In matters of weight loss, food and exercise are regular parts of the conversation. A new survey from Everyday Health suggests that another topic should be considered in that conversation: mental health.
The survey found that 40 percent of respondents listed mental health improvement as a leading reason to lose weight. Indeed, mental health and its connection to body weight and weight loss came up again and again.
For example, stress was listed as a leading obstacle to weight loss, and only 12 percent of respondents said they never ate when feeling stressed, nervous, or anxious. Meanwhile, people in the survey who tried but failed to lose weight were more likely to report mental health struggles, and more likely to report guilt or shame about eating, than those who lost weight.
The survey involved more than 3,000 American adults who had tried to lose weight in the preceding six months. In addition to attitudes around the new medications, go-to weight loss tactics, and common hurdles to weight loss, respondents answered questions about their emotions and mental health state as it related to their weight.
The key takeaways exemplify what researchers have long known: that these two factors are closely related.
“Research shows a bidirectional relationship between mental well-being and weight,” says Allison Young, MD, a psychiatrist in New York City, a member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, and Everyday Health’s Health Expert Network. “We don’t fully understand this relationship yet, but there appears to be biological as well as psychological factors responsible for it.”
“It is not a coincidence that as rates of obesity and diabetes are skyrocketing, the rates of mental disorders are also skyrocketing,” says Christopher Palmer, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “They are interrelated because they are both disorders of mitochondrial dysfunction.”
Here are some of the key takeaways from the survey, along with expert insights that can help you apply these lessons to your own life.
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