An adage once said, “If there is no mental health, there is no health at all.” In order to be in optimal health, your mental and physical health must be in working order. Your physical health will decline if you are in mental distress. Being a healthy weight is a major sign of optimal physical health. Unfortunately, many people suffer from being obese and overweight. They try many methods to losing weight, but they do not make enough progress. Many people and medical professionals fail to realize that mental health plays a role in weight loss.
Mental Health Factors that Affect Weight Loss
Stress
Though stress in trace amounts is necessary for survival and success, excess stress can be a major detriment to the body. Stress triggers the release of cortisol, a steroid hormone. Cortisol plays a role in metabolism and salt and water balance. Excess cortisol increases fat in the abdominal area.
Negative Attitude
Having a negative attitude affects motivation and perceptions. If you keep thinking, “I’ll never lose the weight” or “This is not working, so why even try?”, you will be less motivated to exercise, make a pull up routine, eat healthy, and engage stress-reducing activities. Even if you are losing weight, your negative attitude may keep you from being satisfied with your progress, which may make you stop taking healthy courses of action or develop a distorted body image.
Eating for Emotional Hunger, Not Physical Hunger
If the psychological factor of eating did not exist, obesity would not be an issue. Many times, people do not eat for hunger. They eat to alleviate negative emotions or produce positive emotions. Eating for the purpose of attributes to obesity.
Low Self-Esteem
If you have a low self-esteem, you may not feel like you deserve to lose weight. If you have severe low self-esteem, overeating may be an unconscious way of committing a slow suicide. Low self-esteem also attributes to a distorted body image. You may not be as overweight as you think or overweight at all, but because you already have a negative view of yourself, you will have a negative view of your body. If you have a low self-esteem, you will not be satisfied whether you have lost 10 or 100 pounds because your issue is dislike of yourself, not your body.
How to Improve Mental Health to Lose Weight
Reduce Stress
Avoiding unnecessary stress is the simplest way to reduce stress. You can only control your life; other people will live theirs the way they see fit regardless of your opinion or attempt to control. Chaos seeking may make life exciting for a short time, but it causes damage for the long-term. For stress that you cannot avoid, engage in stress reducing activities (e.g. yoga, meditation, walking, etc.) and balance your schedule. Doing activities that you love reduces stress because you are content doing them.
Challenge Negative Attitudes
Instead of thinking that you will never lose the weight, you are not making enough progress, you do not deserve to lose weight, etc. think the opposite. Think that you will lose weight in time if you invest the right amount of effort. Be satisfied with every bit of progress you make, even if it is only one pound a week, because weight loss is a process, not an overnight event. Think and declare positive thoughts about yourself, even if you do not believe them.
Being Mindful of Purpose of Eating
Before you eat, question your purpose for eating. If it is your normal meal time and/or you genuinely feel hungry, eating is acceptable because it serves its purpose. If you are bored, sad, angry, stressed, you need to resort to other ways to alleviate or channel those emotions other than eating (e.g. calling a friend, walking, punching a pillow, meditating, etc.).
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