Do you ever walk past a mirror and think, “I’m so fat”, “My hips are huge” or “My once-lean stomach is now covered in this wobbly, horrible belly fat”?
If you often bad-mouth your body or punish yourself with negative self-talk (“Idiot! I have no willpower. I’ve eaten an entire pizza.”) – you are not alone.
Many women have a love-hate relationship with their bodies (or worse, they hate their bodies all the time).
However, negative self-talk can lower your self-esteem and actually hinder your weight-loss goals.
Berating yourself for your weight may drive you to overeat in response to negative feelings (“emotional eating”).
This is because negative self-talk is only going to cause you to tighten the reins around what you allow yourself to eat, making you more likely to restrict food and then overeat and blame yourself over and over again.
What’s more, negative thinking patterns can lead to physical stress and increase the risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes (as revealed by this study).
So what can you do? Try one of these ways to detox your thoughts and quit negative self-talk:
- Develop an awareness of your thoughts and learn to notice when you’re being self-critical so you can turn negative thoughts into positive ones.
- Observe (without judging) your emotions and notice the thoughts behind the emotions. Ask yourself, “What am I actually blaming myself for?”. Answering this question can help you identify your mind’s misunderstandings and the false assumptions you’ve cultivated.
Examples of false assumptions related to your body are:
➣ I am not skinny enough, so I won’t find a partner (or a job)
➣ I can’t lose weight because of my lack of willpower, so I’m worthless
➣ I’m fat, so everyone is judging me
- Meditate for 5 to 20 minutes each day. Meditation gives you a great opportunity to look at what your mind does and access your thoughts so you can observe them without having to identify with them.
- Write down your negative thoughts. This can help you identify thought patterns. From there, you can examine the root problem that may be causing the negative thoughts in the first place.
For example, if you have a negative thought that says, “It is impossible for me to lose weight”, perhaps the underlying limiting belief is, “I don’t deserve to lose weight and live a happy life”.
- Counteract negativity by changing negative thoughts into empowering beliefs, even if you don’t initially believe what you’re saying to yourself.
For example, if you often say to yourself “I’m fat and I need to lose weight”, you can replace this negative thought with “I would never say this to a beloved friend. I’d tell her that her body is amazing, and if she really wants to lose weight just to feel better, she can definitely do that by staying positive and living a healthy lifestyle. So that’s what I’m saying to myself”.
- Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with your body, look for what’s right.
For example, you can express gratitude for everything that you are able to achieve with the help of your body (including essentials such as allowing you to work and seeing people you love).
Weight Loss: How to Make a Difference With Positive Self-Talk
While healthy nutrition, exercise, and self-care are essential for weight loss, positive self-talk can also make a huge difference in achieving your goals.
Here’s how positive self-talk helps your weight loss journey:
- Positive self-talk can improve fitness and enhance exercise performance. This is because it can actually motivate you to go to the gym and even lift heavier weights, which is essential for increasing muscle tone and getting a toned body.
- Positive self-talk has the power to reduce stress, frustration, anger, and sadness. This is extremely important as there’s plenty of science showing that too much stress and out-of-control emotions are linked to emotional eating – which can hinder all of your weight loss goals.
So, a positive internal dialogue is an incredibly efficient way to relieve stress and cope with negative emotions without overeating.
- When you practise positive self-talk, it becomes easier to ditch the diet mentality that makes you try one fad diet after another without actually seeing results – Because dieting is known to cause lower self-esteem, while positive self-talk improves your self-confidence and empowers you to embrace a non-diet approach to losing weight.
This is extremely important for your weight-loss journey because fad diets simply don’t work. They just make you crave carbs and sweets while trapping you in a binge-restrict cycle and depriving your body of the nourishment needed for healthy weight loss.
When you stop dramatically limiting foods during a diet, these cravings calm down so you can better understand your hunger and fullness cues and lose weight while eating intuitively.
- Positive self-talk is all about assuring yourself that you’re capable of achieving everything you set your mind to.
Research published on ScienceDirect has proven that using affirmations to imagine positive events and situations triggers in your brain the same areas that would be triggered if these events actually happened.
This means that positive self-talk really has the power to help you cope with whatever life throws at you and achieve anything you want.
The Bottom Line
Words are powerful. The words you say to yourself can be helpful or hurtful.
They can encourage you to stay positive on your weight loss journey or give up on your weight loss goals and get trapped in the restriction-binge cycle.
This is because the thoughts you have about yourself create your beliefs – and your beliefs create your world.
When you overcome negative thinking, you’ll be better equipped to shift the diet mentality and lose weight the healthy way.
Sources:
Verywell Mind – Negative thoughts: How to stop them
Healthline – Positive Self-Talk: How Talking to Yourself Is a Good Thing International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity – Depression, emotional eating and long-term weight changes: a population-based prospective study