Do you find yourself breaking your diet and it feels almost intentional?
Often it is.
No one wants to diet.
It’s easier to quit than to try and then fail. But we don’t have to fail. If we understand our motives and we learn to recognize them, we can circumvent them and find success.
Listen to Carlene talk about all the ways we sabotage ourselves to keep from dieting and living a healthy life at a weight we feel good at.
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Transcript – Self-Sabotage (scroll up for Podcast)
Hey, this is Coach Carlene with Thin Brain Training. My thoughts for today are about self-sabotage.
As I work with women over at boot camp, it’s inevitable that people fall off their programs. That they cheat on their programs, if you want to use that word. It’s a word I don’t use, because everything’s a choice. We don’t get to cheat. We get to choose whether we want to lose weight or not lose weight on any particular day, and how we eat and the exercise we do is direct correlation to how much we lose.
We make choices, we don’t get to cheat. We choose not to lose weight. We choose to stay heavy. That’s a choice. And it’s ours to make. But what happens when you really, really want that dream. When you can pitchure yourself, you can see yourself healthy, and happy, and bouncing around and getting on amusement park rides and riding horses and swimming in a bathing suit. And you can see that the vision is so clear, and you’re doing so well.
You know, like you’ve lost like 50 pounds, and you’re feeling great. And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, your brain says to you, man, I think you deserve a reward for that. Let’s go have such and such and reward ourselves. And then you think to yourself, yeah, yeah, I deserve that. I deserve that. But you know if you eat that you’re going to gain weight.
You know that if you eat that you’re going to open up pathways and doorways to lead you back to foods that you know will make you fat again, foods that will cause you to regain that 50 pounds.
And yet you still choose the food over progress. That is self-sabotage. We know better. We want the end goal, we want it bad. And yet, we will give that all up. Just for a taste on the tongue. For a 10-second taste on the tongue, we will throw all of our hard work away.
Now you may say, Well, that’s not gonna make me gain 50 pounds. But here’s the deal, that one slip doesn’t make you gain 50 pounds. It’s all the ones you take after that. Once you open that door and say to yourself, I don’t really care if I gain weight today, I don’t really care if I don’t lose weight today. All I care about is that flavor on my tongue today. So I’m going to enjoy that flavor on my tongue for all of 10 seconds. And worry about the consequences later. We’ve all done it. We’ve all done it many times. But when you have that want and that desire and it’s real. And you know, it’s real, why would you sabotage your efforts to do that? And that’s what I want us to talk about today. Why do we self-sabotage?
Well, from my experiences, there are many, many reasons why and the most is because we fear either failure, or we fear success. If you can figure that out. If you can figure out what holds you back then you can beat this whole self-sabotage act that we go through constantly.
You know, the truth is, and I hate to say it, but this is the truth. Nobody wants to diet.
If you sabotage yourself, then you can quit and give up the diet. And it’s not like you’re failing, you’re quitting. Yeah, you know, oh, I gained two pounds. And that’s just not what I want to do. So I’m just not going to bother anymore.
That way, you get to say that to yourself and justify why you’re not going to do the diet so that you never see yourself as a failure.
It’s then that we start justifying it in our heads. If I purposely fail, then I don’t have to keep doing this. I don’t have to worry about if I’m eating right. I don’t have to deal the consequences of it. I don’t have to think about it. I can just be done with this.
The truth is everybody wants to be done with dieting. But the underlying facts are: if you are a person who gains weight easily if you are a person with any type of binge eating or snacking, or food behavior that will keep you from being thin, you have to master this. You have to break your old habits and create new habits and begin a new life of how you eat and take care of yourself.
Quitting doesn’t get you anywhere.
If you look at your own dieting history, you’ll find that you quit diets all the time. But then you start new ones, you always start new ones. Those of us who have been obese most of our lives have lived on a diet almost, I would say 80% of our lives. We’ve been on diets, and yet we go and we purposely make them fail. We choose for them to fail, so we don’t have to do them anymore. But then we just go find another, you know, this one doesn’t work. It’s too hard. And then we’re reading and we’re looking and we’re like, oh, look at this one. This says that if I don’t eat for 24 hours, I can eat whatever I want. Now that’s my kind of diet.
We’ll you do that new diet for a week or two and then realize we don’t want to go 24 hours, we want to eat now. So we eat and blow the whole intermittent fasting thing and say, oh, that doesn’t work for me.
Or you come to boot camp with me. And you’re like, Oh, yeah, all gung ho, I’m gonna do that Rawk Starz Diva diet, and I’m gonna lose 100 pounds in seven months, woohoo, I’m on this. And then all of a sudden, you realize, Oh, this takes work. Oh, my God, she wants me to do stuff. Well, if I could just throw this away, I’m going to go and eat that bag of this. And then she’ll throw me out (which isn’t going to happen). But she’ll throw me out. And then I won’t have to do this anymore.
We purposely, we purposely hurt ourselves and hurt our desires and our wants and our dreams, so that we don’t have to work so hard. What do you think of that? I mean, come on, is it really better to stay heavy when you don’t want to? Just so you don’t have to work hard?
Living healthy is hard work. It is not something that comes natural to any of us anymore. We don’t have that intense labor of our forefathers and mothers, we just have ourselves and we have to learn to say no to ourselves. And we don’t want to do that. We’re like little whiny kids.
We cry to ourselves, you always say no well I want what I want when I want it, and I deserve it. Because I’m such a good person. When your kids try that it doesn’t get them anywhere with you, right? So it shouldn’t get you anywhere with yourself.
We have to stop looking at failing as a good thing. As a way to get out of doing stuff we don’t want to do. Because you know, in your own history, you go back and sabotage yourself again and again and again, over and over and over.
You keep repeating the same thing and getting the same results.
So self-sabotaging a diet so that you can get out of dieting doesn’t make much sense. Because if you have a weight issue, and you gain weight easily, then you’re going to just always be trying the next new diet, the next new fad, the next new thing and then quitting the minute it’s not fun anymore. The minute you think, oh, this is work.
You have to be able to push yourself hard through the hard work and keep going after your dreams and goals. It’s the only way you get anything done. You don’t get to graduate from college if you never go to class, right? Well, maybe some colleges, I don’t know. But you know what I’m talking about.
We have to work hard for what we want, and by self-sabotaging, by purposely eating food to keep ourselves from succeeding is wrong. You may not be doing that consciously. But if you think about it, you know.
It’s the truth that we give up easily because we don’t want to have to face failure. And we rather quit because quitting makes us feel like we have control where when we just fail, we feel bad. That makes no sense. If we just fight through, persevere, have patience with ourselves we’ll really never have to do a diet again once you find the right food that lets you be the healthy you you want to be.
Now, on the flip side of that people sabotage themselves because they’re afraid of success. And if that’s your truth, you need to really examine that. I hear a lot from women, you know, a lot of women, they’ve been thin a few times in their lives or even thin through their 20s and their teens and, and they always felt like people were staring at them that people were kind of lusting after them. Maybe that happened maybe some bad incidents happened in their past and now they’re afraid to be thin.
That’s a hard thing to admit to yourself that you’re afraid to be thin. So you have to face those things. You have to figure out what it is. I had one woman years and years ago and she was the most honest person I’ve ever dealt with. She had a lot of weight to lose, well over 100 pounds. When she lost 12 pounds she panicked. She panicked because she was afraid her father who had verbally abused her all her life over her weight wouldn’t have anything to verbally abuse her over anymore, and it would ruin her relationship with him.
That’s the only relationship she knew with him and she didn’t want to lose it.
That was such an honest answer. I was flabbergasted. It was a truth she had to deal with. I don’t know if she ever lost the weight. I never heard from her again. But it was something she recognized that without that abuse from him, she didn’t have a relationship with Him. And she didn’t want to give up that relationship.
We have to look at ourselves and see what we really want. And if being successful being thin makes you nervous, you need to figure out why.
One of the reasons women give me is because people will expect more from them. If I’m thin I can’t use my weight as an excuse anymore not to do the things that people want me to do. So therefore I’m going to stay heavy and not have that extra responsibility laid on me?
Getting thin doesn’t work that way, you know. People might expect you have more energy, you might expect that you have more energy. But they’re not going to say, Oh, well, I think now that you’re thin, you could handle 20 more employees under your project management. If you are competent that would happen anyway. So you can’t let that get in your way.
People are afraid of what other people will say to them. When you lose weight, so many people come up to you and say, Oh, my God, you’re so thin. Look at your face.
We always lose weight first in our face, and our faces do tend to get thinner first because you have less sodium. But as soon as you put sodium back in your life, your face plumps up.
Don’t be afraid of what other people are going to say. Don’t be hurt every time someone says you’re too thin when you don’t feel thin enough. That’s not anorexia. We know what is on our body. Other people are comparing us to how we used to be, who cares what they think? What matters is what we think and how we feel and what we do. They don’t know what’s going on in our heads. They don’t know what’s going on in our bodies.
Maybe we’ve got a big old muffin top still to go. They’re not seeing that. They don’t understand. So we can’t let other people dictate our success story. We dictate what makes us successful and what doesn’t.
You have to find the reason you’re sabotaging yourself. And you have to then decide, is it worth it? Is it so true to me that I’m never going to be successful?
Another problem many of the women I deal with have is that they don’t believe they can keep the weight off once they lose it. So therefore they don’t want to reach that point of success. They don’t really want to get to goal because if they never get to goal, then they never have to worry about maintaining the weight.
That’s another way to sabotage yourself. You have to reach your goal weight. Your mind needs you to hit that number, whatever that number is, to make you feel that you did succeed. And if you avoid it, then I guess you never have to face the fact that the rest of your life, you’re going to have to manage your food.
If you have a tendency towards obesity then it’s true. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have to manage your food.
Our bodies are meant for harder labor than what we do in our lives. And they require less calories than other people. That’s just the fact that we have to face. We don’t want to face it, we want to call it unfair, and that’s okay. But it is a truth. And if we can accept the truth about ourselves, if we can see what keeps us from fighting hard for what we say we really want, then maybe we can break down those barriers and move past them and get to the goal weight that we have dreamed of. We can live the life that we want, and no longer be ashamed of being seen because of our weight.
There’s so much emotional baggage that goes with obesity, and you have to work through it.
You don’t have to relive past bad things. You don’t have to do that. But you have to realize that these things that weigh you down have to be left behind, not forgotten necessarily, just not brought forward with you.
Do build an excuse list of why it’s better to fail than to succeed.
No self-sabotage.
And when you do find yourself eating off your food plan for no apparent reason. Go think about it some more. Don’t let those ideas become excuses. Because that’s easy enough to do.
You can say to yourself, yes, when I was young, I was ooggled at or even molested. So I don’t want to be thin again. But then you have to put that into context. That happened when I was young. It’s not who I am today. I’m a much more powerful woman now. I can take care of myself. And you know, I’m not so young and beautiful anymore it probably won’t even happen.
You need to talk to yourself, you have to. You have to get past those fears. Because they’re not worth it to you. You deserve to be a thin healthy person. You deserve to try it out at least.
I tell women all the time, don’t fear being thin. If you get to goal and you don’t like it, you can remedy that really fast. In a matter of days, you can gain the weight back, but you won’t know until you get there. You don’t know what life is going to be like until you get there.
So let’s not self-sabotage, let’s learn from our past and our mistakes and start looking for success in our lives instead of the negatives.
All right, that’s it for me for today. I hope to talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with others helped me build my fan base. And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter so you know whenever there’s a new free workshop or a new podcast.
