Spiritual Root of Stress-driven Obesity

 If you suffer a sufficiently large quantity or the wrong kind of stress, you want to build a wall between yourself and the world. Your body type may obediently respond by physically building up padding between you and the world. 

 It helps dull your emotions, as a palliative measure - not sure how that plays out, physically, but it definitely works.

 This is particularly noticeable when losing fat, as it can release the emotional numbness in a reverse-order sort of way. As you drop the physical pounds, the emotions from the time the the fat was laid down come back to you. I think it works due to the chemical profile of the blood being part of what memories are tagged with. Burning the fat returns your blood to a younger version (especially pollutants), which causes the related memories to surface. 

 You 'eat' your experiences, and this spiritual truth causes unaddressed sources of stress to be held in the fat, unfortunately freezing the irritation up against your skin, making you permanently more irritable until the stress is addressed and/or the fat is shed. Sure you can drop weight using starvation, but without addressing the spiritual body, sooner or later the physical body will come back into harmony with the spiritual. Sustaining a delta can be done but this is...stressful. Causes strain, even.

 This means therapy, done correctly (Stoicism) is a weight-loss measure. If you solve the outlying sources of stress, then you don't need the fat anymore and the fat that's stress-driven will vanish. At most you need a a bit of percussive maintenance to jog the memory of the lipostat system.