Author: Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN

Few of us will travel a straight path to weighing less. There will be false starts, unplanned detours, stalled engines, and dead ends. But the answer is not to start over–only this time “do it right.”

Those false starts and dead ends are all part of the learning. The program is not a year long because that’s how long it should take to attain your ideal weight. The program is a year long to allow time for lots of failure.

We do not achieve success when we put sufficient distance between ourselves and our failures. We achieve success when we learn to bring our failures close,  examine them with clear eyed compassion, learn what we can from them, and use them as fuel for future growth.

It’s frustrating to see the same whiff showing up over and over again on your Daily Review. Maybe it’s the 9 pm snacking free-for-all that happens every night.  Or your seeming inability to drive past the drive-thru on your way to work without pulling in. Or always succumbing to temptation and pouring that second glass of wine, despite your intention to stop at one.

Whatever it is, you can clearly see that this habit is standing between you and progress. But you can’t seem to change it. Day after day, despite your best intentions, it ends up in your whiff column, making you feel like a failure. It seems pretty obvious that you simply don’t have the ability (or will power or strength or resolve or whatever) to change this habit.

It’s hard to keep believing that change is possible when all the evidence seems to point to the contrary.  And that’s why it’s so important to collect some evidence that a different choice is possible.

If you have a habit that you want to change, not doing it for a single day is not enough to undo years of daily reinforcement. But it is the beginning of showing your unconscious brain that change is, in fact, a possibility.

What We Know About Ourselves

Our actions and self-talk powerfully shape our beliefs about ourselves and what is possible.  In order to start believing that we can be someone who weighs less, we may need to start thinking and talking about ourselves differently. But it’s not enough to decide what we want to choose. We also need to accumulate some hard evidence that we sometimes make weigh less choices.

This is a recurring theme in two of our favorite behavior modification podcasts: The Foodist podcast by Darya Rose and Taking a Break from Drinking by Rachel Hart.

Although Rachel’s podcast focuses primarily on the habit of drinking, the insights and strategies that she employs translate seamlessly to the work we are doing in the Weighless Program. In this episode on Self-Coaching, for example, she discusses the importance of practicing the new behavior we want to cultivate, despite the fact that it is likely to be uncomfortable at first.

The entire episode is worth a listen but if you’re pressed for time, tune in at minute 11:20, which is where she discusses practice.

Rachel expands her exploration of the importance of practice in this episode:

The Foodist podcast is also a wealth of insight and inspiration for the work of behavior change.  In each episode, Darya coaches a listener through a dilemma, frustration, or roadblock that is derailing their healthy eating habits and mindset. Scroll down the list of episodes and you are sure to find one (or several dozen) that speaks to you.

But the true power of Darya’s podcast is not finding the one in which Darya “fixes” the problem you’re having. It’s in realizing that the answers don’t come from following someone else’s prescription but in understanding, accepting, and working with our own beliefs, feelings, actions, and reactions.

If you have a long-standing habit that is getting in your way, start by collecting some evidence that a different choice is possible. Recognize that choosing something else may be uncomfortable at first but will get more and more comfortable with practice. Also, remember that habits get momentum the more you practice them – both good and bad – so make sure you fuel the good ones and starve the unwanted ones.

Researchers writing about mindful eating in Frontiers in Psychology interviewed a number of overweight people about their attitudes towards self-care and self-kindness. The results were fascinating.

The subjects were very uncomfortable talking about ways that they were kind to themselves.  They seemed to equate self-kindness with self-indulgence, which they saw as a negative trait.

They were a bit more comfortable with the term “self-care” but here again, there was an interesting divide.

They talked about things like getting out in nature or taking a bath or setting aside time to read or visit with a friend. As long as it didn’t involve food, they were comfortable identifying these activities as self-care.

But they were unwilling to see choosing healthy foods or exercising as a way of exercising self-care. They saw these things as something they “should” be doing.  Therefore, doing them didn’t count as self-care or something they were doing to be kind to themselves. 

Isn’t that interesting?

If we can come to see making healthy food and movement choices as a way of showing ourselves kindness, instead of a duty that we may or may not be fulfilling, maybe the notion of self-kindness wouldn’t feel so self-indulgent and dangerous. 

Perhaps you’ve  noticed a pattern in which a day of wins seems to be followed by a day (days??) of over-indulging.  Maybe we tell ourselves that we deserve a reward for good behavior. Never mind that the reward undoes the progress…if this were a logical or rational issue, none of us would be here!

Or, if our good behavior doesn’t show up on the scale THE NEXT DAY, we console ourselves with food. Never mind that this consolation leads us further from where we are trying to go. See above.

I think this happens because we still view those wins as something we are doing in order to lose weight, which suggests that this is a temporary thing that we can stop doing as soon as we lose the weight.

Here’s a subtle mindset shift that may help interrupt this cycle.

Instead of viewing your weigh less choices as something you are doing to lose weight, try to see your weigh less choices as something you do because this is who you are now: someone who weighs less. It’s a permanent state of being (and action).

“Should we go out for dinner or make dinner at home tonight?”

This is a question that comes up fairly frequently at ourhouse. On the one hand, it’d be awfully nice to have some one else do the cooking (and the dishes). And the food is often a little more indulgent than what we might make at home.

On the other hand, we’ll end up spending more money than if we cooked at home and funds are not unlimited. We’ll also almost certainly end up taking in more calories. Not the end of the world but, again, those “funds” aren’t unlimited either!

Sometimes, we decide to go out.  But just as often, one of us will say, “Let’s bank it.” That’s our way of saying that we’re content to save it for another night.

Deciding not to go out for dinner because we shouldn’t spend the money feels like a loss. Deciding to “bank it,” somehow feels like a win. By deciding to make dinner at home, we’ve stored up a treat for the future.

Try this next time you’re deciding between a weigh less and a weigh more choice. Instead of telling yourself that you “shouldn’t” or that you “can’t afford it,” consider whether you might prefer to leave it in the bank for the future.

Being someone who weighs less does not mean that you have to replace your turkey on whole wheat with steamed tofu, brown rice and algae flakes. (Unless that’s something really love.)

If a turkey sandwich is a lunch that works for you (i.e., it’s easy for you to get/make, you like the way it tastes and the way it makes you feel) then that is a perfectly reasonable starting place.

There will be times when it’s tough to find the motivation to stick with the effort. Perhaps you’re not yet seeing the results you feel you should be seeing, or you’ve had a set back. You wonder why you should bother continuing.

But, really, what’s the alternative? You can give up and just go back to being unhappy about your weight and hopeless about your ability to change it. You can go on a crash diet, but you know how that’s ultimately going to turn out. Or you can choose to remain hopeful. You can gather your resolve (or borrow some from your friends here) and stay in the saddle.