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iQuestions Faculty, Dr. David Eckman 
 
 
Question: 
 
Why do some people find it impossibly difficult to diet effectively? 
 
Answer: 
 
Some people find it impossibly difficult to diet effectively. 
 
It’s a commonly-known fact among medical people that there is an 
irreducible group who go through weight reduction program after 
program, and they do pretty well for about thirty days, and then after 
thirty days, they give up and they quit. 
 
A lot of research has gone into why those individuals quit, and the 
Centers for Disease Control, Kaiser Permanente, and many other 
research groups have concluded this, that oftentimes, food is used as 
a positive coping measure for personal pain.  
 
Frequently, this pain comes from unhealthy family backgrounds, and 
what people do is they’ve learned in the history of their life to use food 
to deal with the pain of life— particularly the pain of hurtful and 
dysfunctional family backgrounds. 
 
When it comes to dealing with these interrelated issues— weight 
reduction and a painful family background— you have to take a two-
track approach, like railroad tracks.  
 
On the one side, there is the watching the portions of food, doing 
regular exercise— that kind of very practical stuff— but on the other 
hand, a person has to address the family background. 
 
 
 
Reading books is useful, talking to others is useful, possibly going into 
counseling or a small group is useful, but the pain from the family 
background has to be addressed, because if the person is into the 
habit of killing that pain with food, those two things have to be 
separated and addressed as separate issues. 
 
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