Once I Learned How to Stop Beating Myself Up, Weight Loss Got a Lot Easier

Has this ever happened to you? You start to lose weight; you’re feeling hopeful and confident. Then you blow it and feel like a failure. And then the mental beat down begins:

    “I’m such a sorry loser.”
    “I shouldn’t have put all that weight on in the first place.”
    “What’s the use? I’ll never lose weight.”

Why beating yourself up doesn’t help you lose weight

Somehow we think that being hard on ourselves will make up for the “fact we blew it.” “If I’m hard enough on myself, maybe I’ll stop doing it.” But in reality it often leads us to give up. As one of our participants put it, “I get angry with myself for being fat in the first place and eventually give up.”
What would you do if you found someone bruised and battered?

You wouldn’t pummel them with more blows. You’d show them compassion and try to help them. This is the attitude you need towards yourself when you stumble and struggle in your efforts to lose weight.

Three Steps to show yourself compassion

    Stop criticizing yourself. Look for your strengths instead of your flaws. To help you do this, write yourself a letter listing all your strengths. Resist the urge to counter your strengths with “Yes, but I’m not as good as ”

And, if you do criticize yourself? Don’t criticize yourself for criticizing yourself. :) You’re trying to undo a lifetime of habits, so be very, very patient with yourself. It’s going to take time.

Fill your life with pleasant activities that don’t require food. These activities give you somewhere besides food to turn to when stressed. Make a list of as many pleasant non-food activities as you can come up with

Give yourself compassion breaks. Set three reminders for the day: one for the morning, afternoon and evening. You can use the alarm on your phone to do this. When the alarm goes off, take 10 minutes to reflect on ways you can be kind to yourself. For example:

        “After lunch I will be kind to myself and go for a 15 minute stroll.”
        “I will be kind to my body tonight and not snack on junk food. Instead I will choose an item  

         from the list I just made.”
        “If I slip up and have a cookie, I won’t beat myself up. Instead, I will eat my cookie slowly and 

          enjoy it. Then I will do one of my pleasant activities.”

Showing yourself compassion could be the missing ingredient in your weight loss efforts

Jean Fain, LISW, MSW, a psychotherapist and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School, believes self-compassion may be the key in your weight loss efforts. She has developed The Self Compassionate Eating Quiz to help you determine whether compassion is something you could use more of. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and score. You can take it here for free.

Our online courses (which you can find here) can also help you develop self-compassion and take better care of yourself. Here’s what one of our participants had to say about their experience:

“I stopped beating myself up over any lapses. That used to make me feel so bad I ate even more...with that destructive emotional stuff out of the way, [weight loss] is becoming easier.”

Do you beat yourself up every once and while? If so, give these three steps a try and share with us how it went in the comments section below. If there are other techniques you’ve found helpful, please share those with us as well.

source:http://fullplateliving.org/blog/once-i-learned-how-stop-beating-myself-up-weight-loss-got-lot-easier