According to the World Health Organization (WHO), obesity and overweight have become two of the most important problems in human societies worldwide. These are health disorders that have the capacity to affect people's quality of life through a wide variety of pathologies: hypertension, diabetes, wear and tear of the joints and legs, or hypercholesterolemia, to give a few examples.
But in addition to the disorders that are reflected in specific organs and cellular tissues, there are other ways in which obesity affects us negatively, and they have to do with the psychological impact.
One of the main reasons why obese people want to lose weight is not to ''lighten up'' (although this sounds relative), but to stop feeling bad about themselves, to the point of feeling guilty about something they don't really have as much control over as it seems. It is the punishment of low self-esteem and we can't blame anyone for how they look or feel. This is what our mind is like.
These psychological effects of obesity and being overweight often include distress when looking in the mirror, insecurity when relating to others, fear of showing too much when putting on a bathing suit or going out to a party, the belief that no one can be physically pleasing, etc. In practice, these types of problems have as much or more persuasive power than the biomedical reasons for deciding to try to lose weight.
However, this psychological factor is often only considered when thinking about the reasons for burning fat and adopting a more defined appearance. The role played by psychological variables in the weight loss process is not as often discussed, although they are in fact crucial.
This belief of only eating healthy to lose weight can be worse than what we were already doing. The reason is that this strategy is based on the idea that obesity and overweight are problems of lack of willpower, something that happens when we act inappropriately by giving in to our impulses and not putting into practice what the healthy eating theory actually says.
Therefore, we tend to overlook the fact that the tendency to accumulate more or less fat is largely due to genetics, so many people end up being unable to follow a diet with no other plan than to follow it to the letter, and then the rebound effect and the feeling of guilt appear because they end up throwing in the towel.
Due to the lack of information on the relationship between genetics and fat accumulation propensities, do not consider the possibility that their starting situation is much more disadvantaged than that of the models they want to identify with and that they therefore need more than a weekly food table as a reference.
Thus, any weight loss formula that rests its entire weight on the need to follow an eating plan will be hopelessly flawed, because it will overlook two things. First, it will ignore the fact that the genetic makeup of each individual means that he or she can only stay below a certain weight, consistently and without compromising his or her health.
Source
Secondly, it will overlook the fact that, beneath the idea that it is "willpower" that must promote a person's transformation, there are hundreds of psychological variables that interact with each other in a very complex way, and if we can learn from them, getting closer to the right weight is much easier than forcing ourselves to eat certain things day after day.
In the long run, emphasizing the adoption of new habits and routines of general behavior and stress management is much more useful than blindly relying on diets, as if hanging a food chart on the refrigerator would lead to following that nutrition plan for several years in a row. It is one thing to have the tools, but it is quite another to use them.
In the vast majority of cases, overweight people do not lack information about healthy eating, but other habits, something that familiarizes them with the dynamics of a healthier lifestyle, just as knowing how a bicycle works does not enable us to use it. The price for bypassing this diet may be not only to feel bad about the "slimming" diet, but to gain even more weight than before starting the diet, due to the sudden rebound effect caused by the body's reaction to adapt to abstinence. Not to mention the anxiety that this brings, anxiety that, in most obese people, makes them eat even more to ''feel better''.
What should we do?
As we have seen, achieving steady weight loss requires a holistic view of all the elements involved in fat accumulation: biological predispositions, dietary intake, exercise and psychologically modifiable behavioral patterns. Concentrating on just one of these areas will not only contribute nothing, but will increase the problems we already had before we tried to get healthier.
As for the psychological variables, relevant aspects such as stress management, the existence or not of binge eating due to anxiety, problems in falling asleep, expectations of success when trying to lose weight, etc., should be taken into account (modulated by the interpretation of what happened in previous failures), work fatigue, level of self-esteem, and a long etcetera.
This is especially important at the beginning of a weight loss program, as at that stage people experience how their attention tends to focus more on high-calorie foods. But it is also essential to maintain a healthy lifestyle consistently over the years, otherwise you revert to a lifestyle where you do not pay attention to what you eat.
Source
When we are in that moment of losing weight, it is advisable to be guided by both nutritionists and psychologists, so that the biological and psychological variables are kept under control. In this way, our capacity for self-control can have a positive influence on the results we obtain in our organism.
That's all for today, but if you have any questions don't forget that you can leave me your comment and if you have other useful tips for weight loss in the psychological concept, I'll be here reading. Peace.
