Weight loss (a mental process)

I get it. I have sabotaged myself many times. When I was very young I often used food as a way of punishing myself. I have a long way to go, but I am in a great place mentally this time around. Don't get down on yourself. Choose to believe in yourself and love yourself enough to treat you right. You do deserve to have a healthy and happy life :flowerforyou:

I gained weight and kept it on as a way to shield myself from things that happened in my past.

I started losing weight for health reasons and when I met with my trainer for the first time and he asked what my goal was I told him I just did not want to be small enough to be thrown into a trunk . . . bad past!

I agree that it takes time for the mind to catch up with the process of losing weight for some of us. I have gone through some periods of depression and have to remind myself that I am still the same person and just as people treat you one way when you are overweight they will treat you another way once the weight is gone, in fact all through the process.

I am a homebody, sort of a loner, I just prefer to have a few close friends, but if you think about some of the things you want to do and make them rewards for your progress, just small things that mean something to you it may help this too not be so scary. You do deserve to be happy and to have all the things that you want and while I will not say that losing weight will make them all happen it will make you feel better about yourself and probably help you achieve those things and more.

I wish you the very best, you have a good start being on MFP

I feel it is very much a mental issue, I find, but in a different way.

If I think I am eating plenty and just log without looking at the total I actually eat less, then when I feel like I am hardly eating anything and I am restricting myself all the time, I actually eat more in total.

For me, it is very much a mental process. I've been obese most of my life and had my fair share of bad stuff to deal with. I ate to keep my anger down. I ate to stuff my fear. I ate to hide myself and how I really felt about most everything.

I know how to lose weight. I get the process. The work is working with myself, my head, to stop eating my life away. The work is telling myself that I am worth more. The work is feeling my feelings instead of eating them, even though it scares me sometimes. And the work is to not give up on myself and believe I am valuable to me, because, honestly, no one else' opinion matters more. All this is a mental process, and to me, it's a lot harder than the mechanics of losing weight.

Regardless of the difficulty, I am willing to do the work, so I try, and try and try again. It's paying off. I just have to keep on working.

I'm thinking about you and hope that the mental part of this gets easier for you. You deserve to be happy and healthy.

A lot of the weight I gained was due to what food 'meant' to me. I've done a lot of journaling this year to really get to the root of why I eat the way I do--mainly because cutting calories and exercise are great, but I intellectually understand how to do those things. It's all the hidden emotional stuff I didn't understand. It wasn't until I really thought about it that I realized that one of the reasons I would hoard tubs of those brownie bites in my bedroom and stuff my face with them was because when I was a kid, my brother and father would eat any of the treats in the kitchen without thought to anyone else--so I had to be sure to hide them or eat them first, otherwise there wouldn't be any left for me. I also ate to numb the stress I felt due to grad school or my family problems. It gave me something to do with my nervous energy. Sort of like a security blanket. Dealing with those kinds of emotions is scary and makes you feel vulnerable, but it will help you maintain the weight you lose and help you be healthy in both body and mind.

Wishing you much success! Hang in there!:flowerforyou:

I overate a lot due to emotional reasons. I didn't even know I was slipping into depression. It wasn't until a few weeks ago when I started an anti-depressant that also is given to people healing from bulimia that I realized it doesn't have to be hard NOT to eat my emotions. I gained weight during the same time that I was depressed and now I'm losing as I take my medication, watch my calories and psychologically heal. It is a mental process and for me, it was quite literally connected to my mental state.

One of the reasons I started overeating is that I started getting unwanted male attention at the age of 13/14. It made me very uncomfortable and I didn't know how else to deal with it than to eat and eat and eat and get fat so that it would go away. It worked.

I gained the weight for reasons I tried to shield myself from for so long. It was so...easy to just eat and focus on the happiness I got from the high of eating crap. When you're unable to get happiness anywhere else, it's no wonder you turn to the good feelings food brings you.

I've thought about it ever since I started on mfp and there are a lot of things that contributed to my butt being too big for my jeans. One being I grew up ridiculously poor. I mean...starving African kinda poor where I was literally malnourished and eating out of garbage cans to my mentally ill moms advice. So when I got older and got my own money, man oh man did it feel good to eat what I wanted. It was the first time I've ever actually felt full. Amazing

The other was just pure anxiety and fear and the depression that came along with it. I couldn't handle being around people and I felt so out of control...like I wasn't in charge of my life. Things just happened and I would always be a victim to unfortunate circumstance. I cried a lot. Never had anyone there for me. I was totally alone. But ya know who was there? You got it. Big Macs and twinkles! And they were my only way of escaping depression. I found something I could really be happy about. And dun dun dun. There's where my emotional eating comes into play and it's been hard to escape ever since.

I'm still, even at 29, failing at losing the weight and taking control. Losing weight is so easy it's ridiculous. I know what to eat and how much. I know how to get some easy exercise. I know the exact formula. I just can't get myself to do it. Food is the one thing I'm most passionate about in my entire life and that's a sad thing to say. I'm working on it all. Loving myself is the only way to break these bad habits and become a better person. The one I always dreamed I could be

Weight loss is very much a mental thing. I have used my weight over the years as a suit of armor to protect myself from rejection. I project on other people that they won't like/accept me because I'm fat. It is a simple way to deflect the fear that if someone looks beyond the weight and gets to know they real me, they will still reject me. Not because of something external like weight, but because of something fundamentally wrong with me. Fears like that do not disappear in a day.

Also over the years I have lost lots of weight (and gained it back). If I added up all of the weight I've lost over the years, it has to be several people's worth. I've had some unrealistic expectations about how my life would change 'if only I lost the weight....' And then when things don't really change much after losing the weight I'd get discouraged. And then back the weight would come.....

To be honest after going up and down so many times, it was almost impossible to start trying to lose weight again. The fear of failure is overwhelming. The total amount I need to lose to get anywhere near a 'normal' weight seems impossible. The only way to begin to face it is with 'small' goals that seam achievable. Hopefully with each goal I can get a sense of accomplishment and success that will give me the will to continue on.

Just remember we didn't gain all of this weight overnight, so why should we expect to lose it overnight.