American’s are the most overweight population in the world today – but I believe Americans are starving – we are starving for fulfillment, and we just keep consuming but it never satisfies our hunger. 

 An estimated two-thirds of adult Americans are categorically overweight or obese.  And three years ago I was one of them.  In this country it is most often referred to as a national health crisis, but I believe it is just as much an emotional and spiritual crisis.  I suspect that much of the nation, like myself, have lost touch with what really “feeds” them. 

 I was forced to face my personal obesity crisis one night in a hospital emergency room when I believed I was having a heart attack.  Stress caused by the collapse of my real estate development company had fueled significant weight gain.  As it turned out, I wasn’t having a heart attack but I was receiving a “wake up call”.

 For me, food had gone from filling a physiological need for sustenance to being a psychological attempt to fill an emotional and spiritual void.  Food had become a temporary distraction from the stress and anxiety I felt at work.  Food was also a way that I coped with all of the feelings that came up around the effect the economic crisis was having on my sense of self. 

With my company facing bankruptcy, my sense of my self as I had constructed it had died.  With a wife and three children I new that I needed to address my weight issues before I really did have a heart attack and literally died.  I realized that I needed to take a good look at my life.

I say in my book, Weight Release: A Liberating Journey, “The ‘self’ that I needed to examine was defined largely from the ‘outside in.’ When I say ‘outside in,’ I mean the way I felt about myself was largely dependent on outer criteria, such as the balance of my bank account, rather than from inner criteria, a sense of wholeness and well-being.  I measured my self-worth in terms of net worth, rather than examining my underlying sense of worthiness.”

Like many Americans I had lost track of what was important.  I was so distracted with things outside of myself that I thought would make me happy, that I neglected my inner world.  It took losing my money to really find myself again.

 We are a consumer nation.  We always need more because we have bought into the notion that we are fed from the outside in.  We are NOT, nor can we ever be, fed from the outside in.  Only by discovering what really fulfills us will be ever be satiated and content. And that is the truth behind the obesity crisis in America.