So how is the shame cycle keeping us overweight?
When we set a diet or exercise goal or plan, spoiler alert, we are human, and we ARE going to mess up from time to time.
When we do, many of us will then beat ourselves up with the belief that shaming ourselves is the right way to get us back on track.
And isn’t this what we were taught as kids?
If we did something wrong, we got yelled at, maybe even physically hit (if you call it spanking, that somehow makes it ok, right?), and this was supposed to make us do better in the future. So it makes sense we do the same thing mentally to ourselves to try to correct our behavior.
The problem is, mentally berating ourselves with negative self talk (like “you shouldn’t have eaten that”, or “you are so lazy, why did you skip your workout”) makes us feel awful.
And if you are overweight, you probably are in the habit of EATING to make yourself feel better.
So we eat something that’s not part of our plan, then we make ourselves feel terrible, then we go and eat a cookie to cheer ourselves up (often without consciously realizing what we are doing) and then we yell at ourselves for eating a cookie, and then we feel terrible.
See what’s happening here? It’s an unending loop and part of why we have such negative associations with trying to lose weight. The shame cycle feels terrible.
Instead of getting into this shame cycle, the best thing to do is treat that one off exception to our plan as exactly what it was – a one off exception to our plan. If we want, we can take the incident to our coach to understand what the thinking was that lead to the exception so we can learn from it and be onto ourselves next time.
But we let it go and just get right back on track.
What happened at lunch today does not need to have any effect on what we do at dinner tonight. We haven’t “ruined the whole day”. We don’t need to wait until Monday to start over. We just resent in this moment and go back to our plan.
Would working with a coach help you break the shame cycle and lose weight? Let's jump on a call to see if my program is a fit for you. https://lisaduke.net/schedule
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