How To Pull Yourself Together And Lose Weight

Willpower and laziness

There is strength, there is will, but there is no willpower to lose weight. Familiar?

Let's start with laziness. According to the definition, laziness is the lack of desire to act, to work, to do something. Where does the disregard for your health come from? Why can't you increase your attractiveness and self-esteem, lose weight? Let's try to solve this riddle.

There is a hypothesis regarding the laziness of humans and animals, which explains this state of natural energy savings in case of famine or war. The key factor is the scarcity of resources and the danger of its occurrence. But this approach does not help to understand why there is no motivation to lose weight, although there is no shortage or danger.

It is important to correctly assess the situation of the emergence of laziness - not as a lack of desire to act, but as a desire not to do something specific. At the heart of laziness is usually a conflict of desires.

Laziness is not a moral defect. This is a conflict of mutually exclusive desires. Understanding this allows you to stop reproaching yourself and start looking for the cause of laziness.

There are three main components of the desire not to act:

• lack of incentive;
• conflict of desires;
• lack of energy.

Let's consider what role a disorder of will plays in the problem of weight loss, and in particular in the phenomenon of laziness. Laziness is a desire to refuse to overcome difficulties, a steady unwillingness to make an effort of will. Will is the ability to fulfill one's desires, goals set for oneself.

Paradox: Women who complain about their lack of willpower to lose weight are often successful in other life situations, such as their careers.

To understand when willpower disappears and laziness appears, you need to consider the stages of an act of will.

1. Desire stage. Excess weight causes somatic and psychological problems, so the desire to get rid of excess weight occurs in almost everyone.
2. Desire stage. Difficulties may arise at this stage. But rather not with the awareness of the desire to lose weight, but with the inability to imagine the attractive consequences of gaining a slender body.
3. Stage "struggle of motives". In a conflict of interest, the loser is always the desire to lose weight. There are numerous factors that reduce motivation when losing weight, you can read about them in the article Motivation for weight loss.
4. Decision-making stage. Unsuccessful past experience, self-doubt, negative reaction of others - all this takes a lot of energy, because of which the desire to lose weight disappears.
5. Stage of drawing up an action plan.
6. Action stage.

Problems in the last two stages arise only if the previous stages were inefficiently completed. It can be concluded that the failure occurs in the interval between the emergence of a desire to lose weight and the implementation of the necessary actions. This must be taken into account when losing weight, and also stop using the phrases “I’m too lazy” and “No willpower” - this is weakness and failure.

A systematic approach to the problem of weight loss

The main negative factor of most weight loss methods is an attempt to combine diet and physical activity. This does not take into account the psychosomatic nature of the disease. In psychosomatics, the reactions of the body are secondary, and the root cause lies in the mental and social life of a person.

Dietetics and nutrition alone cannot cope with the problem of obesity, just like psychotherapy is not the leading method of treating such a disease. Only their combined use gives the most stable result.

Bio-, psycho-, socio-model is an integrated approach, a set of diagnostic, psycho-physiological, medical, diet and nutritional methods and technologies that help normalize eating behavior and body weight, eliminate key imbalances, and maintain the achieved result.

The biomodel is a complete diet, nutritional support in the form of food supplements, physical activity.

Psychomodel - soul, sensations and interaction, internal state, emotions, feelings, thoughts.

Sociomodel - interaction with the outside world: family, colleagues, friends.

The modern approach to the problem of eating disorders comes from the fact that this disease is caused by a complex of several reasons that are in the field of our biology, psyche, and society.

goal setting

One of the important steps towards weight correction is understanding the end result. The point of your ideality, awareness.

This point determines the strategy - the goals that must be achieved in order to realize the desire. Goals define actions - what exactly you must do to get a result. This is how skills, new habits are developed, and gradually, step by step, you come to your point of ideality.

Your safe and truly productive path is the path from the future to the present. That is, first you determine what exactly you want, and only then proceed to action.

Your inner child wants love

The expression "every adult is a little child at heart" is not hyperbole.

Psychologists practicing transactional analysis distinguish three main psychological structures of the personality: "inner child", "inner parent", "inner adult".

The principles of transactional analysis are based on the belief that a person can change, he has ample opportunities for choice in the present, despite any unsuccessful results in the past. This is good news for those who want to lose weight, who have a lot of experience in losing and gaining weight.

The “parent” and the “inner child” cannot agree among themselves, therefore, an internal conflict is inevitable, in which one of the parties wins.

Diet, restrictions - "parent" is included, breakdown - "child".

This conflict will continue until the inner adult appears. A beautiful and healthy body is in the hands of the adult part of the personality, and not the "capricious child" or "demanding parent." It is the strengthening of the adult part of the personality, which is responsible for itself, and not for others, that helps to lose weight to the cherished goal. Start taking matters into your own hands, stop blaming genetics, your metabolism, your mom for always overfeeding you.

The most important task is to become a caring, indulgent “parent” for your “child”, to learn to understand him. Without a reverent attitude towards yourself, it is simply impossible to deal with your body, weight, eating behavior, and the search for real desires.

Very often, overweight people promise to start loving themselves, buying beautiful things only after losing weight, but for now they torture themselves with insipid, tasteless food, exhausting physical activity, scold themselves for weaknesses, like a critical parent.

food addiction

Food is necessary to satisfy a basic physiological need. Food addiction is the inability to resist the need to eat, while the need is not due to the physiological feeling of hunger and thirst, but the desire to cope with experiences.

A person chooses such behavior when trying to escape from reality and when food is used for non-food purposes. If he wants to drink, he eats. Angry - eat. And it doesn't always happen because of bad emotions. For example, food can be a reward. Got a five - let's go to a cafe. Offended - eat candy.

These patterns of behavior, laid down genetically, are passed down from generation to generation.

Often a losing weight person studies diets, strictly adheres to one of them and is surprised that he cannot lose weight quickly, devalues ​​the work done, breaks down and again feels guilty that he needs to eat. But no matter how much you want to lose weight and no matter what skills the specialist you turn to for help possesses, it is impossible to safely reduce weight in a day or a month, and even more so to maintain the result.

This is eating behavior, and behavior takes a long time to form. Pull yourself together, "sew up your mouth", use willpower - all this gives a temporary result. So it's time to change tactics. It is important not to work with the consequence in the form of excess weight, but to look for the cause. Excess weight is a consequence of eating habits, and these habits always have reasons. Having dealt with the reasons, you can easily maintain weight. The path will be longer, but the result is much more attractive.

hunger vs appetite

The desire to eat something is controlled by two different feelings: hunger and appetite.

Separating hunger and appetite is fundamentally important for the normalization of eating behavior. Hunger refers to the physiological need for energy and is manifested by physical symptoms (dizziness, irritability, rumbling in the stomach) in response to a nutrient deficiency in the body. Physical hunger must be satisfied.

One of the primary tasks is to start eating not “whenever”, “when everyone sits down at the table”, but for the most natural physiological reason: because you are hungry.

Appetite is a psychological component, it is that pleasure, that consolation, relaxation that delicious food gives us. How to recognize hunger and appetite? What is the reason for increased appetite? Detailed in the article.

The second most important task is to understand what signals your appetite sends you. Appetite is obsessive, indomitable, comes when he pleases. It is indomitable appetite that leads to weight gain, and it is he who gives a signal of unmet psychological and social needs.

Feelings are always hidden behind appetite. A feature of overweight people is the inability to distinguish shades of feelings. We need them to realize and fulfill our desires. If we do not understand them and do not use them for their intended purpose, they torment us, and excess food is used to relieve stress. However, this is an illusion. Life is not only not getting better, it is being destroyed.

What's stopping you from curbing your appetite? Anger, resentment, fear, anxiety, loneliness, guilt, shame, envy, greed, jealousy, longing, boredom, fatigue. All these states of a woman are most often called stress and thus they close themselves off from their own feelings and experiences.

Experiencing all these feelings is necessary for normal mental functioning. But it is important to live these feelings correctly and stop using food as a magic pill for all problems.

Appetite is a hidden need

Appetite (from Latin appetitus - “desire, desire”) is a desire to have a bite, caused by the smell or type of food, social environment (for company), mental state (jamming of loneliness, sadness, fear).

The relationship with food is a lifelong romance. If you do not understand the causes of appetite and do not learn how to otherwise satisfy your needs for security, intimacy, forgiveness, self-acceptance, development, self-realization, pleasure - all efforts will be in vain. Overeating and weight will return.

You already know that the desire to eat can hide completely different motives. You can no longer fool yourself into thinking that the brain needs glucose. The mind and body need a break. Every time you feel an appetite, think about what you want. Ask yourself questions:

• What am I doing? What am I thinking about?
• What am I feeling right now?
• What feelings do these actions and these thoughts evoke?
• What do I really want right now? Cake? What needs are actually behind my desire to eat?
• What can I do right now to get a little closer to meeting my true need?

Understanding the individual causes of temptations is the basis for developing a healthy eating behavior. Your task is to understand the reasons for this craving, and not to reject or ignore them. If you are drawn to a certain product, this is an occasion to think and analyze the situation. Prohibition and restrictions do not solve the problem.

What to do with eating behavior? The correct answer is to stop and think. Calorie counting and intuitive eating are two extremes, but together they are the key to solving the problem.

The information is for informational purposes only and requires laboratory confirmation!

Circle of Pleasure - Learning to Satisfy Needs

Food not only satiates, but also brings pleasure and joy. The first reason for the appearance of appetite, lying on the surface, is the lack of happiness and joy in life. Draw a circle - this is 100% happiness. Divide the circle into sectors. Place the pleasures that make you happy in the sectors. You will be surprised, but in the fight against excess weight, 50% of the circle can belong to the pleasure of eating. Half! This is buying, cooking, eating, going to restaurants, ordering food.

The bottom line: Lack of enjoyment of life is one of the main symptoms of food addiction. Look for pleasures that have nothing to do with food. For example, you can ride on a swing, turn on the music loudly and dance, soak in the bath. At the end of the article you will find a list of tasks that will help you deal with food addiction.

Benefits of being overweight

The changes that are inevitable in the process of weight loss can be ambiguous. On the one hand, these are your internal changes, your attitude to work, to children, to yourself, to rest, and on the other hand, the reaction that will follow from your environment. It is necessary to prepare for this, since these changes may not always be predictable.

What should you be prepared for? To the fact that your environment may react very strangely to your behavior. The husband will begin to bring cakes more often, the mother will diligently bake pies with the confidence that she cares, at work everyone will insistently invite you to drink tea with sweets.

Another reason for being overweight is its “participation” in interpersonal relationships, namely the condescending attitude of others. Excess weight, like any other disease, calls on loved ones to take care of you, allows us to avoid unwanted activities. In body language, this is a kind of reproach. The unconscious manipulation of obesity is evident.

These are the secondary benefits of being overweight. These benefits, of course, are of an unconscious nature, but as long as we are not aware of them, they can continue to operate.

The most common psychological causes of weight gain:

• stress eating;
• food as the only pleasure, the main antidepressant;
• perfectionism and the inability to delegate part of the tasks;
• food is the only way to relax.

How to defend the borders

Floating boundaries of the body are often floating psychological boundaries. The blurring of one's own and others' boundaries is becoming the norm. When they ask, but you don’t really want to. When you don’t really want to, but it’s hard to refuse. These are blurred boundaries. Healthy boundaries are calmly refusing if you don’t feel like it, and not getting into someone else’s life when it doesn’t concern you.

Top 10 Tips for Effective Weight Loss

1. Write down goals, long term and short term. Don't discount your small victories. Praise yourself. How?
2. Give yourself a gift, just like that. Pamper your "inner child" - swing, ball, warm hugs, new underwear, massage. Already today.
3. Write at least five points that you already like about your own body.
4. Write at least five points that you already like about your own character.
5. You need to realize that there is a long road ahead of you, which can be accompanied by breakdowns, relapses, kickbacks, and plateaus. It is impossible to carelessly treat yourself and your body for many years and demand that he lose weight as quickly as possible. Patience and praise for even the smallest victories are important.
6. From now on, when the desire to eat appears, it is necessary to try to recognize whether it is hunger or appetite. When the thought “I want to eat” arises, you need to: - take a deep breath and slowly exhale; - to understand whether appetite is associated with a feeling of hunger; - if yes, choose healthy and tasty food. Eat mindfully and with appetite; - if there is no hunger, try to understand what is the true need behind this eating behavior, what are you trying to replace with it; - analyze the results of the internal conversation with yourself.
7. Make a list of pleasures that are in your life or that are not for some reason. Call this list “33 pleasures”: 20 pleasures for the body, 10 for the soul, and at least 3 future pleasures that you can’t afford yet. Or maybe this will be all 33 points. In this list, include everything that you really love that makes you happy. Hang the list in a prominent place to help you manage your cravings. This list will help your loved ones - they will not need to puzzle over what to give you for the holiday. So do not skimp on desires. It is important for all of us, both women and men, to dream.
8. Think about the benefits of being overweight and overeating. Remember the period when there was no excess weight yet. What can prevent you from losing those extra pounds? How will the people around you react to this? The main thing is to remember that a strong desire to improve your life is always rewarded.
9. Learn to say no without giving a reason. You explain - it means you feel guilty, justify yourself. But there really shouldn't be any guilt. When you begin to value yourself and your time, people will begin to treat you with more attention and care.
10. Meditation is the best way to get motivated. You rest while the body works.