Lasting Weight Loss: How to Beat Self-Sabotage

Seriously, we’re our own worst enemies sometimes right?

We do what we know we shouldn’t and then feel guilty and get into a whole self-blame trip.

Don’t you think it’s time you started treating yourself a whole lot better?

Do you feel like you are your own worst enemy when it comes to losing weight? How often do you VOW to start eating healthier, only to end the day in a full-on binge of pizza, wine, and cookies?

Have your efforts at losing weight in the past been met by sabotage at your own hands? Learning to stop sabotaging yourself and, instead, support your efforts to change your life can be difficult. Understanding how and why you self-sabotage is the key to overcoming this self-destructive behavior.

Understanding Self-Sabotage

When you self-sabotage, you make choices or act in ways that undermine your own goals and values. Self-sabotage is a trick our minds play on us to keep us stuck in our old patterns of behavior, and we have many useful and even devious tricks we use to “justify” these actions.

Some of the most common ways people sabotage their own weight loss efforts include using food to soothe stress or negative emotions, having a black-or-white mindset about eating or health that sets you up to fail, or refusing to change because it creates discomfort.

Self-sabotage is just one of the many habits that have gotten you to where you are right now. Habits are things we do over and over again, so if you’ve been doing certain things to derail your health or weight loss efforts for some time, then there’s a good chance you’ll continue doing them until you make a conscious effort to stop.

How to Overcome Self-Sabotage

The first thing you need to do is identify your patterns and behaviors that are affecting your health and making it difficult for you to lose weight. Keep a journal. Write it all down. Get in touch with the ugly truth about your snacking, overeating, cravings, and body shaming behaviors. Don’t hold anything back. The more you know, the better chance you’ll have of changing these habits.

In addition to looking at the patterns of behavior, it’s also important to make a note of the emotions that go along with these choices.

What are the feelings that occur just before, during, and after these types of sabotaging incidents?

How will you feel if you continue to behave in this way, every day, for the next year of your life? If you do nothing, that’s likely what’ll happen, so consider how that’ll make you feel.

With evidence in hand of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it’s time to make some new choices. Be on the lookout for the justifications that you use. What lies are you telling yourself? And when you hear these pop up, do something different. Make a new choice. Resist the old patterns of behavior.

Adopt a new pattern of behavior consciously. Decide on the new, healthier choice you’ll make, and intentionally make that choice as often as you can. The more you practice this form of self-discipline, the easier it’ll become.

Focus on how these new, more positive actions make you feel and change your outlook or attitude. Stay as intentional as possible so that you don’t let older, more subconscious patterns take over.

Avoid the people, situations, or cues that triggered your old behaviors as much as possible. By placing yourself in a positive environment and relieving the stressors that led to poor choices previously, you have a better chance of eliminating your self-sabotaging patterns.

Final Thoughts

Making small, meaningful changes over time will help you successfully end the self-sabotaging behaviors that can keep you from successfully losing weight. Making massive transformations to your life isn’t possible without incremental change, so focus on what you can do today, at this moment, to stop one act of self-sabotage and put yourself on the path toward better health, one step at a time.