therapy, where a therapist takes a patient through ways of taking care of their body holistically and in a way that can have a lasting impact.

“By the time I was meeting my therapist, I weighed almost 80kg. I had a terrible relationship with food. I was not kind to myself. What contributed to my weight gain entirely was how I saw food and how it made me feel,” she explains.

After going through the therapy sessions, she had a mindset shift.                                

“I keep telling my therapist that she gave me the confidence to know that I can lose weight by being kind to myself.  What I don’t do now is dieting. I don’t go to the gym for purposes of weight loss but for the sake of my health goals,” she adds.

She says her therapist encourages her to acquire a certain lifestyle, rather than getting a quick fix to weight loss. 

“It is less about my weight, but more about my health. I need to understand everything that I eat and the effect they have on my health. To that effect, there are some things as a family that we don’t take, like wheat, dairy products and ultra processed foods,” she explains.

“I have learnt that many of the processed foods have additives like sugar, which are addictive to the brain. It could later have adverse effects on one’s health,” she adds.

Carol wishes she knew everything she knows now earlier. 

“Most of the decisions that we make in terms of eating are informed by our emotions, sleep levels, nutritional deficiencies, stress levels and all,” she shares.

Snacks

“Before this programme, I could have snacks anytime, and I could still be hungry. That wasn’t normal, and my body was giving me cues. I could starve myself for a week, and then eat a lot in the subsequent week but that wasn’t helping,” she says.

She says for weight loss, it is all about choices and it starts in the mind. She adds that it’s not okay to deny oneself things without a reason but because of how taking those things affect one’s body.

Jaini Shah, a rapid transformational therapist, explains that weight is just one measure of health and not everything.

“One of the biggest factors that affects weight loss is the food we eat. So food could be 95 per cent and exercise five per cent,” she says.

She, however, says it is difficult to change the way we eat, adding that the connection to food is sometimes equated to love. “The reason behind this is because many of us don't realise that we have an emotional connection to food. We have an attachment to food that's been there since the time we were born, even since the time we were in our mother's womb,” she explains.

She also explains why we turn to food when emotional needs go unmet.

"We all have these underlying needs —for connection, comfort, security. And when those needs aren’t met, we often turn to one of the simplest, easiest, and most familiar solutions: food," explains the expert.

She now uses therapy to help support people who have that need. Her work involves rewiring certain beliefs that people may perceive about themselves. 

“It's about looking at the feelings and the emotions behind food and your psychology towards food to then help you create the ability to have this lasting change, especially when you're trying to be healthier,” she says.

She explains that the real reason people have cravings or cheat days is because of a certain connection they have with the food. 

“The way people perceive food is very individual. It all stems from how you were brought up and what rules and conditioning you had around food during your childhood,” Jaini tells Healthy Nation.

She explains that the very initial connection of food to love stems from the moment people are born and especially when they are fed.

“That's the moment in which we all form this connection that food equals love. Because in that one moment when you are being held and you are being fed, all your necessary needs are being met. You are safe. You feel connected. You are loved,” she says.

In most Kenyan homes, people were conditioned to finish the food on their plates. Jaini says that in adulthood, it is safer to have just enough food that one can finish in a sitting. 

She explains that there are some psychological factors that contribute to either weight loss or weight gain. 

“We may have a lot of emotional trauma in our body, and that tends to also sit within our fat cells. This is where therapy becomes really important, so that you can heal all those wounds that you have,” she explains.

She adds that stress also contributes to weight gain, and it is more hormonal.

“If you think about stress from an evolutionary perspective, our bodies are built as if we are hunters and gatherers. We haven’t evolved much. Back in the day when we would experience stress in our body, it could mean that a drought is coming, or we're going through a period of big scarcity, and there's not going to be a lot of food available,” she explains.

“Stress would signal to our body to hold on to and store all our fat reserves so we can make it through this drought season. Also, when cortisol, the stress hormone, spikes up in your body, it actually releases glucose in your bloodstream. When you have more glucose in your bloodstream, you're naturally not going to be able to release weight because higher blood sugar levels means that you're not going to drop the weight,” she adds.

Some people also experience emotional eating. People who do that choose to eat food addressing the emotional state that they are in.

“The root of it basically comes down to you ‘eating your feelings’ rather than feeling them,” she says.

For people who don’t believe in therapy for weight loss, she says that a better term would be self-care.

“There’s so much stigma around the word therapy but going to therapy does not mean that there is anything wrong with you. It means that you want to be the best version of yourself,” she says. 

A study published in the scientific journal Nutrients in 2021 says that integrating a diet with a dietary consultation and regular psychotherapeutic group sessions proved to be the most effective in reducing weight and body fat.They call it cognitive behavioural therapy.

“Obesity is a very complex disease with numerous medical and non-medical underlying factors—genetic, endocrine, psychological, social, and environmental, to name a few,” shows the study.

“For this reason, only a comprehensive treatment of this medical condition, integrating traditional approaches (diet and increased physical activity) with psychotherapeutic interventions and pharmacology or bariatric surgery—if recommended—can be successful in the fight against it,” says the study.

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