4 myths about weight loss

You want to lose weight. You know it would be good for your health; you want to fit into smaller size pants; you want your family to be proud of you; you want to play sports with your friends and win, but ... you’ve failed in the past and you just don’t have the faith that you can! The thoughts that go through your mind are likely similar to the four common myths that Dr.Prochaska et al. describe in "Changing For Good":

Myth #1 “People don’t really change”

People do change. In our everyday lives we meet people who quit smoking, eliminated their alcohol dependency or rid themselves of unhealthy eating habits! People change their lifestyle, lose weight, learn how to eat right and get fit! It may take several tries, but to say that people don’t change is to admit defeat in the face of facts to the contrary!

Myth #2: “I’ve tried everything – nothing works”.

In this day and age, it seems that everybody is trying to lose weight and everybody and their uncle knows how to do it. Everyone wants to sell you that pill, detox and ab machine that will get you there in a flash. If you tried one of those, I’d say you have tried the wrong thing. Do your research again and this time make sure your main criterion for lifestyle change is your health. Choose a diet that you can maintain for the rest of your life. Choose the exercise program to go with it. Once you chose the system, stick with it for the recommended length of time and beyond – I guarantee you will have the results you want! I did!

Myth #3: "It takes willpower to change".

Yes, if by willpower you mean “a belief in our ability to change behavior, and the decision to act on it.”

Willpower does not however represent each and every effort towards weight loss. If that were the case, yeah, you’d commit to your goal of weight loss and, bam, you are done and wearing size Small jeans. The reality of change is that if you rely only on your willpower and you fail, which can happen for reasons outside of your control, you’d have a hard time trying again and again until you were successful. “Failure to change when relying only on willpower just means that willpower alone is not enough”.

Myth #4 “Change is simple”

When you are feeling down about your seeming inability to lose weight, somehow that notion that someone somewhere can change at the drop of the hat lodges itself in your mind! You think - I am struggling and it should not be hard, it should be easy!

Losing weight, like any self-change, is not simple. Most of us go thought several stages of change, and not once. We start at the stage of denial (“Pre-contemplation stage”) Then we move to the Contemplation stage, which is followed by Preparation, Action and Maintenance. Sounds like quite a process, indeed. In my next posts I will be considering each of these individually, so that some of you, who tried to start a weight loss regiment in the past but fell of the wagon for one reason or another, may realize that it happened not because you cannot change, but because you were not in the right stage for self-change. This may help to re-evaluate past “failures” as a learning experience and renew your efforts of finding a fitter, lighter, healthier you!