5 Tips for Overcoming weight loss Guilt
Guilt is one of the most common emotions that people can encounter when they try to lose weight and fail. Guilt over ‘failures’ can seriously spoil your chances for a weight loss success story. Here are some top tips to get rid of fat - and guilt – forever.
1. Healthy Selfishness
It’s important to develop a sense of “healthy selfishness” when weight loss is your goal. While your friends might mean well when they keep asking you out for dinner and drinks every night, it can make healthy living extra challenging. You want to keep saying “yes” to make them feel better, but really you need to focus on making yourself feel better. Learning how to say “no” (in a nice way) doesn’t mean that you should feel guilty. The key to a weight loss success story is all about balancing short term versus long term gains.
2. Healthy Perspective
Traditional approaches to healthy living, which advocate strict or specific diet and exercise plans, actually go a long way toward making people feel guilty. Most weight loss plans are so strict that people feel deprived. This feeling of deprivation is what causes a lot of people to break their diet or not go to their prescribed exercise session. Once this happens, it’s all too easy for the person to progress from a lapse in their diet (a short term slip up) into a relapse (a more long-term abandonment of the principles of healthy living). Some people feel so guilty about one missed training session or a couple of biscuits that it sends them into a downward spiral – one missed session turns into 6, a couple of biscuits turns into the whole packet. Just as mental strength gives professional athletes an edge on their competition, developing a healthy perspective is essential to successful weight loss.
3. Healthy Strategies
An alternative approach to successful weight loss involves not giving clients a specific diet and exercise plan. Rather, practitioners encourage clients to devise their own healthy living strategies that suit them both physically and psychologically. In this way, the clients’ healthy life journeys are much more self-directed and autonomous and they are much more motivated and inspired to keep up their diet and exercise day in and day out. Because they are establishing their own rules as to how to live a healthy life, they are much less likely to break them and feel guilt and much more likely to successfully lose weight and keep it off.
4. Healthy Mindset
The biggest challenge many weight loss clients who have experienced previous weight loss attempts face is changing their mindset. They may have tried nearly every weight loss plan and program on the market, losing and gaining weight over and over again. Once they manage to shift their mindset out of the “twelve week challenge” or prescribed diet mode, then everything just falls into place and successfully losing weight becomes easy. Most of these ‘dieters’ look back and can’t believe that they struggled with weight loss for so long. Naturally slim, fit and healthy people don’t follow a specific diet and exercise plan, they don’t feel deprived and they don’t suffer guilt when they eat a giant slice of chocolate cake. The key to guilt-free healthy living is changing your mindset so that you no longer want to eat unhealthy foods and you actually want to engage in exercise. Once you’ve done that not only will you be able to lose weight, and keep it off, but you won’t find it difficult and you won’t suffer from diet and exercise guilt anymore.
5. Healthy Reflection
If you can really understand how something works then you can fix it. Unfortunately most people don’t have the necessary skills within themselves to get to the underlying issues of why they acted in a particular way and why they feel guilty about it afterwards. Most people can process things at a conscious level, but need help to tap into their subconscious and discover why they repeatedly self-sabotage their weight loss efforts. In terms of “quick fixes” guilt can be really disempowering, so you need to find a way to compensate yourself. The most obvious method to deal with guilt about over-eating, for example, is to do more exercise. However, when you consider it takes a 65kg woman over 50 minutes on the stepper machine just to burn off the calories in three Tim Tams (let alone a whole packet) then the limitations of this weight loss method soon become obvious. You are much more likely to feel empowered (and also much less likely to repeat the behavior and feel the associated guilt again) by addressing the real issues behind why you repeatedly over-indulge. And that’s the best fix – because it’s the one that will last forever!
Guilt can be a very destructive emotion; however, it can be turned into something constructive and positive that can actually help you on your way to successful weight loss. It’s up to you. If you don’t learn how to deal with the emotions that cause you to do things that make you feel guilty then you will end up living a life of yo-yo “guilting” (probably combined with a life of yo-yo “weighting” as well). Learning to handle guilt and transform it into a positive thing is a huge part of any successful weight loss story.
