The Weight Loss Trap

When Your Happiness Depends on the Number on the Scales

What if the pressure you’re putting on yourself to lose weight is making the whole process harder than it needs to be?

Have you ever told yourself you’ll finally feel good about yourself once those last 5 or 10 kilos are gone? That you’ll be happier when you fit into your old jeans, more confident when your belly is flatter or more relaxed around food once you reach your goal weight?

If so, you’re certainly not alone.

For many women, losing weight isn’t just about changing their body. It’s about what they believe that change will give them: confidence, happiness, freedom, a sense of achievement. Perhaps even the feeling of finally being good enough.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight or wanting to be healthier. The trap comes when we start believing that achieving the goal is what will make us feel okay. That’s when weight loss becomes about much more than weight loss.

We’re encouraged to set goals, stay focused and push ourselves towards the result we want. Goals can be useful. They give us direction. But there’s a difference between wanting something and believing you need it in order to feel good.

Listen to the difference:
I’ll be happy when I lose 10 kilos.
I’ll feel confident when my stomach is flatter.
I can relax when I get back to my goal weight.
I’ll finally be proud of myself when I stop overeating.

These thoughts can seem perfectly reasonable. After all, wouldn’t achieving something we’ve worked hard for make us feel good?

Perhaps. But what happens when the scales don’t cooperate?

You lose a kilo and feel fantastic. You’re motivated, excited, finally getting somewhere. Then the following week, despite doing everything you think you’re supposed to do, your weight hasn’t changed.

Suddenly you’re disappointed. You wonder what you’ve done wrong. You start analysing what you ate, questioning whether you’re doing enough and thinking about what you need to change.

Maybe you need to be stricter, maybe you need to exercise more, maybe you shouldn’t have eaten pizza for dinner. And before you know it, something that started as a desire to feel healthier has become a full-time mental project.

The problem isn’t wanting to lose weight, it’s putting your wellbeing on the other side of the goal.

When you believe that losing weight will make you happy, every fluctuation in your weight becomes emotionally significant. The scales go down and you feel good. They don’t move and you feel disappointed. They go up and you feel like you’ve failed. Your emotional experience starts rising and falling with a number.

And when you’re worried about whether the weight is coming off quickly enough, where is your attention? On the problem. You’re thinking about what you’ve done wrong, what you should eat next, whether you’ve ruined things and what you need to do to fix it.

Now that’s a lot of thinking.

When we’re caught up in that much thinking, it’s hard to see clearly. We become more reactive and less flexible, and we end up making decisions from frustration, fear or disappointment rather than from a clear sense of what our body actually needs. After a disappointing weigh-in, you might skip lunch to make up for yesterday or you feel so discouraged that you abandon the very habits you were trying to build. You’ve blown it, so you might as well enjoy the rest of the day and start again tomorrow.

This is where pressure becomes counterproductive.

We tend to assume the circumstances are running the show. Scales down, happy. Scales up, flat. Ate as planned, virtuous. Ate something you hadn’t planned, guilty. Obvious, isn’t it? The outcome makes the feeling.

Except look at what the number actually does on its own. Nothing. The same reading can land like a catastrophe on Tuesday and barely register on Thursday. The number didn’t change between Tuesday and Thursday. You did. The feeling was never coming from the scales. It was coming from what you were making the scales mean.

Which means your wellbeing was never due to the bathroom scales in the first place.

You can still have a goal without making your happiness dependent on achieving it. That’s the difference between attachment and engagement.

Attachment is believing the result is what will make you feel happy, successful, confident or at peace.

Engagement is pursuing the goal because it matters to you, without making your wellbeing dependent on whether or when you achieve it.

Let's look at how this might play out with weight loss.

Attachment sounds like:
I need to lose 10 kilos before I can feel good about myself.
If I don’t lose weight this week, I’ll be furious.
I won’t be happy until I’ve hit my goal.

Engagement sounds more like:
I’d like to lose some weight because I want to feel healthier.
I’m learning how to eat in a way that works for my body.
And I get to feel like myself the whole way through, regardless of what the scales say.

In the first example, your happiness is conditional on achieving a result. In the second, you're free to pursue the goal without making your emotional wellbeing dependent on it.

Wanting to lose weight, care about your health and take meaningful steps towards improving it is great, but you don’t have to put your happiness on hold until you get there.

What if you took the focus entirely off the scales and focused on the process?

You'd get to notice when you're hungry and when you're full. Enjoy your food. Make choices that are good for you without turning every one of them into a test of your willpower. Have the lovely dinner, the weekend away, the night out with friends without the nagging sense you've somehow jeopardised your future happiness.

This is possible when you don’t make your happiness dependent on the results.

When you engage in the process without being emotionally attached to the outcome you’ll find there's a lot less pressure, worry and mental effort involved. You’ll have more space to think clearly, respond flexibly and make choices that genuinely support your long term health and wellbeing.

If you've spent years believing that you'll finally feel happy, confident or comfortable once you lose weight, this might be a very different way of looking at things, but it’s worth looking in this direction.

You might discover that when you're no longer emotionally attached to the outcome, you're free to engage with the process in a much calmer, more enjoyable and sustainable way.

And that's a very different experience from spending your life waiting for the scales to give you permission to feel good.