Self sabotage isn’t just one thing. There are many causes of self-sabotage, especially when it comes to weight loss. But the end result is that you continuously prevent yourself from getting what you say you want and never completing tasks or projects that you want to get done.
All of this can lead to feeling bad about yourself and expecting to fail, which leads to more self-sabotage to avoid facing failure head-on, which perpetuates the cycle.
What I have found is that most people who have had a long-term relationship with yo-yo dieting don’t actually believe that they are capable of losing the weight so their brain looks for evidence to back up this belief causing the self-sabotaging behavior.
2 Reasons You Sabotage Your Weight Loss
There are many reasons people self-sabotage but two of the biggest reasons are faulty thinking and procrastination/avoidance.
Faulty Thinking
Let’s face it. When it comes to losing weight, you know what to do. You know what healthy eating looks like but you just can’t get yourself to get started and stay the course.
It’s your faulty thinking that causes you to repeat your patterns that prevents you from losing weight and causes you to re-gain the weight once you lose it.
Examples of faulty thinking, or what I call the dieters mindset, that sabotage your weight loss are:
- I blew it I may as well keep on eating
- This food will make me feel better
- I lost the weight so now I get to eat
- It’s just a little bit it won’t make a difference
- If no one see’s me eating it doesn’t count
- It’s not fair that they can eat that but I can’t
- I’m going to gain the weight back anyway so why bother
- I’ve been ‘good’ for 5 days, I should’ve lost weight, what’s the point
What makes this faulty thinking is that none of it is true. These are old patterns of thinking that you have not learned how to change.
This faulty thinking is a direct result of the beliefs you formed early on about yourself and your relationship with food.
Your beliefs dictate what you think, what you perceive and what you create in your life.
Your brain is working to achieve everything you believe. This is why my coaching focuses so much on changing your limiting beliefs.
Your beliefs cause the faulty thinking that causes you suffering in your life.
If you think about it, when you are having these thoughts that cause you to sabotage yourself, you are likely in a state of stress overwhelm, anxiety frustration etc.
When you begin to see this thinking as faulty or unintelligent, you will then have the ability to change your thoughts to thoughts that are true, real and logical.
When you align your thinking and your behaviors with what you want for yourself, you will be able to lose the weight and keep it off.
Procrastination/Avoidance
Another way you may self-sabotage your weight loss is by not dealing with problems until they get so big that you are forced to deal with them.
There are several potential reasons for procrastinating and avoiding. You may never have learned the skills to break tasks up into smaller pieces, or you may tell yourself you are too tired to plan out a schedule for doing what you need to get done.
Perhaps you feel overwhelmed by the size of the task at hand or you feel like an imposter who doesn’t have what it takes to succeed.
I find the “fear of failure’ to be a predominant belief that sabotages those whose desire is to lose weight.
Maybe you self-sabotaging by not even getting started, eating a bag of cookies when you intended to eat only two, making excuses to overeat vs creating reasons not to are very common patterns of behavior.
In the short term, you manage to avoid the discomfort of an stress-provoking or boring or unrewarding task. But in the long term, the things you’ve put off keeps you right where you are instead of where you want to be.
You may also procrastinate and avoid because you are a perfectionist. You overthink things or can’t decide where to begin. All of these tendencies tend to have an anxiety component. You can counteract these feelings by reminding yourself that there is no such thing as ‘perfect’.
Procrastination and avoidance (as well as addictive behavior) can also be ways of not taking responsibility for your actions.
Some of us fear success because we don’t like the limelight or fear that others will expect more from us than we can deliver. But rather than facing this fear head-on, we tend to set ourselves up for failure instead.
But fear not …your faulty thinking and self-sabotaging behaviors are changeable. You 100% have the ability to change!
A good place to start is to begin to notice your thoughts and ask yourself if they are true and real.
Lasting weight loss starts with changing your mindset.
When you learn to become aware of your self-sabotaging thoughts and then change them, you can change your life.
As my coach says, “The problem isn’t the problem, the problem is how you’re thinking about the problem.”
If you’re ready to stop self-sabotaging your weight loss, schedule a free call with me now.
