Being a Jerk to Yourself Isn’t Helping You Lose Weight

How’s your tolerance for failure right now?

When you make a mistake – you overeat, you eat something you hadn’t planned, you have a binge – what do you say to yourself?

Do you use it as a reason to beat yourself up?

To ruminate on how hard things are for you?

To shame yourself, or to tell yourself you’ll never figure this out?

Because that right there…it’s costing you your dreams. It’s getting in the way of your success.

The self-loathing, the complaining, the pointing fingers, the beat-downs. Those things are keeping you from achieving your goals.

Because, the truth is, successful weight loss comes at the end of a LONG string of failures, my friends.

If you don’t get super good at failing, you’re going to quit before you reach the finish line every single time.

In order to achieve your goals in weight loss (and in anything, truly) you need to be okay with the fact that you’re going to suck at it sometimes.

We’re human beings, not robots. OF COURSE we’re going to mess up along the way.

We’re going to overeat when we’re sad and stressed, we’re going to blow right past our +2 without even thinking about it, we’re going to want to swan dive into a bottle of wine at the end of a long day.

It’s what happens AFTER you fail that matters.

I see this all the time with my clients - the minute they get REALLY good at failing, their success in weight loss (and beyond) becomes inevitable.

Learning to fail well is a critical skill we need to reach our goals.

We think beating ourselves up when we fail moves us forward. That it might motivate us into finally taking action when we mess up, but it never actually works that way.

What does happen is that we EXHAUST ourselves mentally with all the judgment and regret, so when urges for ice cream and wine DO come around at the end of the day, we have zero energy left in the tank to get through them.

If you fail and beat yourself up, you’re compounding the negative emotion you experience.

If you fail and get curious…you’re LEARNING.

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I walk my clients through this process every week, and you can do it in your own self-coaching, too.

When you make a choice you regret, or you create a result that you don’t like, instead of shaming, self-loathing, a generally treating yourself like garbage, ask:

What do I think was going on for me?

That’s it. It’s the simplest question with the most powerful results.

Was I scared? Stressed? Overwhelmed?

What was I thinking that made me feel that way?

Am I noticing any patterns? Do I tend to overeat regularly when I think these things?

What do I think I really needed in that moment?

How can I give that to myself next time?

Imagine if every single time you had a slip up on your weight loss journey, you ditched the self-judgment and asked yourself these simple questions?

You’d feel a HELL of a lot better, and you would start to notice the patterns, excuses, and unhelpful self-talk that are keeping you stuck.

You would find solutions with compassion and curiosity, rather than beating up on yourself.

You would be figuring out where you went off course so that you can do better next time.

You’d be learning, and growing, and overcoming your brain.

And you would lose weight.

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The fail is just the beginning.

It’s just the start of the process of compassionately interrogating your choices and what they create for you. Not so that you can use it as an excuse to hate on yourself and stall your progress - so that you can LEARN and grow.

The only way you WON’T reach your weight loss goals is if you don’t commit to learning and growing from failure.

And beating yourself up after each mistake is the quickest route to exhausting yourself and quitting.

We HAVE to figure out what we don’t know….and every failure moves us closer to our inevitable success, if we can stay curious about what that mistake has to teach us.

When we work together, I guide you through the process of ditching shame and self-judgment and replacing them with compassion and curiosity – so you learn everything you need to know to fail your way to success.

Book your 60-minute Discovery Call today, and I'll show you how.