eat in response to stressful life situations (as opposed to overeating on a regular basis) and because of their genetic predisposition to obesity and their low metabolic rate, find it almost impossible to lose the weight that is gained during these self-medicating binges (Booth, 1980). Large quantities of food have a sedative effect, and one theory of obesity hypothesizes that obese people may not have learned as children to discriminate between hunger and other forms of distress, leading to the eventual adoption of food as a cure-all for any aversive state. This process is known as associative conditioning and the result is called conditioned hunger (Stunkard, 1980).
There is little argument that stress is one factor which contributes to the maintenance of obesity, but the newest research indicates that it is not an original causal factor, but a result of obesity. In other words, most people do not originally get fat because they have emotional stresses; they originally get fat because of a combination of genetic, metabolic, neurochemical, and sociocultural factors. Then, after they have become obese, they begin to experience large amounts of stress (due to societal discrimination against and contempt for obese people) and start to episodically overeat in response to this new stress (Brownell & Wadden, 1983; Greenwood & Pittman-Waller, 1988; Stunkard, 1980).
Additionally, many obese people repeatedly try to lose weight by dieting and repeatedly fail, and there are several sound reasons for this. It has been demons
...