Obesity

“Overweight people did not have a problem with their body machinery – their metabolism, glands, or even genes, but with their appetites.” According to NY Times Magazine (1959), 90% of all obesity caused by psychogenic problems (Seid, 123). . . . Body weight had become solely a question of personal habits, of diet and exercise – that is of psychic health and personal self-control” (125). . . The overfed body was, strangely, an empty body, one plagued with emotional needs that food would never satisfy. In this construct, food was abstracted beyond even a scientific quantity of calories and nutrients. It had been abstracted into an emotional symbol. . . . The psychoanalytic model also reinforced powerfully the connection between sexual maladjustment and fatness. . . . Appetite for food became inextricably tangled up with the appetite for sex. But the sexual instinct came to be regarded as more powerful, more important, and more respectable than the instinct to please the palate or fill the stomach” (126).