14 Feb Why Self-Care is Better Than Weight Loss

For many people weight management is an all consuming, lifelong struggle.  The problem is not losing weight.  It’s keeping the weight off.  “Yo-yo” diets keep people in a never ending cycle of losing the same few pounds over and over.  Studies show that when people “yo-yo” diet they ultimately gain weight.

If you find yourself trapped in this continuous cycle, it is time to try a different approach.  Placing external restrictions on yourself doesn’t work.  Instead, heal yourself from the inside by designing and implementing a self-care program.

Living a healthy life is much more than reaching a magic number on a scale.  A complete wellness program promotes physical activity, eating appropriate amounts of nutritious foods, getting adequate sleep and relaxation, developing and maintaining healthy relationships, not smoking, using your innate gifts to fulfill a purpose, and managing stress and emotions.

4 Keys to Successful Self-Care

1.  Self-regulation is the ability to set and keep appropriate boundaries.   Almost all people with dysregulated eating have problems with self-regulation. (Dysregulated eating is defined by these tendencies: Using food to sooth stress, anxiety, or depression.  Eating when not hungry.  Eating past the point of satiety.  Depriving oneself of nourishment or food pleasure when restricting.) Self-regulation problems can present as skipping meals, because they “don’t have time” or have “better things to do.”  They binge, restrict, or both.  They have difficulty recognizing hunger and often confuse other emotions with hunger.  They don’t recognize satiety, therefore, they eat past the point of being full.  Typically people with dysregulated eating also have problems with self-regulation in other areas of their life .  Instead of setting well defined sleep hours they stay up late and/or oversleep in the morning.  They often arrive late for appointments.  They either don’t exercise or overdo it.  They see things as black or white, all or none.

Developing a clear vision is one technique to improve self-regulation.  You can’t set clear boundaries if you can’t see what you are placing boundaries around.  Identify your strengths and define how you want your life to move forward.  A number on a scale or a particular lab value does not provide adequate direction and will not keep you motivated over the longterm.  Instead, look at all the major areas of you life and define clearly what you want them to look like.  Develop a specific plan with SMART goals for each.  This is why developing a life plan is the very first step of my Fit For Impact program.  Developing a clear vision with a plan that is relevant to you is a must.

Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habits refers to exercise as a Keystone habit.  He contends that if you learn how to make exercise a regular part of you life, then other habits are easier to learn and establish.  This is particularly helpful for people with self-regulation problems.  Studies show that if you implement and sustain a healthy exercise program, the self-regulation needed to do that carries over or generalizes to your eating habits.  That means if you learn to exercise regularly you will find it easier to eat healthily, which is an even more difficult task.

2.  Managing Stress and Emotions – Learning to recognize what your are feeling, what your need is at the time, and how to cope with it in a healthy manner is central to Self-care.  Many people with Generalized Anxiety and Depression and many who are just overworked and overstressed use food as a cheap, quick, easy, and legal relaxant.  Unfortunately emotional eating is a risk for unhealthy eating disorders.  It feels easier just to sooth the problem with food instead of addressing the actual problem.  If you’re like me, I thought eating was the problem.  It was not until I stopped to ask what am I really feeling and what do I need that I found the answer.  What I really needed when I got home from work was stress reduction and not a large meal.  I found that trying to control my appetite in the evenings was difficult, because it was not the real problem.  I should have been addressing the cause of my stress instead – an out of control work life.

It is easy to be lured in by the instant gratification of food, however it comes at the expense of long-term weight control, and the real problem is still not solved.

3.  Critical thinking and Problem solving –  Critical thinking in this context is not negative thinking but being able to view a problem logically from different perspectives and develop a plan.  Many people make decisions based on their feelings:   “I don’t like to exercise.”  “I don’t like to eat vegetables.”  Liking or disliking something should not be the sole arbiter for doing something.  Often to achieve a goal we need to do things we don’t like doing.

Many fear asking help from an “expert” because it makes them feel like a failure.  They feel like they should be able to solve the problem on their own.  Others feel like asking for help turns over control of their life to another person.  If they have been in an over-controlling relationship in the past, this can present an internal conflict.  They may see an intellectual need for help but fear keeps them from reaching out.

Many people with dysregulated eating have a fixed mindset.  They view successes and failures as the result of fixed, unchangeable qualities.  They feel like their inability to control their weight is genetically determined.  Losses are because of character flaws or defects and wins are the result of innate talents.  They may say, “I don’t exercise because I’m lazy.”  People with a growth mindset understand that we all have gifts, talents, and areas of weaknesses, but also see room to expand and improve on what we have been given.  They see a correlation between effort and results.  A person with a growth mindset would say, “I need to develop new strategies and plans to get me to exercise because the ones I’m using aren’t working.”

The good news is, that if you naturally have a fixed mindset, you can change.  If your first thought is that you are a failure, reframe the discussion.  Stop what you are doing and intentionally ask yourself what could you do differently to change your circumstances.  Tell yourself that you can change, develop a plan of action, and follow through.  Small successes will build confidence and with persistence you will change your mindset.

“The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it.” – Marcus Aurelius

4.  Self-compassion –  Evaluating your actions critically to problem solve, as we discussed earlier, is a helpful process.  Denigrating yourself  and expecting 100% perfection, however, leads to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other psychologic pathology.  You can soothe unhealthy self-criticism through learned self-compassion, or through more destructive means such as over-eating, alcohol abuse,  sexual promiscuity or other maladaptive behaviors.  Allow yourself to accept your body and your feelings as they are.  Acknowledge those feelings and don’t judge yourself for them.  Accept that you are doing the best you can do at the time with the tools that you have currently.  Commit to positive steps and develop more effective tools.  Acknowledging your feelings is not the same as giving up.  Continuing to denigrate yourself leads to a spiral of binging or restricting.  Both end only in more self-loathing.  To stop the cycle, use positive self-talk.  Even if you don’t believe it, refer to yourself only in positive terms.  You can refer to your actions in negative terms, but never attribute them to your innate characteristics or abilities.  There is a difference between being disappointed in yourself for eating an entire bag of potato chips and telling yourself that you are a loser or a failure.  Words matter.  Studies show that you don’t have to believe what you say.  If you say it long enough and often enough you will change.  I like how one researcher said it, “Fake it until you become it.”

If diet plans haven’t worked for you.  Stop dieting.  Concentrate on self-care.  Concentrate on the practical steps that promote wellness in general.  As you nourish your body and psyche with what they truly need, you reduce the feelings to use food pathologically.  Dysregulated eating thus becomes normal eating. Karen Koenig defines “normal” eating as: 1) eat mostly when hungry,  2) choose foods that satisfy you and feel good in your body, 3) eat with awareness and with an eye toward pleasure, and 4) stop eating when you’re full or satisfied.  Once you achieve “normal” eating, then and only then, are you ready to tackle nutritious eating.

Here’s to the Journey!