The importance of psychology when it comes to weight loss

Fighting obesity and overweight involves taking psychological factors into account.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), obesity and overweight have become two of the most important problems in human societies in recent years. in human societies around the world.

They are health disorders that have the capacity to affect people's quality of life through a wide variety of pathologies: hypertension, diabetes, wear and tear on the joints of the legs or hypercholesterolemia, to give just a few examples.

But beyond the affections that are expressed in specific organs and cellular tissues, there are also other ways in which overweight affects us negatively, and which have to do with its psychological impact.

The psychology of losing weight

Often, the main reasons why people with obesity want to lose weight have less to do with extending their lifespan and more to do with getting over feeling bad about themselves, to the point where they feel very guilty about something over which they have less control than they seem to have. to the point where they feel very guilty about something they actually have less control over than they appear to have..

These psychological effects of obesity and overweight are usually anguish when looking in a mirror, insecurity when relating to others, fear of showing too much by wearing a bathing suit or going out to a party, the belief that no one can be physically pleasing, etc. In practice, these kinds of problems have as much or more persuasive power than the biomedical reasons for deciding to try to lose weight.

However, this psychological factor is usually taken into account only when thinking about the motives for burning fat and adopting a more defined appearance. and adopting a more defined appearance. The role played by psychological variables throughout the weight loss process is not so often discussed, although in reality they are fundamental.

The importance of the psychological aspect when fighting overweight

The belief that losing weight is simply a matter of eating healthy foods can leave us in a worse situation than we were. The reason for this is that this strategy is based on the idea that overweight and obesity are a problem of lack of willpower, something that happens when we act inappropriately by giving in to our impulses and not putting into practice what the theory of healthy eating says.

As a consequence of this, we tend to overlook the fact that the tendency to accumulate more or less fat has a large part of its causes in genetics.Many people end up being unable to follow a diet without any other plan than sticking to it, and then there is the rebound effect and the feelings of guilt for throwing in the towel.

Because of the lack of information on the link between genetita and propensities to accumulate fat, they do not consider the possibility that their starting situation is much more disadvantageous than that of the models they want to identify with, and that they therefore need more than a weekly food chart as a reference.

Thus, any slimming formula that supports any weight loss formula that rests its entire weight on the need to follow a diet plan will be hopelessly lame, because it will miss two things.because it will overlook two things. First, it will ignore the fact that the genetic makeup of each individual means that he or she can only stay below a certain weight consistently and without compromising his or her health.

Secondly, it will be overlooked that, under the idea that it is "willpower" that should promote the transformation of the person, there are hundreds of psychological variables interacting with each other in a very complex way, and that if we can learn from them, getting closer to the right weight is much easier than forcing ourselves to eat certain things day by day.

In the long term, emphasizing the adoption of new habits and routines for general behavior and stress management is much more useful than blindly relying on dieting, as if hanging a food chart on the fridge will lead us to follow that nutrition plan for several years in a row.

In the vast majority of cases, what overweight people lack is not information about healthy eating, but other habits, something that introduces them to the dynamics of a healthier life, in the same way that knowing how a bicycle works does not make us capable of using it. The price of overlooking this can be not only to feel bad for leaving the diet "to lose weight", but also to gain even more weight than before starting the diet, because of the sudden rebound effect caused by the body's reaction to adjust to abstinence.

What to do?

As we have seen, to achieve consistent weight loss, it is necessary to a global vision of all the elements that come into play in the accumulation of fat: Biological predispositionsThe first is biological predispositions, food intake, exercise and behavioral patterns that can be modified by psychology. Concentrating on only one of these areas will not only not add up, but will add problems to those we already had before trying to become healthier.

As far as psychological variables are concerned, we must take into account such relevant aspects as stress management, the existence or not of binge eating due to anxiety, problems falling asleep, expectations of success in trying to lose weight (modulated by the interpretation of what happened in previous failures), fatigue due to work, level of self-esteem, and many more.

This is especially important at the beginning of a weight loss program, since at that stage people experience how their focus tends to be more on everything related to high-calorie food. But It is also essential for maintaining a consistently healthy lifestyle over the years.Otherwise, we return to a lifestyle in which we do not pay attention to what we eat.

For all these reasons, when it comes to losing weight it is advisable to count on the supervision of both nutritionists and psychologists, so that the biological and psychological variables are monitored and, consequently, our capacity for self-control has positive effects on the results we obtain in our body.