How To Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Diet
Do you self-sabotage when you’re trying to lose weight?
Maybe you know you shouldn’t be eating junk food but you do it anyways because you have a craving.
Or you go over to mom’s for dinner and you love her cooking so much that even though you tried hard not to you end up going over your daily budget.
Self-sabotage is a common behavior that can stop you from succeeding.
We’re often unaware of our destructive habits and don’t know how to effectively change our behaviors to reach our goals.
Here I’m going to address common weight loss self-sabotage behaviors and patterns and how to overcome them.
Why Is Breaking Free from Self-Sabotage The Key to Achieving Sustainable Weight Loss?
If you really want to lose weight and keep it off then it’s important to identify the reasons why you self-sabotage. Otherwise, you’ll keep starting over again and again.
And eventually, you’ll give up.
Self-sabotage can happen for many reasons.
Perhaps you’re afraid of the consequences of what will happen when you reached your goals.
Maybe your friends won’t like the new you or you’ll get made fun of by your family because everyone else is heavy.
Or you’ll have to eat completely differently from your family and it makes you uncomfortable.
You can also self-sabotage if you’re setting ambitious goals that are out of reach.
Maybe you don’t believe you’ll reach them or think they are impossible for you so you self-sabotage.
Other reasons can be you’ve done so much research that you’re hearing conflicting advice and you keep changing your plan.
Whatever your reasons for self-sabotaging, identifying them will help you align your behavior with your goals so that they are not in conflict.
Identifying Common Self-Sabotaging Behaviors and Patterns
To help you figure out your own self-sabotaging behaviors, here is a list of patterns that are common to people who are trying to lose weight.
Does any of them ring a bell for you?
Feeding Emotions, Not Hunger
Emotional eating is the most common coping mechanism for negative unwanted emotional triggers such as stress, anxiety, or loneliness.
We eat to distract us from the core of the issue or problem that we don’t want to address at the moment.
Unfortunately, eating is addressing a problem that food cannot solve.
It can give us temporary relief from those negative emotions especially when we resort to hyper-palatable foods that are high in sugar, salt, and fat. They temporarily release dopamine to make us feel happy but it never lasts.
When we’re using food to solve an emotional issue we can create a negative addiction pattern to emotional eating that doesn’t serve us.
This tends to happen more often to individuals who have trouble identifying feelings, regulating their emotions, and have not developed other healthier coping mechanisms.
Delaying Real Action
We’re wired for gratification and pleasure so it’s no surprise that when it comes to healthier habits we keep postponing starting.
We associate healthy with deprivation, willpower, more discipline, and a lack of enjoyment.
Constantly reading about different diets, looking at training programs, and doing Google research are all forms of procrastination.
We are doing the preparation of starting the weight loss journey but not actually starting the journey but it feels like we’re taking action.
Postponing taking real action and changing our habits only delays our goal and makes it harder to get started. The more we procrastinate the better we get at it. We strengthen our ability to postpone and put off getting started.
Silencing the Inner Critic
Over 80% of the thoughts we have today are the same thoughts we had yesterday, last week, and last month. It’s a tape recording of the same thoughts on repeat.
This also includes the same dialogue of the negative, critical voice we all have inside our heads. We are our worse critics. We would never let someone talk to us the way we talk to ourselves in our head.
But the truth is that we self-sabotage ourselves when we believe our thoughts are true. We believe what we tell ourselves when we’re struggling, experiencing difficulty, and feeling like giving up.
In moments of self-doubt, anxiety, and challenge during our weight loss journey, we believe we’ll always feel this way and that we’ll never reach our goals or get past this hurdle.
We tell ourselves to give up, that it’ll never happen for us, that we’ll always be stuck, and we don’t believe it’ll get easier.
Even though we can train our brains to help us succeed, when believe our negative thoughts we destroy our efforts and reverse our results.
Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
Breaking Free from the Perfectionist Trap
Yes, being a perfectionist can be the reason you fail and self-sabotage. If you’re holding yourself to doing everything perfectly otherwise it’s not even worth getting started you may not even get to start.
Not forgiving yourself for your mistakes or when things do not go as planned can cause you to feel depressed, and ashamed, and come undone in the process so you give up.
If you’re a perfectionist you’ll accept nothing but perfection and are highly critical and judgmental of yourself. You may feel that if you don’t do it exactly as you had planned it means you won’t see results.
Instead of seeing progress and growth in your journey, you see mistakes and struggle to move on when things don’t work out the way you expected.
To learn more on how to overcome your self-sabotage tendencies, check out the next section where I go through tips to help you defeat your self-sabotaging behaviors to permanently lose weight.
Empowering Yourself: How to Conquer Self-Sabotage with Confidence
Identifying your self-sabotage habits is part of the equation for success, the other part is figuring out how to prevent those unhealthy behaviors so that don’t destroy your ability to lose weight.
Here are tips to help you do that!
The Trigger Detective: Unraveling What Sparks Your Reactions
You probably heard of the saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
This applies in the case of self-sabotage. It’s better to identify your triggers and work on preventing them than it is to try to change your behaviors when you’re triggered.
You do this by being curious and asking yourself a list of questions after you noticed you were triggered. These questions include,
Where were you?
What were you doing?
What were you thinking?
What were you feeling?
Who was with you?
Answering these questions after each incident will give you a better picture of your triggers and help identify any patterns that may have sparked self-sabotaging behaviors.
Overcoming Challenges and Embracing Fear
Often times the root of our reasons for self-sabotaging is fear. We fear what may or may not happen if we reach our goals so we intentionally thwart our efforts and progress. To combat this we must face our fears and challenge them.
To do we want to list the reasons why reaching our goals are going to make us worst off. What are we afraid will happen if we reach our goals?
Here are examples of real fears and misconceptions from my clients,
“I'm convinced I'm going to be fat for the rest of my life. My fear is that I keep getting bigger & bigger because I'm clearly not getting any smaller.”
“I have a fear (stupid as it may seem) that even after I lose all this weight I am going to have to work this hard every day to keep it off.”
“I feel afraid that I’m going gain all the weight back after my diet. It’s like I am afraid to eat anything and I scan like every food at the store before deciding what to buy.”
“My friends love to dine out and do mimosa brunches. If I lose weight I’ll have to find new friends.”
The next step is to challenge your fears and poke holes in the logic. When we pause and say our fears aloud it can sound ridiculous but it’s what we believe so it stops us from reaching our goals.
Ask yourself is this fear really 100% true? Remember that if it’s 100% true then everybody will agree that it’s true. If that’s not the case, you’re believing a false narrative that you can start breaking down.
“I'm convinced I'm going to be fat for the rest of my life. I don’t feel like it’s possible, so why bother trying.”
Don’t you think if you changed your actions your body will change too? You’ve seen other people lose weight on a variety of weight loss programs. So it is possible. If you tried something and it didn’t work perhaps it wasn’t sustainable for you and your lifestyle. You need to keep trying and figuring out what works best for you. You’re worth it.
“My friends love to dine out and do mimosa brunches. If I lose weight I’ll have to find new friends.”
You can still go out with your friends and dine out with them. However, there is a balance between enjoyment and reaching your goals. You can choose healthier items on the menu or have 1 drink instead of paying for the bottomless mimosas. The key is to be selective in deciding what you choose to indulge in and what to pass on.
Find Your Tribe
Having a supportive group of friends or a network of people you can lean on when times are tough can help you work through your self-sabotage tendencies.
We tend to self-sabotage because of emotional reasons. We’re experiencing an uncomfortable feeling that we want don’t want to feel and need a distraction so we postpone, we rationalize ourselves out of something we know we should be doing, we eat to feel better and provide ourselves comfort.
Instead, we can put on our trigger detective hat and go through the list of questions to figure out what emotional need is not being met right now. Maybe we need to work through some anxiety because we’re stressed about a project, or we’re feeling lonely and need someone to talk to, or we had a bad day and want to vent.
Whatever is the driver for your triggers, having a network of friends or family you can turn to will help reduce your tendencies to self-sabotage.
Ready To Achieve Your Goals?
Identifying and quitting your self-sabotaging behaviors doesn’t happen overnight but you can improve on them.
Checking out why having the right mindset is important to reaching your goals and how you can reprogram your mindset to make your weight loss journey easier is a good first step to tackling your self-sabotaging habits.
Candace is the owner of Rhodes To Strength. She provides weight loss and mindset coaching services to women around the world to create sustainable habits that work for their lifestyle.
You can find her rollerskating, hiking, and bird watching in her spare time.