Subconscious Confusion between Fat and Health by Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D. The subconscious part of the mind sometimes confuses being healthy with being fat. This causes a drive to be fat in order to remain healthy. There are many icons and cultural myths in Western culture that equate fat with good health and slender with ill health.
Most people know that being slender is much healthier than being overweight.
But we all know that losing weight, while almost an American national mania, is all too seldom achieved. So when we do notice that a person has lost some weight, our first thought is that there is something wrong with him. This is so common that it often results in a person's subconscious mind associating being overweight with being healthy. This does not make good conscious sense, but it is perfectly logical to the subconscious because it functions only with deductive logic . If inductive reasoning were available to the subconscious we would not have nearly so many dysfunctions .