You have decided to go on a diet and lose all that fat, so you go about researching all about different types of diets, calories, the sort of physical exercises you could go for, and draw up a humongous chart detailing your diet and exercise regime.
If that wasn’t enough, you download multiple apps, each dedicated to a different aspect of your rigorous routine i.e. calorie counter, diet plan, and workout. Since Spectrum internet gives you easy access to high-speed internet, downloading two to three apps doesn’t seem like a hurdle to you. Moreover, with Spectrum hotspots spread all across the country you can easily take your weight loss regime everywhere.
However, things aren’t working out like you’d imagined. Despite all that effort, your psychological well-being is obstructing the success of your goals. Weight loss is an arduous task for your mind and body, and even more so for those struggling emotionally.
The key to getting out of this unending and disastrous loop is to identify its root cause. So here are a few psychological roadblocks, which you need to assess yourself for.
1. How You Perceive Yourself
The foremost hindrance to your weight loss endeavors might be the very reason that led you to embark on a weight loss journey in the first place. The problem is how you look at your body, mind, and personality with bitter criticism and repulsiveness.
The mind and personality are intangible bits, which you can modify so as to gain acceptance. As for the physical aspects, those attributes that cannot be changed and hence you should learn to accept them and only work on those that you can change. In this instance, a simple calorie intake, exercise, and diet plan research can help you feel good about yourself.
The trouble arises when you’re filled with so much self-loathing that every tiny imperfection is magnified for you to beat yourself up over. Now, no level of expertise over fitness plans can result in weight loss as it cannot recede the hatred for your own self.
Research shows that a negative body image is more rife in obese individuals than the ones with normal weight. As you dislike your body, you may feel too self-conscious to perform an activity in public or avoid doing anything that makes you feel worse than you already do.
So even when you attempt to lose weight, you feel incredibly miserable as you are doing it under self-disapproval.
Start with at least liking yourself; rather than viewing your body as something ugly by comparing it against unrealistic standards of beauty, think that you don’t like some aspects of it and you can work on them so you could be happy.
2. Deal with an Objective Assessment of Yourself
The most common extreme perceptions of beauty are that either you are a plain waif or a beautiful being; there is no middle ground. There’s no positivity in both of these perceptions or room for acceptance for your real self. So when you see all those lovely comments people are posting over your wonderful appearance, it’d be hard to accept when someone expresses their disapproval.
But remind yourself, your body is more than a vessel of perceived beauty. You should look at it objectively and love it regardless as it is the point of connection with others, a treasure of biological wonders, and a conduit of your aspirations.
3. Either Make or Break
When you are diligently sticking to your rigorous diet, but a teeny-tiny moment of self-indulgence throws you off completely and brings you back to square one, then you may be going through cognitive distortion.
As the name implies, it’s the distortion in our cognition, when we view the world inaccurately, often in an exaggerated and negative manner.
People going through this either think that their diet is an absolute disaster or a stunning success based on what they eat; there is no flexibility in their thinking. Studies conclude that the aforementioned phenomenon is connected to a lack of control over eating habits and unwillingness to maintain a healthy weight.
So when you’re prone to either make it or break it pattern, you end up overeating because you just ate a small piece of yummy yet a fatty snack and believe that your diet has been ruined spectacularly.
Try being flexible in your thought, it is okay to indulge yourself with chocolate or greasy food once in a while, after all, you are human. Tell yourself that diet failure due to that piece of chocolate is an irrational thought and it is going to prompt you to do something irrational like eating more than you should. But you are a rational being and will let this self-indulgence go, then move on with your diet.
Wrapping Up
Conquering your psychological struggles may not be easy, but it’s not impossible either. A good way to begin is to accept what you are going through. Even acceptance is a testament to your strength and a guarantee that one day you will get over it.
Once you’ve identified and accepted your situation, you can now move onto resolving it. Depending on its severity, you can overcome it by yourself or seek therapy.
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