Yesterday I gave you 3 reasons that could motivate you to lose weight, however in my opinion, these reasons won’t cut it in the long run and are not reasons to lose weight.
Today I’d like to expand on this topic a bit and give you my experience of why it’s a bad idea to undertake a weight loss program for the wrong reasons. First, here is a little background on my experience with this topic:
I have been dealing with weight and food issues for almost my entire life. As far as I can remember, my perceptions of food, fat, and even calories (I do not count calories!) began when I was around 10 years old. I remember sitting in the car on a summer day in my shorts and looking down at my thighs and thinking they were fat. Of course when you sit down, everyone’s thighs spread out; I was not fat. 🙄
Throughout the years, I have gained weight and lost weight, but for the most part I maintained my weight (overweight) at around 145-155. I got to a point where I refused to diet and decided that I would eat what I want and exercise on my treadmill daily. The problem was that I usually didn’t eat only when hungry, and the types of food I ate kept me overweight and overeating.
There were times when I decided that I wanted to lose weight but my heart wasn’t really in it. The experience that I have had with undertaking another weight loss program because I “kind of wanted” to lose weight, or “I should lose weight” is that it only lasted for a short time, and then I would end up going off my diet and feeling just horrible about myself.
When you are half-heartedly attempting to lose weight, you have two sides of yourself at war with each other: one side wants to lose weight, but the other, stronger side wants to eat anything and everything. In my experience, the stronger side would always win out, because I really didn’t want to do what was needed to lose weight in the first place!
What I think is the most damaging part of attempting to lose weight for the wrong reasons is the emotional roller coaster you put yourself on. Here you have been telling yourself that you were going to lose weight, but now you are overeating on processed, sugared food that is taking you in the opposite direction of your goal. Then the next day, you return to your diet, but end up giving in to your cravings again and again.
This turns into agony and craziness, and in my humble opinion, I truly think that if you are not ready to commit 100% to making changes and losing weight, then it’s better that you don’t even start down that path. There are just too many ups and downs with going back and forth between sticking to your diet and going off of it over and over again. Unless you can do this and not beat yourself up mentally every time you get off track, then I suggest waiting until you are truly ready to commit to change.
You will know when you are ready to commit to healthy changes and weight loss. When you find that true motivation that will carry you through long-term and whose main component is doing it for yourself, then you should have a much easier time of sticking to your plan. You will probably still have some ups and downs, but with persistence the downs should be much fewer than the ups when you are 100% committed to getting that weight off.
