Healthy Weight, Healthy Mind: 8 Negative Thoughts that Interfere with Weight Loss

We are pleased to bring you this regular column by Dr. David Creel, a licensed psychologist, certified clinical exercise physiologist and registered dietitian. He is also credentialed as a certified diabetes educator and the author of A Size That Fits: Lose Weight and Keep it off, One Thought at a Time (NorLightsPress, 2017).

Do you have a weight loss question for Dr. Creel? Email him at [email protected]. He may answer your question in a future column.

One of the first steps to changing your thinking is to identify thoughts that get in your way. Categorizing these irrational beliefs can lead to building a shortcut that will help lead to functional thinking and healthier behavior. Here are seven types of negative thinking that can interfere with weight loss.

1. All or Nothing Thinking

Did you go to bed as a late-night snacking bug and hope to awaken in the morning as a die-hard dedicated dieter? Motivation, drive, and excitement can be instrumental in helping us accomplish important goals such as losing weight. But when we look at things in a polarized way, we end up repeating cycles of weight loss and regain.

To learn more about how to combat this pattern of thinking, read Avoid “All or Nothing” Thinking.

2. Filter Focus

Some people filter out accomplishments and focus only on their deficiencies, especially those related to weight. An example would be ignoring the two pounds you lost, while focusing on a package of cookies you ate this morning. This viewpoint leads down a road of frustration and hopelessness, paved with the perceived tragedy of many failures. Don’t get me wrong, we do need to understand and evaluate our mishaps, but only if we also enjoy our positive attributes and success.

Learn how choosing to mainly focus on the positive aspects of life changes your outlook on every situation, the people you encounter, and yourself, in The Problem with Filter Focus.

3. Mind Reading

Mind reading can obstruct weight management by causing anxiety and concern over what others think about us. Thinking this way can result in self-imposed pressure to prove something to a boss, sibling, spouse, or co-worker. As a result, we may eat to help relieve the stress caused by these feelings — or we may lose focus on weight-related goals.

Mind reading can directly impact health behavior if we make assumptions about what others think about our size, what we eat, or our competence using exercise equipment at the gym.

Learn how trying to be a mind reader can obstruct weight management by causing anxiety and concern over what others think about us in Stop Trying to Be a Mind Reader.

4. Catastrophic Predictions

The idea that you’ll never lose weight if you don’t do it now is a good example of a catastrophic prediction. This way of thinking creates enormous pressure to change. Although this pressure can yield results in the short run, it doesn’t work well as a long-term perspective. A now-or-never mindset builds resentment and is emotionally exhausting. You may believe that putting intense pressure on yourself to change NOW will eventually lead to healthy habits. But our minds don’t work that way.

5. Labeling

In most instances, labeling is a poor way of explaining our behavior. We are unintentionally reasoning our way out of a solution. In other situations, using labels can be a copout. When you label yourself stupid, lazy, disorganized, or lacking willpower, you’re saying you can’t change — and that lets you off the hook for managing your weight.

Read how Catastrophic Predictions and Labeling Won’t Help You Lose Weight.

6. Emotional Reasoning

Emotional reasoning permeates many areas of our lives, including relationships, career, self-image, and certainly weight management. Having a strong emotional reaction each time you see the scale move in the wrong direction may cause a surge of negative emotions that leads to irrational thinking. Maybe you vow to eat nothing all day forgetting that each time you try this it ends in disaster. Or perhaps you feel strongly that you’ll never succeed and, as a result, you stop trying to eat right or stay active.

Read The Problem with Emotional Reasoning.

7. Demands

If you want to manage your weight long-term, “shoulding” yourself is not the best strategy. It may actually prevent us from doing what’s important. Even if you have short-term success guilting yourself into action, this won’t be effective in the long run. Even if it worked, who wants to feel guilty or pressured all the time? Telling yourself you have to do something strips away your perception of freedom and can lead to feeling disgruntled and even angry.

If we want to make lasting behavior changes and feel good about it, we need to stop talking to ourselves that way. Be nice to yourself. A simple change in words can make all the difference.

Read Why Making Demands on Yourself Won’t Help You Reach Your Goals.

8. Rationalization

Instead of blaming themselves for everything, some people blame others or their situation in life. Sometimes we come up with complicated explanations for our behavior so we don’t have to take responsibility for it. Yes, we do live in a culture that promotes weight gain and inactivity, but we still have choices. Some rationalizers are the defensive, angry types and others are intellectuals, debating like high paid defense attorneys. Some of us have spent years “spinning” the responsibility of our actions to make it someone else’s fault when we can’t reach our goals. Always shifting the blame bogs down our ability to achieve health goals.

Read Rationalization — It’s Not My Fault.

Healthy Weight, Healthy Mind: The Problem with Emotional Reasoning

We are pleased to bring you this regular column by Dr. David Creel, a licensed psychologist, certified clinical exercise physiologist and registered dietitian. He is also credentialed as a certified diabetes educator and the author of A Size That Fits: Lose Weight and Keep it off, One Thought at a Time (NorLightsPress, 2017).

Do you have a weight loss question for Dr. Creel? Email him at [email protected]. He may answer your question in a future column.

 

In the last few posts we’ve been reviewing thoughts that might interfere with achieving health goals, including catastrophic predictions and labeling, all-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, and filter focus. This week we will explore emotional reasoning.

Most of the thought patterns we’ve looked at in the last few articles are based on emotional reasoning. This type of reasoning occurs when we think or feel something so strongly that we believe it must be true. In other words — we’re fooling ourselves.

Emotional reasoning can stem from positive or negative emotions. Imagine an engaged couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. We’ll call them Jack and Susie. Everything about their communication with each other indicates they’re madly in love. Although he wouldn’t admit it to his friends, Jack has learned to like chick flicks because Susie loves to snuggle up close to him and watch them. Susie’s phone is full of cute selfies of the two of them just hanging out. One day you get a chance to talk to the couple.

“I’m just curious. The two of you are obviously in love, but every couple has problems. Susie, can you tell me one thing about Jack that sort of gets on your nerves?”

Susie looks at you and then back at Jack and sort of giggles while brushing the side of his cheek with the back side of her slightly bent index finger. With a glimmer in her eyes she says, “Really, there’s nothing about Jack I don’t absolutely love. He is my everything; we’re soulmates.”

You try to keep a straight face as Jack gently leans forward and kisses Susie on the forehead. Then you ask Jack the same question. “How about you, Jack? There must be something about Susie that sort of bothers you.”

Jack responds, “I guess nobody is perfect, but I think Susie is perfect for me. I mean look at her, she is absolutely beautiful and she treats me like a king.”

This interaction is an example of being blinded by love, which in short is emotional reasoning. These powerful feelings influence their reasoning. Let’s fast-forward five years. Susie and Jack are now in marital therapy because things have turned sour in their relationship. Jack sits at the end of the sofa and Susie is as far away from him as the furniture will allow. Their bodies lean away from each other and their eyes no longer sparkle. In fact, Susie’s eyes seem to squint with anger and Jack’s are constantly rolling into the back of his head as Susie unleashes her laundry list of complaints. The therapist asks Susie a simple question.

“Tell me what attracted you to Jack, why you fell in love with him in the first place.”

With her arms folded she sighs, and says, “Honestly, I can’t tell you. I don’t know if we were truly ever in love. We have just really never connected like some couples.”

The therapist poses the same question to Jack. “What about you, Jack? Why did you fall in love with Susie?”

“That’s a hard question. We were working at the same company and neither of us was in a relationship. Maybe we got together because it was convenient.”

Let’s compare the two conversations with the couple. Before they were married, Jack and Susie were blinded by love. Now they’re blinded by anger and negative feelings toward each other. In both situations they weren’t thinking rationally because their feelings got in the way. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a happy medium for Jack and Susie. Perhaps the therapist can help them reach that point.

Emotional reasoning permeates many areas of our lives, including relationships, career, self-image, and certainly weight management. Having a strong emotional reaction each time you see the scale move in the wrong direction may cause a surge of negative emotions that leads to irrational thinking. Maybe you vow to eat nothing all day forgetting that each time you try this it ends in disaster. Or perhaps you feel strongly that you’ll never succeed and, as a result, you stop trying to eat right or stay active.