Author: Diane Carbonell

No one I know wants to be known as a quitter. Not at sports, not in relationships, and definitely not in weight loss. But most people who try to lose weight do quit at least once. The reasons for quitting vary as much as we all vary as individuals, but most people who quit have one thing in common: They responded to the inner voice that told them to just quit trying to lose weight. If you’ve quit trying to lose weight a time or two because of that negative inner voice, here are some ways to silence it for good.

Clients I’ve worked with over the years have had varying degrees of success in their weight loss. They all gave it a good shot, but some got to their goal weight and some quit before even coming close to their desired weight.

It’s very common to want to quit losing weight. Even as I was successfully losing 150 pounds I contemplated quitting—but I’m sure glad I didn’t. A client of mine had lost about 50 pounds with just 25 more to go and she thought about quitting. She didn’t quit either, fortunately.

Why do we want to quit when we know that losing weight is good for us physically and emotionally?

I think it comes down to a couple of things.

1. We are listening to the wrong voice inside our heads—that one that says, “You can’t do this. All this effort isn’t worth it. You were happy being overweight.”

2. The process is hard. It’s natural to want to quit something that’s hard.

To overcome that inner voice you’ve got to have an action plan to drown it out when it becomes louder than your desire to make the right choices.

Identify truth from untruth. You know that it is true that losing weight is good for you. You also know that it is not true that losing weight is impossible.

When that voice in your head tells you to quit, stop right there and think about what you know to be true: 

• You can lose weight. 
• You can make good choices. 
• Losing weight is worth it. 

Write these truths down to banish the untrue thoughts that your inner quitter is trying to get you to believe.

Face your fears. Some of the thoughts you entertain about quitting come from fear:

• Fear of failure
• Fear of difficulty making the right food selections
• Fear of facing the rest of your life having to continually make those healthy choices

Face your fears and acknowledge them. It’s okay to be fearful of change, but tell yourself it’s not okay to quit because you are worried about those changes.

Expect setbacks. One of the most tempting times to listen to your inner voice telling you to quit is when you are struggling. That’s when the voice becomes loudest.

Expect to mess up. Expect to make poor decisions that lead to gaining back a few pounds. But don’t let those setbacks make you quit.

Instead, forgive yourself for the mess-ups and move on. Look back on all the positive changes you’ve already made and count each pound you’ve lost. Success in the past is a positive predictor of success in the future.

You will always have that voice inside your head that’s ready to tell you to quit, but it’s up to you to listen to it or ignore it. You are a strong person and you can tell that voice to stop spreading untruths and keep doing what you know will be good for your health in the future.

Oh, the shame of weight regain. There is something excruciatingly frustrating about seeing the scale inch up and up. One day you are down two pounds and then a month later you have regained those two pounds and added another four or five. Not only is this cycle frustrating, it can cause you to feel ashamed and want to quit even trying to lose weight.
Like many people, I know the shame of “weight regain.” I remember avoiding friends I hadn’t seen for a long time because I didn’t want them to see how much weight I had gained. I even had a client who made an excuse to skip her closest college friend’s wedding because she had put on 50 pounds in the years since she had last seen her friend. She was too embarrassed to show up to the wedding looking so different from how her friend remembered. To add to her frustration, she had been trying to diet for years without success.
The shame of weight regain is real no matter if you put on the weight suddenly or slowly.

What’s the problem with shame?

You may wonder why shame isn’t a good thing when you need to lose weight. After all, for some people, feeling ashamed of a behavior can bring about change. My kids feel bad when they’ve hurt one of their siblings’ feelings and oftentimes they do change their behavior. At least for a day or two.
But in weight regain, shame doesn’t seem to work as an incentive to lose weight. Instead, the more shame you experience over gaining weight, the more you feel hopeless, helpless, and stuck in a pattern you can’t seem to change.
I totally get it.
As I gained weight, I felt worse and worse about myself. As the years went by and I steadily gained more and more weight, my ability to move in the right direction diminished.
There are a few reasons this can happen, including:

• Depression
• Low self-esteem
• Frustration leading to inaction
• Forced acceptance of your new weight
• Fear of failure

It’s important to acknowledge the shame you feel, even though that acknowledgment can be emotionally painful. For my client who skipped the wedding, she realized her shame was holding her back from moving forward. Once she got to that point emotionally, things began to change.
You too can move from shame to success with some hard work and deliberate choices.

1. Acknowledge that you do feel ashamed of your weight regain.

It’s a difficult but important first step. Write down what’s happened to make you gain weight, how that makes you feel, and then commit to making positive changes from this point forward.

2. Get some professional counseling if the emotions are so strong that they’re holding you back.

There are often deeply held feelings that affect your weight. If you’ve got issues from your past that you know are affecting how you feel about yourself, it might benefit you to get some professional counseling for a time.

3. Make a doable action plan and lay out the steps you need to take day by day.

Don’t declare you are going to lose 50 pounds in 2 weeks. That’s just setting yourself up for failure and more weight regain. Instead, create an action plan to lose weight in a way that is realistic and healthy.

4. Count all progress as positive.

It’s okay to lose weight slowly. Pat yourself on the back when a pound comes off and stays off, feel proud of yourself for exercising regularly, and let each bit of progress move you forward.

5. Watch out for shame rebound.

Just like pounds can come back on when you don’t want them to, so can shame. I had to fight continually against feeling ashamed of my weight regain even as I was trying to drop those pounds again.
Be on the lookout for those feelings to resurface. But this time, you’ve got a plan to combat them and finally get to your goal.

A football player running for the end zone focuses solely on that end zone. He runs fast, evades his opponents, and holds tight to the ball until he crosses the goal line. Getting to your goal weight is important, but unlike that football player, focusing solely on the end goal instead of on the process as you go along is a misstep for both weight loss and weight maintenance.

What’s the magic number you want to see on the scale?

It could be 125, 150, 200, 136, 192, or any other number.

It’s so tempting to set that magic number in your mind and just focus on it to the exclusion of anything else.

Of course, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have that goal number in mind because setting goals is good. What I am saying is that not focusing enough on the nuts and bolts of weight loss will backfire on you in the end.

What’s Important About the Process?

The process of losing weight is not just about getting to your magic number. It’s also about:

• Learning new ways to cook
• Discovering how to handle complex social situations
• Finding out how you best deal with food cravings
• Determining what foods you will and won’t include in your diet
• Exploring exercise options that work for you
• Transitioning to a new healthy lifestyle

My most successful clients are those who don’t rush through the weight loss process without learning important lessons about food and themselves.

They are also the ones who maintain their weight the longest.

What Happens When You Focus Only on the End Number?

Focusing mainly on your goal weight robs you of the opportunity to learn the lessons I talked about above. It’s nearly impossible to truly embrace your new healthy lifestyle when all you care about is whether the number on the scale is going down.

When you don’t have a long-term, permanent lifestyle view of weight loss, you can easily be swayed to trying to lose weight in the fastest way possible without regard to your health.

Here’s an example of someone I know: Linda (not her real name, of course) wanted desperately to lose 35 pounds before her daughter’s graduation. She told me later that she knew better, but she began losing weight by eating a very low-calorie diet—think under 1,200 calories—and exercising for a good long time every single day.

She managed to lose most of the weight but gained it back very quickly.

Why did she gain it all back?

Instead of processing what she needed to do to lose weight permanently, finding a plan that would support (and not hurt) her health, and acknowledging that weight loss can only be long term if lifestyle changes are made, she jumped on the fad diet bandwagon.

She was so depressed after the regain. But she did learn a lesson and finally lost weight in a more deliberate manner. She still had the same end number in mind but went about the process in a healthier manner. It took her a little longer but the result has been lasting weight loss.

Although focusing mainly on your goal weight may seem to be a good idea, ask yourself this question:

At the end of your journey, will you have learned enough about how not to regain weight to make your weight loss last a lifetime?

If you can’t honestly answer that question with a “yes,” then I want you to take a moment to slow down and reassess your weight loss plan.

I think you will come to the point where you, like my friend Linda, realize that focusing only on the end number is doing yourself—and possibly your health—a disservice.

Have you started exercising on a regular basis in the hopes it will help you lose weight? That’s a really great thing to do. But do you seem to feel the need to eat more now that you are exercising? If the answer to that question is “Yes! That’s what’s happening to me,” you aren’t alone. Exercise-induced munchies is a real phenomenon and can definitely derail your dieting efforts. Here’s how to not blow your diet after working out.

Recognize It Happens

Not everyone feels the urge to eat more after exercise, but it is a real issue for some people. A study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that women who worked out intensely ate more calories immediately after working out than women who worked out less intensely. In fact, some of the women ate more calories than they burned while working out.

It’s an interesting study because it shows that overly intense exercise really can cause you to be hungrier and eat more than you need to lose weight. The remedy for this is to be cognizant of your food intake after particularly intense workouts and be smart about what (and how much) you eat.

Another reason for feeling hungry after workouts—even if you don’t exercise with a lot of intensity—is that when you work out, you burn off carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Your body naturally wants to replenish lost nutrients and sends a signal to your brain that you are hungry.

Monitor Your Experiences

Not everyone who works out overeats afterward or even later in the day. But if you are working out regularly and eating a good, healthy diet without seeing the scale drop, you might be eating more than you realize on the days you exercise.

I’d encourage you to take notes about how hungry you feel after certain workouts. If you know that your 30 minutes of strength training in the gym revs up your appetite more than walking on the treadmill, make a note.

Then you will know to be extra careful about what you eat and how many calories you consume after strength training. After all, you don’t want to blow your diet by eating back all the calories you just burned off.

Know What Foods Fuel You Best

Not all food is created equal when it comes to refueling after exercise. Of course you could pig out on sugary cookies, but they aren’t the best choice. Instead choose foods that help you stick within your calorie allowance and fill you up.

Here’s a short list of good, low-calorie post-workout foods. Just keep your serving sizes reasonable.

• Protein shakes
• A small amount of your favorite nut butter spread on a whole wheat English muffin or small bagel
• Bananas
• Greek yogurt with fruit topping
• A few nuts mixed with raisins or other dried fruit
• Hummus and carrot sticks
• Chicken sandwich on whole wheat bread
• Boiled egg that you thinly slice and roll into a tortilla

Stay Hydrated

Part of exercise-induced munchies may be that you are thirsty. Make sure to hydrate before, during, and after your workout. This is especially important if you are doing an intense workout. If you are just taking a stroll around the block with your dog, this probably isn’t the source of your munchies.

Keep Up a Steady Level of Activity

If you just can’t seem to get your eating under control after intense exercise, consider backing off the intensity a bit. You can achieve the same total calorie burn by working out for a shorter time and ramping up your everyday activity level.

Do simple things like walking the stairs several times a day, taking a stroll after dinner, getting up early and working in the yard before you start your day, or even walking in place while watching television.

Missed television shows, hours in the gym instead of sitting at home, giving up foods you love, and eating differently from your friends and family are just a few of the sacrifices you might make when dieting. Sure, losing weight is a lot of work and requires many sacrifices on your part, but are those sacrifices worth losing weight for?

Let’s face it. The word sacrifice isn’t one with a lot of positive connotations. One dictionary defines sacrifice as the “Forfeiture of something highly valued for the sake of one considered to have a greater value or claim.”

In some ways, it doesn’t even seem fair that you’d have to sacrifice anything to lose weight. Just clean up your diet and boom—you’ve fixed the problem.

The issue is that cleaning up your diet does require sacrifices. The longer you’ve been overweight the more sacrificial those changes feel.

You have to make sacrifices to lose weight because the habits you’ve developed that caused you to become overweight in the first place are the ones contributing to your weight problem today.

And in most cases, those are the habits you’ve got to give up.

Common Sacrifices When Losing Weight

I think you might find it helpful to make a list of some of the changes or sacrifices you need to make when losing weight. So in addition to the few sacrifices I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, I’ve put together a list of four more. I am a list maker; when I lost my weight, knowing what I was giving up and what I was gaining helped me stay focused and committed to the long-term prospect of losing weight.

1. Sleep – You might have to get up a little earlier or go to bed a little later to get your exercise time in.

2. Relaxation Time – Instead of sitting around visiting with friends, watching movies, or surfing the internet, you might have to give up some of that time to plan meals, exercise, or prepare food for the next day.

3. Comfortable Relationships – For some people, myself included, one of the hardest sacrifices to make is losing relationships that were built around food. When I changed my diet, some of my friends weren’t happy and stopped including me when they went out to dinner or had a food-centered party. They didn’t want my new diet to ruin their fun.

4. Junk Food – You don’t have to give up every single junk food item you enjoy when losing weight, but you will need to cut back drastically and cut some of them out entirely.

Looking at Sacrifices in a Positive Light

You might be thinking that the sacrifices you make or the foods you give up aren’t worth it. But I promise you they are.

It’s all in your perspective.

If you go into your diet bemoaning the fact that you can no longer eat M&M’s for lunch or have an appetizer and a dessert at your favorite restaurant, you will be miserable.

Instead of thinking about sacrifices as only a loss, consider instead what you gain.

For example, if you get up 30 minutes earlier to take a brisk walk, you’ve burned some calories, ramped up your metabolism for a few hours, and started your day on a healthy note. That’s all positive.

When you turn down the offer of dessert or junk food, you’ve given yourself more room in your diet for healthy, filling foods. That’s a positive.

And when you can finally get back into a smaller sized pair of pants, fulfill a long-desired fitness goal, or feel comfortable in your own skin, all the sacrifices you made to get there are 100 percent worth it.