“Obesity is not your fault, but it needs to become your responsibility.”
Konrad van Staden is a Jungian Analyst working at the frontline of bariatric medicine, bringing the language of depth psychology to a field that has long spoken only in calories, kilograms, and prescriptions.
Based in Kini Bay, on the wild Eastern Cape coast of South Africa, Konrad has spent over two decades inside the consulting room with people the world too easily reduces to numbers: bariatric patients, athletes, binge eaters, the chronically dieting, the post-Ozempic generation. What he found there became the foundation of his life’s work: that beneath every weight problem lives a psychological architecture that no diet, no drug, and no scalpel alone can dismantle.
His foundational title My Fat Head introduced the world to the “Fat Head Phenomenon”: the gap between the body that has changed and the psyche that hasn’t. The 14-volume Psychology of Weight Loss Series that follows is now becoming the definitive psychological literature of the GLP-1 era: a body of work used by bariatric ‘Centers of Excellence,’ pharmaceutical educators, elite athletes, and patients across continents.
As a member of the IAAP, SAAJA, and SAMMS, and a regular speaker for pharmaceutical and medical audiences, Konrad bridges the worlds of depth psychology, attachment theory, neuroscience, and clinical bariatric medicine. He works with elite athletes across cricket, rugby, athletics, swimming, and Olympic-level disciplines through his High Performance Matrix framework. And he writes, daily, deeply, and from the bone, about what it actually takes to inhabit a body you have spent your whole life at war with.
All books are available for purchase Internationally on Amazon, or directly in South Africa (pricing in ZAR), signed copies available on request.
A groundbreaking exploration of why diets fail and what truly drives lasting transformation. Drawing on over two decades of clinical experience, Konrad reveals the central proposition: the weight was never the problem, but the symptom of something deeper. Drawing on Jungian and psychoanalytic thought, it introduces the framework the whole series extends, from the Fat Head Phenomenon to the Unconscious Contracts the body makes on behalf of the psyche. Not a diet book, but the argument that no change in behaviour holds without a change in the self.
Beyond the 14-volume Psychology of Weight Loss Series, Konrad has produced standalone works of Jungian depth psychology, for readers ready for a different kind of journey.
A guided journaling work standing apart from the weight-loss series. Drawing on Jung, Von Franz, Hillman, Woodman, and Eliade, this is a slow, deliberate companion for the inner traveller. Designed for those engaged in long-term analytical work, individuation, and the descent into the questions that shape a life. Where the Psychology of Weight Loss Series turns toward the body, this volume turns inward toward soul.
There is a weight that is not measured on any scale. The Weight of the Soul is a depth-psychological meditation on what we carry that no diet, medication, or behavioural intervention can address. Drawing on Jung’s alchemical thought, Hillman’s archetypal psychology, and more than two decades of clinical practice as a Jungian Analyst, Konrad van Staden offers an invitation to sit with the heaviness as material, to recognise it as something the soul is asking to be met, and to begin the patient work of transmutation. For the reader drawn to depth psychology, the seeker who has read enough Jung to suspect that the body is a sacred text, and anyone who has begun to sense that what they carry has a meaning the carrying itself has been asking them to discover.
Jung wrote that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Meeting Your Shadow is a clear, accessible introduction to one of the foundational practices of analytical psychology, drawing on Jung, Robert Johnson, Marion Woodman, and James Hollis, and on more than two decades of clinical work. It moves through the personal shadow, the collective shadow, and the golden shadow (the disowned positive material we have hidden alongside the dark), and through the work of integration that depth psychology has always recognised as the slow, lifelong centre of becoming who we are. For the reader new to Jung who senses that something deeper than self-help is being asked of them, the long-time depth-psychology reader wanting a clinical companion to the shadow work they have already begun, and anyone who has felt the disowned material rising and wondered how to meet it.
Four volumes published. Ten in active development for upload to KDP within the next two months. Click any available title to buy locally or on Amazon.
The ideas at the heart of Konrad’s work, drawn from Jungian depth psychology, attachment theory, neuroscience, and twenty years of clinical practice.
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The clinical realities of the post-GLP-1 transition. Why appetite return is psychological, not merely biological. The work the medication makes visible but cannot finish.
A deep-dive into the protective functions of weight. The unconscious contracts. Why understanding what the fat does for you is the prerequisite for letting it go.
Attachment theory applied to eating psychology. How the earliest bond shapes a lifetime’s relationship with food. Reading attachment patterns in adult eating behaviour.
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Keynote speeches, talks, lectures, and media appearances. Recorded sessions are linked where available.
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Format Tag Link PendingKonrad is available internationally for keynote speeches, conference talks, lectures, podcast interviews, and broadcast appearances. Below are the most common formats. Select the one that fits your event, fill in the details, and your booking enquiry will reach his desk directly.
All bookings are sent directly to Konrad.