9 years ago, I was running on a treadmill, incline to the max, holding hand weights as sweat poured from every part of my body, thinking this had to be the answer to losing the extra pounds I was carrying.

A good friend approached as I was pounding the plastic pavement. Through labored breaths, I told her how frustrated I was that I couldn’t lose weight.

“Well…” my friend said kindly but very directly. “Maybe you just eat too much, ya’ know?” 

No, I don’t know, I thought to myself. I was so indignant. Of course, it couldn’t be that.

“Hmm…I don’t think so,” I said holding back my rage. “I eat pretty clean and healthy.”

At the time, I had 2 little kids and I was making sure they were eating well. We had good food in the house and I was convinced I ate pretty well on most days so I should be able to lose some weight, right?

I was focused on all the things I thought I needed to be healthy. But I wasn’t focused on when, why, and where I was self-sabotaging. 

When it comes to weight loss, we are convinced it’s just about willpower and motivation with a little suffering thrown in. We think, move more and eat less.

It’s not our fault we feel this way. The diet industry has been carefully designed to get us believing in dogmas: eat just like this, move exactly this much, and you will look like this.

Slowly, however, people are getting hip that this isn’t working leaving us not sure what else to do. We are used to being so hard on ourselves, and so, we think, if we’re not perfect from the get-go something must be wrong.

But what if self-sabotage is the thing we need to help create that healthy lifestyle? What if self-sabotage is normal and necessary? 

Many other struggles people experience – alcohol, gambling, smoking, and many other addictions – the goal is to eliminate those things completely (or, at the very least, for a significant amount of time).

Yet, with weight loss, we can’t give up food. We have to eat. So, it’s going to be natural and normal that we aren’t perfect every single day. Plus, we can’t escape ourselves or our lives.

When we watch weight loss shows on television or hear about weight loss camps, the results usually strike us as absolutely incredible.

But the participants are living in a fake environment. They’ve literally taken a break from their lives and the triggers causing them to struggle with food in the first place.

This means we need self-sabotage to figure out how to make weight loss goals permanent. Getting a handle on self-sabotage starts with recognizing that we are doing it and what can we do about it.

That day on the treadmill, I didn’t know but soon after realized that between 8 p.m. – 11 p.m. were the witching hours for me.

I realized if I continued to eat chocolate chips at night or drink two nightly glasses of Shiraz, I wasn’t going to get the change I was seeking and no incline on the treadmill was going to change it.

The thing was I kind of liked those things. They gave me comfort, distracted me from what was going on in my life. I had to address the underlying feelings and understand why I was turning to these things to comfort me.

Because it’s not what we’re eating for lunch or how much protein we’ve added to our plates, it’s what we don’t have for breakfast when running out the door, why we keep hitting snooze, or what’s happening at 9 p.m. once the kids go to sleep or when we finally wind down from a long, often emotionally stressful day.

These are the things we don’t often want to pay attention to. 

If we want healthy, permanent weight loss to happen, we have to ask these 2 questions…

  1.  What are the expectations?
  2.  Can I accept that I won’t be perfect?

What if we expected stumbling blocks along the way? How many times does a toddler fall down? A gazillion times but they have full faith to walk.

What if we had full faith to create a healthy lifestyle, but it just takes time? Use the stumbling blocks to discover what else we need. Or something we need to pay attention to in order to understand our body and nutritional requirements.

Take time to listen to those mean voices inside your head so you know when they show up. If every other time you’ve failed or you’ve said, “I’ll start again tomorrow…” or next week or next month, let’s start changing that right now.

Make the recommitment short. Within an hour. Dust yourself off immediately and begin again. This eliminates that agony, isolation, and dullness you feel because you’re not staying stuck in it.

And the action isn’t just behavioral, it’s the emotional resilience, as well. There will always be plenty of opportunities to eat and drink more. We have to pick and choose.

If you think this means you have to give up all your favorite things, you don’t. It becomes how much and how often.

Frequency and portion determine success. 

Do I still run on the treadmill? Yes. But not for punishment or to run away from my life. It’s part of a plan to nourish myself and celebrate my choices and celebrate my body.

The reason we don’t normally think of it like this is that the diet industry has become so focused on “eat like this” and “move like” this but we are wising up. We realize that even when we do that, we are still super mean to ourselves, and the method doesn’t last anyways.

This means it’s time to accept ourselves throughout every part of our weight loss journey – stumbling blocks and all knowing it’s helping us get to the other side.