Feeling Resentment about having to Diet

Resentment and Weight Loss

It’s so much Work

You’re fat and you don’t like it.

So you vow to change that by adopting a new diet and exercise program and feel motivated.

Once the novelty wears off and the excitement of something new becomes routine, then the work and discipline required to meet your goals now becomes a chore, drudgery. You begin to RESENT the fact that you have to give up so much for an entire month – your time, your leisure, your pleasure – to get such a small return at the end of that 30 day period. And then you have to do that all over again for another 30 days.

Your angry thoughts are:

  • Why does it have to be so hard?
  • Why can my skinny friends eat whatever they want?
  • Will I never feel pleasure again the way I used to from food? (i.e. Will life suck from now on?)
  • I hate fit people, must be something wrong with them, they must be unhealthy mentally.
  • This sucks.
  • I’m cheating today, f**k the world. It isn’t being fair to me.
  • Most diets are wrong anyway and nobody knows what they are talking about.
  • This is ridiculous.
  • I suffer in other ways, and now I have to deprive myself of this too!!

If you start to become aware that you have these thoughts then the first thing I’d advise is to not react to the realization.

DON’T JUDGE

It’s best to not only ACCEPT the thoughts but to try to give them even more space and feel them completely. The purpose is not to let them take you over and dominate your being, that would be counter productive. The purpose is to become fully aware of the thoughts and feelings so that they don’t derail you from your weight loss goals, and there are 3 concepts for you to use which can help ensure success:

1- Start Slowly: Maybe you bit off more than you can chew and are now in over your head. Incremental changes over time work better than trying to get it all done in one fell swoop.

2- Make sure your dieting is pleasurable and that your workouts are fun. Both go a long way in sustaining you through this tough challenge.

3- Read the mega tip on motivation. It has been shown psychologically to work wonders on almost everyone who takes that exercise seriously. Doing the exercise (or just going over it again) will add more juice in your “drive” tank to push you forward.

IT’S NOT BAD TO BE ANGRY

Anger is good. It tells you that something isn’t right, within or without, and that you should do something about that. Accept that you are irate and use it to further your goals and help meet your needs.

Everyone feels pissed off when they have to diet. Food makes us feel better and so when we diet we literally are changing our day so that we feel “less good,” so it’s no wonder we are irritable. The trick is to find a way to manage that using the three tips above so that our day is almost how it was, in terms of positive feelings, before we embarked on the weight loss pilgrimage.



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