It is not your weight; It is the weight of your issues.
Excerpt from the book, Weight Wisdom: Affirmations to Free You from Food and Body Concerns,
by Kathleen Burns Kingsbury and Mary Ellen Williams

Why do people develop eating disorders? Simply put, they develop the symptoms as an attempted solution to a problem. It may be that they use restriction, dieting, or bingeing to cope with difficult feelings or situations in life. Feelings such as sadness, loneliness, anger, and fear are burdensome, heavy emotions. These feelings can make us believe we weigh a million pounds. We falsely believe that if we focus on reducing our weight or changing our body size and shape, we will feel lighter. However, the burden of our issues remains unchanged.

If you are new to the recovery process, you may still see your weight as the problem. Well-meaning friends and family members may reinforce this idea by commenting and worrying about your weight and your symptoms rather than about underlying causes of your struggle. You and your support system need to learn that the real road to recovery has much less to do with your physical weight than it does with the emotional weight of the psychological issues you have or are currently facing.

Let’s take an example all can relate to. How many people do you know who have gone on a diet after the break up of a romantic relationship? Losing someone is heavy stuff. The pain of the loss may feel like a big boulder sitting in your stomach. Only time will make the boulder of sadness shrink. In a society of quick fixes, we seldom wait for feelings to pass naturally. We get busy buying the latest diet book, going to the gym, and skipping meals with the hope that by reducing our dress size, our dating quotient will increase and the pain will end. However, the heaviness in our stomach remains until the time necessary to heal has passed.

A diet does not ease emotional pain. Instead, it is a poor temporary distraction. In the short run it may help us forget the pain of our loss, but when the diet is broken or the weight does not come off, we feel worse. The pain of the loss is compounded by the negative feelings associated with falling off the diet wagon. The only way through a feeling is to feel it. Time needs to pass. Emotions need to settle and dissipate. Your heart needs to heal. There is no way to reduce the pain involved in being a human being. The answer lies in recognizing, examining, and coming to peace with the emotionally laden problems of living.

Helpful Hint: The next time you start worrying about your weight, stop and ask yourself the following question: If I was not worried about my weight, what would I be worried about? Often our discomfort about life gets projected onto our physical body. Asking this one question is a great technique to help you start identifying the “weighty issues” you may need to address in therapy.