Why you are afraid to lose weight!

I think there are 2 reasons why people don’t lose weight, even when they say they want to. Reason 1-the problem (weight) isn’t a big enough problem for them yet to do anything about it and Reason 2- people are afraid. Today I am talking about reason #2, being afraid.

Why would you be afraid to lose weight? I know some of you are thinking, “No way-we are not afraid to lose weight”. Really…….let’s think about it a bit more before you say you are not afraid. I think people are afraid for 2 reasons:

  1. The big F…..failure. You are afraid to fail, to not lose weight, to not hit your goal. We are all afraid of failure. We are afraid to fail because we don’t want to disappoint ourselves, our family, our friends..etc. We might be afraid to fail because we have failed before at our weight loss attempts and we know how we felt when that happened.
  2. Change. People are afraid of change. When you start to lose weight things will change. You might change, your relationships might change. You are afraid of the unknown. I get it, change is hard and scary.

So, how can we choose health over fear?

  1. Think about what would happen if you did fail…..is it really worse then where you are now? Probably not, most people are already living their worst case scenario. Then think about what would happen if you succeeded. Which outcome makes you happy? Follow that.
  2. When people start to work on themselves whether it is losing weight, starting a new workout, learning a new hobby, they expand themselves and sometimes what we liked to do before does not serve us anymore. It does not mean you can’t do it anymore but you might have to reduce it. Relationships might change, social events might change but it doesn’t have to be for the worse. Example: if you get together with your friends every Thursday for happy hour you could ask them if they want to try going for a walk or trying a new workout class. It doesn’t mean you can’t do happy hour, maybe just do happy hour every other Thursday and the other Thursday do something that is healthier, that fits more into your new lifestyle. If your friends say no to that……are they really your friends?

Being afraid of trying something new is normal, but you shouldn’t let it stop you from being the healthiest version of you. You deserve to be healthy, to feel good about yourself and to be happy. So-why are you still afraid?