The holidays are over and the moment that the ball drops in New York, commercials begin airing to sell you the best work out equipment to help you with that New Year’s weight loss resolution. Why do resolutions fail and what can you do to improve your success? Why is it that we begin a new year with the goals and quickly that new piece of equipment is a place to hang our laundry?
According to the research about 80% of people drop their resolutions by as early as February. What can you do to set yourself up to be part of the 20% who meet your goals? After all, you likely have something that you want and that’s why you bothered with making a New Year’s Resolution to begin with.
Goals
To start let’s look at the goals that we set. Let’s say Mary is a 42 year old mom with two teens and she found that after the birth of her children and over time she has slowly gained weight. So she make’s a goal to lose weight. New Year’s is the perfect beginning date in order to measure her progress. She is motivated and starts by buying a gym membership and signing up for Weight Watchers. By the end of January she is tired and has seen little weight loss so she stops going to the gym every day. By mid February, she stops entirely and is right back to her old ways of eating.
Let’s looks at first her goals. She learned that goals need to be measurable, reasonable and have a time frame so she made a goal to lose 30 lbs in 2023. It is measurable and has a time frame so it seems like a reasonable goal. The problem with this goal is that it isn’t specific enough in order to sustain motivation. This holds true for so many behavior changing goals such as quit smoking, lose weight or getting fit. Losing weight isn’t Mary’s goal. You may say, “wait she said she wants to lose weight.”
It isn’t likely that Mary is going to carry a scale around with her and show people that she is working towards and meeting her goal. What is she likely to do instead as she loses weight? Those are her goals. To have actual goals that you can implement, answer the question, “How will my life change when I make this change?” Mary might answer with something vague like “I want more energy.” What would she do with that increase in energy?
When she becomes more specific and practical then she will have some usable goals. For Mary, her answers may be: have the stamina to ride bikes with my kids, wear clothes like I used to when I was thinner, get my blood pressure down to normal, not be self-conscious of my weight with my partner, and wear “that” dress to the high school reunion.
Inner Thinking Landscape vs. Outer Influences
Another part of being successful is understanding that change isn’t an outside event such as luck, resources, time, other people. I utilize and teach a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which starts with our mistaken ideas of those things outside of us causing our emotional responses, successes and/or failures. Often this takes explanation but once fully understand and utilized, a person is able to make changes that are lasting and best of all, independent from outside events.
In a normally healthy working brain, our reactions to the events in our lives is based on thoughts that we have. Granted our brain is super fast and efficient so it sometimes seems that we aren’t thinking, but there are thoughts happening and it is those thoughts that cause the emotional responses. If it were outside events that caused our emotional response then we would all have to react to the events in the same way. We don’t and the reason is our thinking which includes the thoughts in the moment and our mindsets created from our experiences.
Of course there is so much more to this story than this brief introduction but when we understand that it is our thinking that causes our emotions then we can examine our inner landscape to see what are those thoughts and beliefs that is interfering with us in regards to our goals. If you want to learn more about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy click here.
Our mindset or attitude is to a large extent what makes or breaks our goal oriented actions. If Mary believes that she isn’t able to be successful as she has tried in the past and has failed, then how much effort is she going to exert or maintain to reach her weight loss goals? Due to her insufficient effort, she stops and then proclaims that she failed once more as she is a failure. Why did she fail? Because she is a failure as she may believe or because before beginning she thought she would fail and therefore didn’t expend consistent or sufficient effort?
Willpower and our Goals
Sometimes one of those inner landscapes that interfere with achieving our goals is the misconceptions around willpower. Willpower isn’t something like an arm or leg that we are born with nor is it a situation where we either have it or not. If these misconceptions were true there wouldn’t be an reason for the self-help industry to exist as those with willpower would do and those without wouldn’t be able to meet their goals.
We are all born with the same amount of capacity to generate willpower. Willpower is a set of self-directed goal-oriented thoughts. Let’s say that Mary made the decision to skip the drive through for breakfast and instead after a healthy smoothie rode her bike to work. She is making conscious decisions to alter old ways of decision making to new decisions that are aligned with her goals and then directing herself to act on the new ways. When she remains mindful of her goals, the reasons for them, and believes that her life will be improved by meeting her goals, then she is able to sustain the effort to meet her goals. Then she has the willpower to resist the doughnuts left in the break room at work.
Confidence and Achieving our Goals
Confidence, much like willpower, is confused by many. It isn’t something that we are born with like an arm or leg, nor an uncontrollable part of us that prompts us to act on our goals. It is a self-evaluative process looking at our perceptions of how effective we are in general or in specific situations over time. The continuum of confidence begins at low and goes to high. There isn’t a “no confidence” point.
Let’s say that Joe has high confidence in his golf game but low confidence in cooking. Joe’s golf experiences such as scores, comments of others such as coaches and other players, games won, etc. have all been mostly positive so that he comes to the conclusion that he is pretty good at golf. However contrast that to the disasters in the kitchen, burnt foods or criticisms of others, he believes that he isn’t a very competent cook thereby has a lower confidence.
The problem often in goal-directed activity, if we are incorrect in our evaluations of our experiences, then we are likely to be incorrect about our level of effectiveness or confidence. Mary has had this goal of losing weight every year for the past five years and stops trying by the middle of March. She says she lacks confidence. Let’s say that she does lose weight every time that she sets these goals but discounts the loss as “too little”. The problem isn’t the lack of confidence but a problem with how she is evaluating her success.
Both confidences and willpower can be improved through systematic investigation, evaluation and changing.
Other reasons to work in opposition to reasonable goals
There could be a variety of irrational beliefs that we decide to work in opposition of our goals. If Mary had gone through the drive through and bought a calorie filled breakfast instead of a healthy option, she may say that she lacks willpower. More likely she debated with herself about her options and made a decision to choose the unhealthy over the healthy. This isn’t’ a case of lack of willpower, but a mistaken thought process in which she had an irrational belief about the merits of the unhealthy breakfast choice vs the healthy breakfast choice.
There are a few very common beliefs in weight loss that can derail work on a goal. These can range from food as emotional support to a solution to boredom. Other irrational beliefs include “it shouldn’t be so hard to lose weight” or “I shouldn’t have to give up good tasting foods.” The solutions to these and other irrational beliefs about dieting is to understand that they are incorrect and why. Then replace the irrational with rational beliefs.
In the case of a commonly held belief of food as emotional support it is easy to see how food becomes a vice so to speak. It is often readily available and in our early life, food can be used as reward, present at every holiday and usually filled with fats and sugars. Then when we are sad we eat and feel better. The food didn’t fix the sadness but gave our minds something to do so that we stopped thinking the situation that we think of as sad.
Sometimes there are underlying beliefs derived from our experiences that can be problematic for achieving our reasonable goals. Mindy grew up with a single mother who was bitter towards her father who left when she was a young girl. After a few unhealthy relationships, Mindy became as bitter as her mother about men. When she gained weight she found that men were less attracted and she was glad to not have the male attention. She isn’t likely to put much effort in losing weight as long as she believes that it is to her advantage. We need to be aware of these sensitivities and understand just how the deeply held beliefs shape our decisions and then refuse to let them derail our goal achieving efforts.
If you want to learn more about being successful in meeting your weight loss goals, click the link below.
