There are few things more all-consuming than obsessive thinking about food, health and the weight and appearance of the body. With both women and men this pre-occupation often over-shadows all other goals, enjoyments and experiences in life.
 
The focus on food and the body fills the same need that alcohol, drugs, gambling and compulsive shopping do: It is a strategy to shut down the inner experience of emptiness, aloneness, disconnection and lack. All of these strategies create in initial feeling of excitement and satisfaction, but this is very short-lived.  You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want, so you keep repeating the same behaviour, in progressively more extreme ways, hoping for a different result.