Taming Your Wild Appetite

Did you think that weight loss surgery would help you solve your wild “appetite” issues for a life-time?

I bet it didn’t take long to realize that it didn’t. Sure, surgery may “tame” them for a while but soon they return, and sometimes with a vengeance. So, if weight loss surgery isn’t the answer, then what is?

Is there an answer to our overwhelming appetites?

The answer is YES. There most certainly is a solution. But in order to find it, we need to understand a little about how our appetites work, and how to tame them.

You may have discovered already, that our appetites don’t like to be ignored. The more we ignore them, the hungrier we become. And the hungrier we become, the more we eat. But the more we try to fill our appetites, the more they rage. Feeding our appetites with excess only leads to weight-gain, guilt, and shame. Realizing that over-indulgence doesn’t work,we conclude that we didn’t try hard enough, so we repeat the cycle. We try replacing our excess with total deprivation.

This is where we have gotten off-track. We have more than just physical appetites or a physical need for food. We have many other appetites. We also have emotional and spiritual needs. We have an appetite for sex, authority, power, pleasure, work, gaining wisdom, companionship, love, acceptance, to be wanted, needed, understood, cared for, appreciated, trusted, and to fellowship with God. WOW! Now, that’s a lot of appetites. No wonder we still find ourselves facing the wild side of our insatiable hungers.

Physical food can only satisfy physical hunger. In order to fully satisfy an emotional appetite, we must use the actual thing being desired to fill the need. When we try to fill our emotional needs with food, our real needs go unmet. Any appetite that goes unmet will grow stronger and our unfulfilled appetites scream all the louder to be fed.

The key is to discover what our real need is—whether physical, emotional or spiritual. Discovering our real need will allow us to fill our needs with what they’re really hungry for. For example, if it’s companionship we’re seeking, filling our needs with food doesn’t help. Actually our unmet need for companionship only grows worse. It’s starving. It cries out all the louder to be filled. Our appetite for companionship is not bad, it’s good, but it needs to be filled with healthy and fulfilling relationships, not food.

Are your many appetite needs being fulfilled or are they being starved? Remember, the trick is to discover what we are hungry for. Once we identify our appetite desire, we can work on filling it—one need at a time—achieving success in one area, then moving on to another.

For more on appetites and how to tame them, read my book, Out of Obesity and into the Promised Land.