Phantom Fat: Why You Still Feel Obese After Losing the Weight

Your weight has changed. Your brain has not received the memo. And it may not for another two and a half years.

You stand in front of the mirror and see a body that is no longer there. You navigate doorways as though you still occupy more space than you do. You catch your reflection in a shop window and do not recognise the figure looking back. The scale tells one truth. The mirror tells another. Your body tells a third. And you have begun to wonder whether something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. Something is happening in you, and it has a name.

Phantom Fat Syndrome is the neurological phenomenon in which the body changes faster than the brain can update its internal map of the body. Drawing on the same body of research that explains phantom limb syndrome - somatosensory cortex plasticity, body schema theory, and the proprioceptive entrenchment of decades of inhabiting a heavier body - this book makes a quietly radical case: the persistence of the old body in your felt experience is not psychological weakness, denial, or insufficient gratitude. It is neurological inertia. And neurological inertia takes 18 to 60 months to resolve.

In Phantom Fat, Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Analyst Konrad van Staden synthesises peer-reviewed neuroimaging research with more than two decades of clinical work to offer something almost no other weight-loss book has attempted: a neuropsychological account of why goal weight is not the finish line, and a clinically grounded framework for closing the gap between the body you have and the brain that has not yet caught up.

For the post-bariatric patient. The GLP-1 graduate. The reader who has lost the weight and lost themselves in the process.

The body has changed. The brain is still catching up. This book is the bridge.

Part of the Psychology of Weight Loss Series.