How to stop worrying about your weight

Most women mistakenly believe that the way to feel better about their body is to lose weight.  This myth has been created by a diet industry expected to be worth over £220 billion globally by 2017. Don’t be fooled – diets create profits, not self-esteem.

Sadly, physical changes are not the solution to feeling better about your body.

To be more body confident you only need to work on one part of your body – your brain.  The way that you think and feel about your body determines your relationship with it, not what it physically looks like.

Your feelings about your body can alter on a daily basis, and are easily influenced by your habits and environment.  Try these strategies to create a more positive mind set about your body, where weight is not constantly on your mind:

Ditch the scales

There are two main reasons for giving scales a wide berth.  Firstly, using them as an indicator of your health is flawed.  Weight is just one (rather unreliable) measure that can be used when considering the state of someone’s overall health.

Secondly, if you are weighing yourself daily, what is your motivation?  If the number isn’t what you want to see, it casts a shadow over your whole day.  If it’s what you were hoping for, you’ll only feel good until the next ‘bad’ weigh in.  This practice means that your daily happiness, self-worth and esteem are conditional on a number.

If you want to stop obsessing over your weight, stop weighing yourself.  I went through a period in my life where I weighed myself daily, and it was like being on a rollercoaster – as my weight went up and down, my mood went down and up.

Stop the weight debate

The way we experience life is largely a product of what we think and talk about all day long.  If you’re constantly talking about weight with friends, then it will always be at the forefront of your mind.

Make a conscious effort to stop the weight debate.  Direct conversations away from “So and so has lost weight, don’t they look great?” or “I/she needs to lose weight.”  It’s these seemingly innocent conversations that can make all the difference to how you feel about your body.

Make health not weight your goal

Most diets have a target weight as their goal.  The problem with weight targets is that they seldom produce a healthy outcome for your body.  It’s possible to do unhealthy things to your body to lose weight e.g. fad diets that cut out entire food groups or even food!  These unhealthy practices tend to revolve around deprivation, which imply that your body is bad and needs punishing to get it into shape.  It’s no wonder at the end of a diet most people (95%) put on all the weight they have lost plus more – they’ve had enough of being punished!

Contrast this with having health as your goal.  If you want your body to be healthy, you need to treat it with love and respect.  This is a lifestyle choice, not a onetime goal. It means honouring your body’s need to eat nutritious food (without cutting out any major food groups), to move so it stays supple and strong, and to rest when it needs to.  This happens each and every day.  There is no deprivation or punishment.  You do healthy things for your body to have a healthy body.  Health goals start by caring about your body; weight goals start by hating it.

To stop worrying about your weight, focus instead on your health.  What can you do today to be healthier in both mind and body? I guarantee that focussing on your weight will never lead to a healthy body or mind.

Understand your inner chimp

Believing that your physical appearance is what defines your worth is a symptom of your inner chimp at work.

If you haven’t read The Chimp Paradox by Dr Steve Peters, I recommend you do.

Your inner chimp is the emotional part of your brain, programmed amongst other things, to keep you safe.  The inner chimp mistakenly leads you to believe that your appearance is important to your worth, while the human part of your brain is far more logical, and appreciates that there is a lot more to being a human than just looks.

If you’re constantly having an inner struggle about the importance of your weight over your personal qualities, put this down to the natural tendency of your inner chimp.  Know that the real you, your human brain values you regardless of the number on the scale!

If you’re struggling with your relationship with your body, my coaching programme, The Body Confidence Journey can help.  

To find out if the programme is a good fit for you, simply answer a few questions to help me understand what you’re looking to achieve, and I’ll get back to you with how I can help.

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