Self esteem and weight loss go hand-in-hand. Many individuals seek to lose weight to boost their confidence and while losing weight can certainly boost self-esteem, it is the internal transformation that builds confidence in oneself.
In this episode of the Dish On Ditching Diets, nutritionist Megan explains three ways to boost your self confidence that have nothing to do with the scale, food or how skinny you are. She explains how to improve your confidence and self-esteem during your weight loss journey.
How Does Weight Loss Affect Self Esteem?
As individuals lose weight, their self esteem and body image improves. The confidence gained is a result of their transformation. It’s the person they became to reach their weight loss goal.
The individual became someone who learned to follow through with commitments and showing up for themselves when they said they would. They became someone who was able to pivot and stay on track even when life got stressful.
These are the critical moments where confidence gets built in a weight loss journey. Also, individuals who struggle with emotional eating or stress eating will build confidence as these eating patterns improve which aid with their mental health.
Do You Feel More Confident When You Lose Weight?
While an individual may initially feel more confident and have improved body image, that confidence is often short lived. Individuals tend to fear weight regain and if that individual did not lose weight sustainably or did a highly restrictive diet to lose weight, their confidence in being able to maintain weight loss will be reduced. This is why it is important to lose weight sustainably.
Why Do People Sabotage Weight Loss
It is often due to a lack of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth, and self-belief. Negative thoughts about yourself and your ability to lose weight can undermine your weight loss efforts and if you are attempting weight loss by eating in a way that you cannot sustain long-term it will decrease your confidence, self worth, self belief and self esteem even more.
In this Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast Episode, You Will Hear:
- Self Esteem and Weight Loss – Why Just Losing Weight Does Not Boost Confidence
- Three Things To Improve Self Esteem In Your Weight Loss Journey
- Why You Must Keep Promises To Yourself
- Why You Must Repair The Relationship With Yourself to Build Confidence
- Why Growth Is Necessary To Improve Self Esteem
- Why Doing Hard Things Improves Confidence
- How Going Through Resistance Builds Self Esteem
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Self-Esteem and Weight Loss Podcast Transcript
Hello! In today’s episode we are talking about how to get more confident in yourself when you are on a weight loss journey.
Most midlife women I work with in my 6 month weight loss coaching program, one of the things they always tell me is they just want to be confident. They want to feel confident, show up confident and just feel more confident in their bodies.
Midlife women always tell me if they lose weight and have the body of their dreams, they believe they will have more confidence.
I am going to share my take on confidence as a woman who’s lost 80 pounds and kept it off for 15 years now and as a nutritionist who has coached for 11 years over 1,000 midlife women. There are three things that will help you build confidence.
Number one is build confidence is doing the things you say you will do so you are reliable to yourself, and you trust yourself. The reality is most women aren’t confident because internally they know they say they will do things and never do them. They do not trust themselves.
Most women have a massive track record of breaking promises to themselves especially when it comes to exercise and nutrition so it’s no wonder, they don’t feel confident. Because you don’t trust yourself.
Now, I will say all the midlife women I talk to and have worked with have always gone about losing weight the wrong way. They go on a diet and try to starve themselves, cut out all the “bad” foods and exercise like a maniac and then wonder why it falls apart and they can’t keep doing that.
It’s because their plan was terrible to begin. Your plan must be doable, practical and sustainable to keep weight off until you are 85+ years old and it should add value to your life, not make you miserable.
If your plan makes you miserable, you are a ticking time bomb on your diet. The foods you eat when losing weight are the same foods you eat when you eat like normal, the portions are just different.
So, if you have been dieting the wrong way most of your life and you have a poor relationship with food – looking at food as good or bad then it makes sense why you have no confidence in this area of your life.
Let’s put this in perspective. The analogy I use with clients is if you had a friend and you said to that friend you would meet them for lunch tomorrow at 11am and you blew them off and then your friend calls you and says where are you, I’m here at the restaurant waiting for you.
Then you said, oh well, I just decided not to go – I didn’t feel like going anymore. Let’s meet tomorrow at 11am instead. Now your friend would probably be annoyed but give you the benefit of the doubt and then tomorrow at 11am comes and you don’t show up again.
So, your friend calls you again and say hey, I’m here where are you. Then you said I had some laundry to do so I stayed home. Do you think your friend would trust you anymore?
Do you think your friend would be confident that you are going to show up when you stood them up? Every time you don’t show up or let’s say you call last minute and cancel plans with your friend.
You’re always making plans then last minute calling your friend saying you can’t make it. Your friend’s belief in you would start to suffer and your friendship would also suffer. We all have certain people in our life that we love, but we know we can’t rely on them.
This is no different when it comes to the relationship you have with yourself. If you know you are not trustworthy and that you are unreliable, then it is no wonder why your confidence is in the drain. You are a terrible friend to yourself. You say you are going to do something, but you always cancel on yourself at the last minute.
Most women believe confidence comes from looking a certain way. Don’t get me wrong, feeling fit and enjoying how you look is great, but it does not equate to being confident.
If I snap my fingers and you lose 20 pounds today and you still know you are not reliable to then you will not be confident just from me snapping my fingers and you losing 20 pounds. Now you will worry and obsess about keeping that 20 pounds off because you have a trust problem with yourself.
Let’s say you drank protein shakes three times a day to lose that 20 pounds and now you want to keep that off, but you don’t want to drink protein shakes three times a day. Now you’re worried and fearful you’ll gain the weight back because you are not confident in yourself.
You don’t trust yourself because you took a shortcut to losing weight instead of learning to eating all foods you love and losing weight slower so that you could learn how to eat like a normal person, build healthy habits to age well and be strong and fit so that you trust yourself around food and trust the habits you have built.
A lot of us are trying to Amazon prime the body of our dreams without realizing that this creates all kinds of issues maintaining later and you still don’t have confidence because now you’re obsessing and worrying about keeping the weight off!
What does build confidence are these three things I’m talking about today. The first one is -are you reliable to yourself? Can you trust yourself to follow through with your plan? Can you keep your word to you?
Most people assume because someone lost weight that’s what gave them their confidence. No, it’s who they had to become to get there, and the weight loss was just a side benefit. To lose weight, you must show up for yourself. You say you’re going on a walk 10-minutes every day. You have to show up.
You know you need to eat 30 grams of protein at breakfast so that you don’t have cravings later in the day. You have to eat your protein earlier in the day and not skip meals even if you can’t do it the way you normally do it. You can’t eat your normal breakfast.
Great, take a shameless shortcut – drink a protein shake and eat a piece of fruit. Easy! You just build confidence in yourself.
The worst thing I see midlife women doing is breaking promises to themselves. They say I’m going to get up every morning three times a walk before work and you do it for a week or two. Then all of the sudden you stop doing it.
You go from doing it and saying this is what I’m going to do but you don’t do and break your promises. When you say I’m going to do something and then you don’t do it, it hurts. You are chipping away at the belief in yourself, and you are hurting the relationship you have with yourself.
No different than a friend. If you continued making plans with your friend and not showing up over and over, eventually your friend would no longer be your friend because you are unreliable. So, you are hurting your relationship with yourself, and you stop believing in yourself. That destroys your self esteem.
In order to fix this, you have to go back the way you broke it. If you have a horrible track record with yourself and a history of blowing yourself off, you have to fix it by fixing the relationship with yourself.
No different than the friendship. If you wanted to repair the relationship with your friend, you would have to start showing them that you are someone who shows up. And you have to do that over and over again until your friend starts to become more confident and think you’ve changed.
So, overtime that friendship would be repaired. It is no different with you, which means you have to do the things you say you will do even when you don’t want to do them.
If you broke a thousand promises to yourself, you have to keep a thousand more promises. It’s the only way to build back your trust with yourself.
A lot of midlife women say things like I don’t know why I’m like this. Why can’t I lose weight? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you is you have a broken relationship with yourself.
You have been a bad friend to yourself. You do not show up for yourself when you say you are going to. That’s why you feel this way. That is why it is such a struggle.
You have to become reliable to you. Most women are an amazing human to everyone else. You would give a friend the shirt off your back, you would drop everything to help with your grandkids, you would help a homeless person, you would go live with your kids during a hard time. But when it comes to you showing up for you, you are a different person.
The reality is most women do not value themselves, so they don’t show up for themselves. Deep down you don’t feel good enough and you don’t feel worthy. You will not value yourself until you start showing up and treating yourself like you value you. You have to show yourself that you are valuable by doing things you don’t want to do.
Self esteem is built through the weight loss journey. You can’t eat your normal breakfast with protein today? Let’s say you take a shameless shortcut and drink a protein shake and have a piece of fruit with it. You can’t go for a 30-minute walk today, so you go for a 10-minute walk instead.
Let’s say you’ve struggled with your relationship with food and now you build your plan to include 2 cookies a day. Now instead of binging on cookies every week, you’re eating 2 cookies a day and don’t feel the need to go binge.
These are the little moments where your confidence gets built. Confidence is built through the journey. Not at the end when you lose all your weight.
If you just lose 20 pounds, you won’t have that confidence because you did not build it through the process of changing your habits and mindset and learning to treat yourself like you would a friend. Confidence is built in the journey.
Number two is growth. It is impossible to be confident if you are stagnant. If you are not growing, it is impossible to build confidence. Growing requires you to get outside your comfort zone and do things differently.
One of the things I coach a lot of my clients around is look your way hasn’t worked. You are here working with me because what you have been trying to do to lose weight has not worked so in order for me to help you get to where you want to be then you have to change.
Change forces you to get outside your comfort zone and grow and with growth comes a lot of failing. The only way humans grow is by failing. Think of toddlers. How do they learn to walk? They fall down and they get back up and eventually they learn to walk. Same thing is going to happen in your weight journey.
You will make mistakes, but that is the only way you will learn. Let’s say you start working on your protein at breakfast and you decide to meal prep a breakfast casserole every Sunday.
Now let’s say something happens and you couldn’t meal prep your breakfast casserole. You never thought about having a backup plan, so you have nothing for breakfast. That is a growth opportunity.
Now you can learn that you need to have a backup plan for when that happens. Building confidence in your weight journey happens by you allowing yourself to fail and learn from the moments where things didn’t go as you expected.
A lot of women don’t think about it this way. They immediately interpret the failure as I can’t do this. This is too hard because their perfectionist mindset getting in the way.
The all or nothing mindset of I ruined everything sneaks in. Instead of just saying oh, I need to have a backup plan like a protein bar and fruit in the house at all times, so I have something to fall back on. This is where I say cut the dramatics and find a solution.
If you now recognize you need a backup plan and prepare yourself by having those things on hand or just knowing I’m going to the gas station on those days and these are the things I’m going to look for, that is where your confidence gets built. Now you know what to do in those situations!
Self esteem doesn’t get built from you avoiding failure which are just learning opportunities. Confidence gets build from learning and growing.
Number three is doing hard things and going through resistance. Confidence is built through hard things. You have to go through hard things to build confidence. Let’s say you want to lose weight, but you’re not motivated to track your calories or walk. There’s resistance so you are going to have to go through that resistance and keep promises to yourself because that is how you build confidence and grow.
Let’s say you go out to eat and you don’t know how to track your food, but you take your best guess but searching for something similar. That is where confidence is built. By doing things you are uncomfortable doing. Self esteem does not come from things always being easy and predictable.
Those moments that are harder is resistance and that resistance builds integrity with yourself. It’s easy to do the stuff you say you’re going to do when you feel like it. But when you are growing resistance is going to be there.
Lack of motivation will happen, so you are going to have to show up for yourself when you don’t want to. You are going to have to track something even if you are not 100% certain it is accurate.
Building self-esteem requires work and it’s built through your journey. One of the biggest ways women sabotage themselves is they change their actions and start doing well but stop doing the things that got them there. Things got busy and they stop tracking their food. They’re stressed about something and stop paying attention to eating enough protein.
They quit walking or going to the gym. They start operating as their old selves. The I’ll start over Monday mindset starts to set in or I’ll start over when life is less crazy. Do you stop brushing your teeth when life is crazy? Do you wait until Monday to start over with teeth brushing?
It’s so easy to fall back into that trap. The ego and your old self are so sneaky which is why you have to be on the lookout for this stuff. That’s why if you get to a certain place you have to keep doing the things that got you to that place.
Would you be surprised if you stopped going to work if you quit getting paid? Would you be surprised if you stopped cleaning your house it gets dirty? Would you be surprised when you stop working on your relationship, it goes south? Your confidence in your weight loss journey is no different.
Confidence isn’t a place you get to, and you don’t do anything to maintain that confidence. Think about your teeth. You don’t get to a place where you quit working on your oral health. The moment you quit brushing your teeth, your teeth decline slowly overtime.
If you stop flossing, brushing your teeth and stop going to the dentist would you be surprised that your oral health declines and all your teeth fall out? So, you don’t get somewhere and quit working on things. You always have to work on confidence.
Things require maintenance. A lot of women will lose weight and feel confident, but then they quit doing the things that led to them losing weight then they wonder why their confidence declines.
You will always be faced with resistance in your life when it comes to doing things to take care of your health, but your confidence in your ability to show up will strength the most when you show up during the times that are most difficult.
Most stressful. Most emotional. When you’re not motivated and don’t want to do it. It is those moments where confidence is built.
Just losing weight does not improve self-esteem. Your self esteem is built in your weight loss journey. The little things you do along the way. You – showing up for yourself and showing yourself, you are reliable, you growing, and you doing things when you are not motivated to do them. Even when faced with resistance or hard times. That is how you become more confident in yourself!