Nobody Asks What the Weight Is For

Specialist CBT therapy for anxiety, OCD, depression and more in West London

Someone tells you they have put on a stone this year. What is your first question? If you are British, it is probably not a question at all. It is a suggestion. Cut back. Move more. Maybe a joke about the biscuit tin at work. Here is a hypothesis. We have built an entire culture around treating weight change as a maths problem — calories in, calories out — when for a huge number of people it is actually a nervous system problem wearing a maths problem's clothes. Ask someone in therapy what happened before they gained the weight, and you rarely hear about biscuits. You hear about the year a parent got sick. The redundancy that turned into eighteen months of freelance anxiety. The relationship that ended quietly, on a Tuesday, with no one to tell. Stress does something very specific to the body — it keeps a stress hormone called cortisol running high for months at a time, and one of the things sustained cortisol does is make you hungrier, specifically for the food that is fastest to reach and easiest to eat standing up. That is not a willpower failure. That is the system working exactly as designed, for a threat that never actually goes away because it is not a lion, it is an inbox. For plenty of people, the same anxiety switches appetite off entirely. Food starts to feel like one more task on a day that is already full. Neither direction is a personal failing. Both are the same signal, pointed different ways. CBT does not treat weight. It treats the thing underneath it — the anxiety, the grief, the burnout, the chronic stress response that has been quietly running the show. The Lyceum Clinic offers BABCP-accredited CBT across West London — Chiswick, Ealing, Richmond, Kensington, Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush — and online across the UK.