Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

We all know how important believing in yourself and having great self-confidence are for momentous undertakings like trying to lose weight. There is, however, a natural tendency to protect your self-confidence and self-esteem when you’re not up to the job and can’t lose weight. Being overconfident and having unrealistic optimism are often chosen then as the go-to methods of self-protection. This is not a good move if you want to lose weight. Unrealistic optimism and being overconfident prevent you from developing the skills it takes to lose weight. When you are being defensive like this, you will not carefully think about, spell out, practice, and learn the different weight loss skills you will need. A truer than true way to build confidence is having the skills it takes to lose your unwanted weight. To have the skills and gain the confidence you will have to liberate yourself from adopting any false form of confidence, even to defend yourself against loss of self-confidence and self-esteem.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you need to be confident in order to stay on your diet? Confidence, if it isn’t false confidence or overconfidence, can certainly play a big part in keeping you on your diet. Having confidence in yourself eliminates self-doubt, being overcautious, clinging to old ways, and the disturbing feelings that indicate your are being apprehensive and timid

In any endeavor, though, you cannot start with all the confidence you need. Most people build up their confidence as they go along. Confidence gathering, therefore, is an important weight loss activity. Essential to confidence building is the development of weight loss skills that range from more effective self-monitoring to coping more successfully with emotional eating. As you develop these competencies, what you do to lose unwanted weight will become more habitual. It is at this point that you will feel a well-deserved increase in confidence.

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you having trouble controlling your eating despite not wanting to weigh so much? If so, how confident are you that you could do something about this? The emphasis is on the word “could.” How confident are you that you COULD (not would) do something to gain more control over your runaway eating behavior?

You can gage your confidence by responding to the following 12 statements using the rating scale below.

1    not at all confident
2    usually not confident
3    sometimes but infrequently confident
4    occasionally confident
5    often confident
6    usually confident
7    almost always confident

1. Do your eating publicly so people can see if you are using self-control.
2. Set a daily limit on eating fattening foods.
3. Wait at least 20 minutes before you eat any calorie rich snacks.
4. Talk to a supportive person when you want to eat too much food.
5. Stay away from situations where you might be exposed to junk food.
6. Tell people not to encourage you to eat weight-gaining food.
7. Increase the number of days that you have self-control.
8. Handle your feelings and moods without resorting to eating over them.
9. Eating as a reward only once a week.
10. Do something else for a while when you feel like doing some crazy eating.
11. Do not keep food available that you don’t want to eat.
12. Do not tell lies about your eating habits.

What did you find out? Were you confident some of the time, all of the time, or only a little of the time? Being confident that you could do something about your pattern of eating brings you a step closer to successful weight loss.

by Maria's Last Diet

A lack of confidence is a terrible drawback for losing weight. Lacking confidence is different than losing confidence. Losing confidence means you had confidence and lost it somehow. The implication when you lose confidence is there is a chance, sometimes even a good chance you will get your confidence back. Lacking confidence feels more like a permanent personal deficiency, almost a character trait, something that may very well be irreparable.

Do you lack confidence? If so, is it because of your excess weight or is it a more general lack of confidence? Many women focus on their weight as a measure of how worth it they are. To be overweight is to be unworthy, unequal, less than. It doesn’t have to go this way, though. Your confidence can be chronically low, so your excess weight is only one of the things about you that is dragging you down. This is where you are immersed in an overall belief that you are not as good as. You don’t have what it takes as a person. 

Lack of confidence is certainly not good for you even if you do not have a problem with weight. No one wishes to go through life lacking the confidence she needs. It makes getting through life much more difficult. When it comes to losing your unwanted weight, there is always a connection between your level of self-confidence and the weight loss difficulties you are having.

There is self-evaluation in every endeavor. Did you do it right? Did you do it well? What should you have done differently? This is true of the weight loss process too. You will evaluate how well or how poorly you carry out your day-to-day weight loss routine and how efficiently you address any obstacles that make it difficult for you to lose weight.

Where there is self-evaluation there is evaluation anxiety. Everyone has had experience with evaluation anxiety at some time in her life. You probably know it best as anxiety that comes when you are faced with another person or other people judging your performance. It is anxiety that is specific to certain situations, like a math test or public speaking or a sporting event. In the case of weight loss, you are usually facing yourself, and you are the judge of how you are doing. It’s your own evaluation of your “performance” that makes you anxious: “I know I won’t do well.” “I really messed up at breakfast.” “She didn’t praise me and I went right to food.”

One of the serious consequences of your evaluation anxiety is that it affects your self-confidence. Your anxiety can make you lose confidence and you end up not being able to do the week’s weight loss activities the way you wanted to. Another possible consequence of evaluation anxiety is that you might try to protect your self-confidence by avoiding or procrastinating instead of taking a weight loss step. Or, instead of avoiding, you might reduce your effort so you can say to yourself, “I didn’t try, that’s why I didn’t make it.” In this way, you keep your self-confidence because you didn’t fail. You didn’t really try.

Since self-evaluation is a necessary component of any endeavor, including the weight loss process, you can figure that evaluation anxiety will be part of the process as well. To maintain your self-confidence, it’s best if you devote a part of your weight loss effort to dealing directly with your evaluative anxiety. See what about your performance is causing you to be anxious and see what you can do about it.

If you would like more help with this, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog.

If you are looking for more specific help, email us at and we will point you in the right direction.

The weight loss process is not only a test of you losing weight. It is also a test of your self-confidence. There’s nothing like a bunch of must-do weight loss activities to take the legs right out from under your confidence.  

While confidence is usually defined as appreciation of abilities or qualities, yours or someone else’s, there is much more to be said about it than this. For example, there is self-confidence, which means having confidence or faith in yourself. There is expectation: the expectation that you can and will do it. There is a certainty to confidence. You are certain of your ability to do what it takes. Right along with certainty is conviction. There is also definiteness and a feeling of staunchness. There is belief, belief that you have what it takes to do what it takes to reach the goal(s) you set. You also believe you have what it takes or can learn to do what it takes to deal with events and situations that would otherwise prevent you from reaching your goal(s). A silent partner with confidence is feeling positive. When you are self-confident, feeling positive about yourself and your capability and competence comes with the territory. 

You should also add self-assurance and some of the other self-states to your list of what is involved in feeling confident. Of the other self states that are tightly bound up with having confidence in yourself, one is certainly self-esteem, the definition of which is confidence in your own worth. The other closely related self-states are self-worth, self-regard, and self-respect.

One of your goals during the process of weight loss will certainly be having all the confidence you need. You may not consciously think about this goal, but it will be there working continuously behind the scene and right there in your face, contributing mightily to your weight loss effort.

by Maria's Last Diet

No matter how sincere your intention, no matter how much confidence you bring to the process of weight loss, you will still probably have a great deal of uncertainty about whether you will be up to all the different requirements of the weight loss process.

Will you reach your goal weight? Will you be able to stay on a diet? Will you be able to do what you have to do day-in day-out, week-by-week, month-by-month in order to lose all of your unwanted weight? Will you be able to overcome the repeated failures you’ve had with losing your excess weight and this time achieve successful weight loss?

Yes, you will have lots of uncertainties about your capability when it comes to losing your unwanted weight. These uncertainties are a necessary part of any weight loss journey. Right along with reducing your weight, you will have to have what it takes to bear these uncertainties; that is, until you can make reducing your weight more certain for yourself.

by Maria's Last Diet

Thinking you can do it is often what makes the difference when you are bringing your behavior in line with your weight-loss goals.

Can you go that extra mile today, make dinner for the family as well as keep to your weight-loss routine? Do you think you can assuage your hurt feelings in some way other than by snacking beyond reasonable limits? What about the dinner party on Saturday? Will it be an occasion where you eat out of control like you usually do?

Why does thinking you can do it make a difference in these kinds of situations? First of all, let’s consider the opposite of “thinking you can”, “thinking you can’t do it”. What happens to you when you take this kind of negative outlook? You might not really work at it. Thinking you can, on the other hand, gives you a better chance of ‘working at it’. Working at it implies being more motivated, perhaps even more curious, definitely more persistent, and in all likelihood, willing to tolerate mistakes and even learn from them.

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you someone who has based your sense of self-esteem on what you weigh? Do you think thinner women are better than you? Consider this matter carefully before you answer.

For example, what are you like when you are going to your doctor for a checkup and you know you will be weighed? What happens when you put on a bathing suit? How do you take a comment by a family member or friend about your weight? How do you feel about yourself when you see a thinner woman?

Try this. Draw a circle and think of it like a pie. Divide the pie into pieces with each piece representing the different influences on your self-esteem. You might have weight as one piece, accomplishments as another, relationships as still another, and so forth. See how big each piece is relative to the others and to the whole pie. This should give you a good idea of how much your weight affects your level of self-esteem.