patient gratefully accepts this physical explanation ? !

The list of ailments which are now recognized as arising from emo­tional distress grows every day. Obesity is now widely considered a con­sequence of emotional disturbance. The craving for food, for sweets, is interpreted as a sign of insecurity, a craving for love or a gratification in place of love.
There is no reason to wait until we have actually arrived at what the doctors call obesity to take notice. We can draw the inference that we are inwardly troubled while the scale still tells us that we are only "putting on a little weight." Real obesity is difficult to cope with, and physicians regard it as a serious threat to health in itself. We can cope with the tendency before it goes that far, if we are willing to seek the inner cause.
People who are gaining weight generally protest that they eat very lit­tle. Their inability to keep track of all the guilty nibbling they do is part of the same picture, an inability to face the real problem which plagues them. Doctors often find a gland disturbance, and offer this as the cause of the overweight condition. The patient gratefully accepts this physical explanation, since it relieves him of the necessity of facing the real problem. But the glandular disturbance is in fact only another symptom, an earlier step in the chain reaction set off by emotional stress.