Is Your Inner Rebel Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Efforts?
When it comes to emotional eating, one of the concerns that many women have is that emotional eating will lead us into the dreaded land of weight gain. After all, if “I can’t control what I eat,” or “if my emotions get the best of me when it comes to food,” then surely that will translate to “more pounds on my body.”
This fear of weight gain makes complete sense.
And it’s helpful to take a deeper look here.
It’s instructive to see how our Inner Rebel may actually be working against our own best weight loss efforts.
What is the Inner Rebel?
The Inner Rebel is one of the hidden “eating archetypes” or eating personalities that can take over, and start running the show.
It’s often the part of us that goes against our own best intentions when it comes to food and diet. So if you ever say: “I don’t know why I sabotage myself,” the Inner Rebel is often the reason why.
The Inner Rebel is one of the voices within that just loves to break our own well-intentioned food rules even when we wish otherwise. And it often sabotages our dietary efforts and plans.
How does the Inner Rebel work against our weight loss efforts?
When we’re looking to lose weight, we often create an inner dialogue that we believe will help us in our efforts to eliminate unwanted body fat.
That inner conversation can sound like this:
If I don’t lose weight, I will continue to be unlovable.
If I don’t lose weight, I’ll never be “the real me.”
If I happen to gain even just a pound, then I need to feel terrible about myself.
If I can’t control my appetite, then I’m a loser at life and deserve my own disdain.
I know far too many people who have a very intense and self-rejecting inner dialogue when it comes to food, weight, appetite, and emotional eating.
And quite honestly, I have NEVER met a single person who’s confidently said: “I constantly attacked myself with negative self-talk, I judged my weight and my body every day, I silently repeated all kinds of self-hating thoughts, and then one day I woke up, I lost all the weight, and I was completely happy.”
The truth is, your body does not appreciate any kind of attack. We don’t like it, nor do we favorably respond to it. Quite the opposite. We rebel against it.
So, at some point, after enough self-attack, the Inner Rebel archetype will wake up.
It will literally come to our rescue in the best way it knows how – by subverting our own weight loss efforts that are based in self-judgment.
A part of us sincerely wants to lose weight, but when we go about the business of weight loss through self-hate, life has a way of course-correcting us. The Rebel steps in and says “no.” So we break our diet, we binge eat, we emotionally eat, we eat the foods on our “bad” list – and then we feel like losers because we couldn’t control ourselves.
But the deeper truth is, we rebelled because body and soul are protecting themselves from harshness and self-attack.
Are you beginning to see the lesson here?
If not, let me spell it out:
If you wish to lose weight, your task is to love yourself into weight loss, not hate yourself into it.
It’s far easier to practice healthy eating habits when we are practicing healthy thinking habits.
If you’re looking to lose weight and you’re noticing that the Inner Rebel in you may be acting against your best wishes, my suggestion to you is this:
Practice cleansing your mind of self-attacking thoughts about your body.
Notice if your weight loss approach is based on low-calorie eating and extreme food restriction. If it is, let this strategy go. It doesn’t work sustainably and it will cause your inner Rebel to rise up and seek food.
Consider taking a break from weight loss and just give your body, mind, heart and soul a rest from all the pressure.
Take some time to enjoy your body at the weight that it is.
These practices might sound counterintuitive, but they work. It’s all about learning how to have more peace and love in your weight loss journey, rather than fill it with negative self-talk.
Jessica Kishpaugh is a Holistic Nutritionist, Nutrition Psychology Counselor & Emotional Eating Coach, Owner of LoYo Wellness in Wyckoff in Bergen County, NJ and Founder of The LoYo Method Coaching Program for busy women to heal their relationship with food through the power of food psychology and mindset and behavior habit changes. Jessica specializes in nutrition psychology, emotional eating, binge eating, overeating and mindfulness stress reduction.
Book your FREE Breakthrough Call HERE to get clarity on your relationship with food, to understand what’s holding you back from achieving your health and wellness goals, and to discover a solution so you can nourish your mind and body and live into your full potential.