Redefining Your Current Weight Loss Identity Makes Weight Loss Easier

What is your weight loss identity?  Do you have one you like?   One that is supportive of your weight loss desires and goals?

Have you ever considered that you could intentionally create one?

Just so you know, you already have one, whether you realize it or not.  And it’s most likely not one conducive to making weight loss easier.

But the good news is that it’s entirely possible for you to create a weight loss identity that helps rather than undermines your  experience.  Whenever you want.

The most important aspect of weight loss  success is what’s going on in your brain.

Yes, you can try just changing your body.  Diets, restrictions, deprivation, exercise, excessive exercise, and more exercise.  There’s a whole lot you can do that provides results.

But until you change how you think about your weight loss identity, it’s really hard to achieve sustainable weight loss.

How you label yourself gives clues to your weight loss identity?

Do you label yourself as someone bereft of willpower? A food addict?  A sweet-aholic?  Someone who just can’t resist certain foods like pizza, cake, cookies, candy.  Do  you jokingly claim to be on the seafood diet? As in “I see food, I eat it!”

Do you think of yourself as the fat friend?  The chubby one?

When you consider all the various identities you’ve adopted, have you ever considered how they affect the choices you make when it comes to your relationship to food, your body and your weight?

So now that I’m asking you to become aware of your weight loss identity, how do you describe yours today?

I bet you believe this description you just thought about is a fact. That based on the number you see on the scale, it’s just an observation that’s true.  The clothing size you wear.  The way your clothes fit.  That standing next to all your friends, it’s absolutely true.

But what’ appears to be true can have various nuances and shades of meaning.

So much of successful, sustainable weight loss depends upon the thoughts you believe are true.

The ones you chose to focus on are the ones that dictate how hard or easy your process will be.

When you see the number on the scale, you make that mean all sorts of things.

What do you make the number on the scale mean about you?

What’s your story about that number?

Maybe you make it mean that you are too far gone to ever lose weight again.

Maybe you make it mean that you let yourself go.

Or that your metabolism is broken.  That you’re broken.

The story you believe about you, based on that number, is part of your weight loss identity.

Now I want you to spend a few minutes thinking about that story.  How do you feel when you think about yourself like that?

What emotions surface?

My guess is that those emotions don’t feel like proud, motivated, or strong. Probably feelings of some sort of pain and shame come up instead.

And one thing I know about shame is that it can hijack your brain until you finally realize you have eaten the whole carton of moose track  ice cream.

This story just reinforces your weight identity that you are out of control, weak, a food addict, you fill in the __________.

Stories like this just keep you stuck in the yo-yo dieting cycle that’s become an all too familiar pattern.

That number that you wish you didn’t see on the scale could be someone else’s goal.

There is someone, or probably many someones in the world right now that would be overjoyed to wake up and see that number on her scale. It’s the number they’re working toward. The number they are dreaming about.  It even could be their goal weight.

This is how we know that the story you are telling yourself about the number is not a fact. Not everyone on earth would agree with your story about it.

And if it’s not a fact, that means you have the power to change that story because it’s nothing more than a lot of sentences in your mind, a thought.

Is this the weight loss identity you really want?

Now that you have deeper insight into your weight loss identity, what comes next? I want you to QUESTION EVERYTHING you think about yourself and your weight loss journey.  Every aspect of your relationship with food, your body and your weight.

Question everything you have been taught about weight loss.  Everything you believe about your size.  Everything society has told you that you should be.

ALL OF IT.

Let’s question the story you believe about your weight loss identity.

Ask yourself:

1. Is it helpful?
2. Do you want to keep it?
3. Is it getting you closer to the person you WANT to be?
4. Why do you identify this way? What’s the story or circumstance this identity came from?
5. What are the benefits of identifying this way?
6. What are the drawbacks of identifying this way?

Once you question your current weight identity, you open the door to permanently shifting from current you to future you.