By Kate Spicer of The Press
It's not what you eat, it's why you eat. Trying everything from meditation to Christianity, more and more women are facing up to the real reasons behind their unhappy relationships with food.
Alexithymia is a nerdy word for an inability to express feelings in words; it's a scientific way of describing a person who lacks emotional insight.
For a huge number of women, alexithymia manifests itself in emotional eating - behaviour such as vacuuming up carrot cake when your mother visits, instead of confronting age-old issues, or filling an emptiness caused by loneliness with a yard of chocolate.
One woman described to me an obese relative who had been sexually abused as a child, but refused to acknowledge or deal with the pain. This is the predicament of Precious, the title character in a film of the same name out in New Zealand next month: she is a morbidly obese, illiterate single parent who was, and continues to be, abused in heartbreaking ways.
Before embarking on a "new year, new me" panic dash to Weight Watchers, consider this: one of its own consultants reveals that only 16 per cent of its most dedicated and successful members keep off in the long term what they initially lose. Indeed, failure rates run at about 95 per cent for most diets, because, for many women, diets don't solve the real issue: that eating is their emotional anaesthetic. And that psychological hunger is confused with real physical hunger.
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