Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Trying to lose weight is hard on you emotionally. There’s a lot to be frustrated by, angry at, helpless and hopeless about, and self-critical for. When these emotional circumstances strike, how do you protect yourself from them? Do you deal with feeling frustrated and angry by getting out of control in some way? Do you, for instance, scream at the kids or get into it with your husband?

There are any number of ways you could be shielding yourself from unwanted emotional consequences of the weight loss challenge. For example, anyone in your vicinity may be the recipient of your feelings of resentment for not going through what you are going through. Of course, you express such feelings toward others as covertly as you can so the other person feels them but doesn’t recognize them as purposeful. Another way of cushioning yourself might be to blind yourself to even feeling a certain way. You go on as if the undesirable feeling didn’t even take place.

One more example of insulating yourself against the unwelcome awareness of your emotions and then it’s time for you to think of some examples from your own experience. You come up with reassuring and self-serving explanations for your behavior that are in no way correct. In other words, you rationalize your behavior and your feelings and justify why they occurred. But you are making this justification so you can be more comfortable emotionally and not because it's what's really the case.

Now it’s your turn. What do you do to safeguard yourself when trying to lose weight is too emotionally hard on you?

by Maria's Last Diet

How often do your emotions make it difficult for you to stay on your weight loss course? What happens, for instance, when you get frustrated, sad, lonely, bored, angry, anxious, depressed, and even ecstatic? Do you or do you not feel the effect of your emotion on your motivation for losing weight?

If this is the case, what did you do about such a circumstance? Did you deal with the emotion forthwith? Did you try to squelch it? Did that work or was it too late because the damage was already done? Did you try to substitute another, more weight loss friendly emotion in its place? Or did you throw up your hands and let the go-ahead-and-eat-fattening-foods emotion rule the moment?

As always, it is best to deal with this kind of emotional interference beforehand. Practice new ways of coping with the troublesome emotion early on. Rather than trying to squelch the emotion even in practice, try some other ways of handling it. For example, see if you can lessen the potency of an emotion like frustration just by learning you can wait it out so it will have less and less power over you. Having what you practiced ready for the occasion when the meddlesome emotion is upon you once again should make it a lot easier to stick tight to your weight loss plan.

by Maria's Last Diet

Gwen was secretly eating what she shouldn’t and gaining more weight despite wanting to get back on track about losing her unwanted weight. She found that she couldn’t stop chowing down on things like leftover pizza and some of the kid’s favorite snack food. She was desperate to stop doing this.

When talking to a friend, Gwen said that her secret eating took place primarily when her husband wasn’t around. Her friend, being psychologically minded, asked Gwen if there was a connection between her eating and her husband’s absence. Gwen didn’t think so. Undiscouraged, the friend kept at it. What had Gwen told her about her relationship with her husband? The last thing she remembered Gwen saying about their relationship was she couldn’t speak up to him.

Maybe, the friend thought, Gwen was filling herself full because she didn’t feel fulfilled with her husband. She tried telling Gwen this, but it was no use. Gwen was focused solely on her eating, as if her eating was disconnected from the rest of her life. The friend knew better. How, though, was she going to help Gwen see the possibility that her secret eating could be a way she compensates herself for not feeling fulfilled in her marriage?