Disclaimer: This is just reflections from my own experiences, and everyone's wired differently so what works for me may not work for you. I don't intend to sound preachy or prescriptive or to trivialize anyone's struggles; just sharing some ideas in case they're useful for others.
More and more, losing weight reminds me of quitting smoking back in my 20s, and I'm taking the lessons I learned then and applying them to the weight loss process now. Here's some stuff that has helped me think about my habits and my emotional responses to the process of changing them.
- I have to genuinely want to make a change for myself. If it feels obligatory or something I 'should' do for others, it's very easy to put it off or make a token gesture without really committing to changing in the long term. With both smoking and weight loss, I got to a point where I really truly wanted to make a change - not "I should do this because it's healthier," but "I am sick and tired of feeling like this." That mindset of genuinely wanting to make change is important for me - turns out it's not that hard to do something that I really want to do. Obviously this varies tremendously for different people, but finding ways to make it about what you really want for yourself - rather than what you feel obligated to do because academically it's unhealthy - can really help.
- Identifying the detrimental effects of the current habit and the positive results of changing that habit - in very tangible terms - is a big part of this. With smoking, it was like "I feel like shit, I smell awful, my mouth tastes like an ashtray, my clothes stink, my skin looks gross, I'm out of breath all the time, and I'm paying money for all this crap." With weight loss, it's very similar. Articulating both the positive results of making change and the negative effects of my current bad habits helps cement my thinking and keep me motivated.
- Setbacks are going to happen, and that's okay as long as they don't derail you entirely. My partner struggles a lot with guilt and feelings of failure any time she goes over her calorie budget, and we talked a lot about those emotions and how we can regulate them. Guilt or shame are insidious and destructive because they tend to have more to do with how we're perceived by others, but remorse or regret aren't inherently bad emotions to experience, temporarily. If you have a goal and you fall short of it, feeling regret is completely natural. It can even be useful.
- Think of those negative feelings as an emotional pain response, like the sting you feel when your hand touches a hot stove. Physical pain is our body's way of warning us away from danger. Emotional pain can be similar - an indicator that we've fallen short of our own standards for ourselves. That's a good thing, provided we harness that pain and learn from it. But the important thing is that after we learn from it, we let it go and re-focus. If you binge hard on sweets and blow your calorie budget on a given day, that sucks, for sure. It feels awful. But it's not the end of the world. You can experience those emotions, learn that you don't want to feel that way again, and that can help you stay more disciplined in the future.
When I quit smoking I had a bunch of lapses like that, and I have while losing weight as well. It's okay! Shit happens, but each time I fell short, it helped me remember why I was doing this and helped me stay motivated to avoid similar lapses in the future.
Hope this helps, y'all. Good luck out there and keep ya heads up.
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