Say you are trying to lose the weight, trying very hard to do your best.
...then, say you engage in some bad eating habits that go directly against your effort to lose the weight.
This, of course, is human nature, bound to happen.
So, what to do?
Here's a good tip having to do with weight-loss psychology. There is a definite difference between dealing with shame and dealing with guilt.
The given, the thing you can't change, is that you reverted to your old bad eating habits.
What you can change is your response to your lapse. There are 2 ways to go. You can
- feel you are a bad person because you did it
- feel guilty because of your momentary lapse
Feeling you are a bad person has to do with pervasive shame, feeling flawed, inadequate, like a failure. Feeling guilty has do with focusing on the behavior you engaged in at that particular time.
Guilty feelings about a particular instance can be very productive. The more pervasive feeling of shame is not productive. It is demoralizing and usually interferes with further action.
Try to focus on criticizing the "sin" and not the "sinner", the behavior and not you as a whole person. Then you can be active and devise ways to act better next time. This is completely doable, whereas trying to make your whole self over is much too daunting and unnecessary a task.
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