Depending on what people are trying to sell you, you have probably heard a million different reasons behind weight problems and the solutions to them. People have problems with both gaining and losing weight, but what is the real cause? What is happening inside your body and mind that is preventing you from easily reaching your weight goal? What can we do to help give ourselves that little boost to get us moving in the right direction?

As far as quick, effective fixes, there are none. We hear of these miraculous pills that will help us lose 50 lbs in one week, or that protein drink that makes us bulk up in just three days. Although it's what we all want to hear, it's not reality.

The first factor that has a major impact on our weight is our biology or genetics. It's no surprise that children will most likely take after their parents; the genetic code to be overweight, tall or have a certain colour hair is passed on to us all from our parents. Environment has little to do with our weight, for example in the cases where children are adopted very young, they will still resemble their birth parents rather than the parents they have spent their entire lives with. Unfortunately we have no control over what genetics we get, but we can observe patterns in our family tree and learn to modify our lifestyles to compensate for our genetic flaws.

An important — though not well known — fact about weight loss is how our fat cells work. Most know that our bodies store fat, but what most don't know is that we never lose those cells. When we lose weight, the fat cells in our bodies merely shrink — they do not disappear. Once we manage to shrink our built up fat cells and lose the weight, our bodies are in constant battle with us to gain it back. Our bodies feel that with this weight loss we are lacking nutrition, and will continually try to restore the fat cells to their largest size.

Another aspect of our lives that can affect our weight is our emotions. The ability to deal with emotions is also something we usually gain from genetics, but will also be determined by our experiences and reactions to them. People will use different methods to cope with their emotions, but in many cases people will use food. Overeating is a well-known coping strategy for stress, anger, loneliness and depression. Past experiences with eating to cope can reinforce the need to turn to food for comfort. In the same way, people can abstain from eating to cope with low selfesteem, depression and anger. This type of problem could lead to an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia.

In order to avoid using food as a coping method for negative emotions, keeping a log of when we eat and why can tell us if we are eating too much or too little and if it was because we were hungry or experiencing an emotion. If you think you may be using food to cope there are many resources online that have solutions to help manage stress, depression and other problematic emotions.

Source: Wood, Samuel E., Wood, Ellen G., Wood, Eileen and Desmarias, Serge. The World of Psychology. Toronto: Pearson Education Company, 2008. Print.