I know first-hand that not everyone starts off believing they are capable of reaching their weight loss goals. I also know that a lot of my clients have come to me after trying countless diets or spending months and years trying to lose weight that just won’t stay off! Their confidence in their ability to lose weight is low, which is why I put together the 5 BEST tips for increasing your self-confidence during weight loss.
Sure, setting goals that are manageable, realistic and attainable is key to successful weight loss, but the sky is the limit when you believe you can achieve it! Let me ask you this…
If I were to ask you right now to rank your self-confidence on a scale of 0-10 (0 as in weight loss is impossible, where do I even start? to 10 as in I’m already successful and reaching for the skies!) that you can achieve your weight loss goals, what would your score be?
My guess is that it isn’t a 10 today. That’s okay! But wouldn’t you WANT it to be a 10/10 most days?! The feeling of putting your skinny jeans on and knowing you are rocking them for a night out with your girlfriends? What about feeling like you can conquer your next work meeting or that parent-teacher conference or your wedding day? Yes, please!
Self-confidence usually results in faster and more successful weight loss! Wondering how?
- Accountability. You stay more accountable to realistic goals long term. Confidence in achieving each small goal helps you to stay on track to achieving your bigger goals… without the time spent on roadblocks or plateaus!
- Learning mindset: You practice and reflect a learning mindset. Having self-confidence allows you to remain more open to embracing challenges or bigger goals in hopes that you can learn from the experience and grow! Research indicates that individuals with a growth learning mindset (compared to a fixed mindset) are more likely to achieve their goals.
- Strength in social support: You feel supported and encouraged in your journey. This support could come from a coach (like me!), family, friends, or even your coworkers. When you have the self-confidence in yourself to accomplish your weight loss goals, you know and accept that others believe in you, and you become more likely to believe in yourself too!
- Resiliency. Resiliency is increased by recognizing past successes, which is a concept called mastery. By recognizing your strengths and accepting how you have been successful in the past, you are more optimistic believing you can achieve in the future!
All of the above ways are key to why weight loss is more successful with increased self-confidence. I could talk for DAYS about this… but I am here to provide value to you and show you HOW you can implement these same practices!
So check out the 5 Best Tips to Increase your Self-Confidence during Weight Loss below!
Here we are! The long awaited 5 Best Tips to Increase Your Self-Confidence during weight loss.
1. Don’t rely on yourself. Ask for help!
Shocker, I know! Your self-confidence should come from YOU, right? But when dark or stressful times come, we always rely on the light at the end of the tunnel to help us continue on. By hiring a coach (uh hm, me!) as well as sharing your goals and struggles with friends and family, you will have not only a support system who believes in you… but also someone to turn to when you just can’t believe in yourself! By asking for help, you recognize that you don’t have to do this alone.
The help that you receive when you aren’t afraid of asking for it can help take you from valleys to mountains and skies! Asking for help may seem daunting, but I can promise you that the journey is so much easier when you have people in your corner troubleshooting with you and cheering you on!
2. Find Your Why
One of the biggest surprises I tend to discover when working with busy women is that they don’t always dig deeper into WHY they are on this weight loss journey. There are so many great benefits to losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight, but those benefits don’t always equal the WHY of my clients wanting to lose weight! Sure, better sleep, more energy and motivation, fitting into clothes more comfortably or being able to keep up with the kids at home are a huge plus, but the reason WHY tends to be none of these.
Digging a little deeper to find out what your WHY is for this weight loss journey can actually provide better clarity and dedication to achieving your goal! The reason for this is because you have defined your future. By defining your future, you visualize what you want in such great detail that it doesn’t seem impossible… and the question becomes more of HOW you are going to get there than WHEN!
By finding your “why” and defining your future, weight loss tends to lose the power it gained from your frustration and time lost. When you discover your “why” and can visualize and explain just exactly what your future can look like, your confidence has already increased because your brain had to pull all its data from the cloud of your brain together to make the dream! Because of this, your best, future self is already imagined… which means that it IS possible! Recognizing this inherently boosts your self-confidence (even if it’s as tiny as a mustard seed!) to look for more knowledge on how to make that dream a reality. So even if you don’t believe it yet, by practicing visualizing your defined future, your brain will keep trying to problem solve!
3. Believe everything is figure-outable
Building off of your “why” is your brain figuring out “how” you can achieve your weight loss goals. When diets fail you or the program your best friend promised would “work for you, just like it did for me!” just isn’t working out, it’s easy to wonder how you are going to reach the future vision of the best YOU that you’ve dreamed of.
But just like figuring out how to fly a plane or bake a cake, weight loss is figure-outable! By continuing to believe in the future you have defined, you can continually seek out information and resources to get you to your goal.
You may be thinking…”but how is your nutrition coaching program any different than any diets I’ve tried?” Busy gal, lifestyle habits are NOT a diet! In my nutrition coaching program, we work on figuring out how to lose weight together… because I’ve already figured out a blueprint for success! The only thing that’s left is you BELIEVING that weight loss is figure-outable…because it is!
4. Put your blinders on and stay in your lane!
Ah, the dreaded comparison trap. The “grass is greener on the other side” jazz. But is it?
One of the best ways to increase your self-confidence is to focus on SELF. By all means, celebrate a friend or family member’s weight loss journey or their goals they have just crushed… but their timeline is NOT the same as yours! Setting goals and accountability are some of the best practices for a weight loss journey, but remembering that your journey is NOT the same as someone else’s is KEY! Others have different bodies than you with different DNA and their every step is going to leave a different footprint than yours. Acknowledging that your journey isn’t any less important or less achievable will help you to stay on track with your goals and stay hopeful, committed, and excited about the journey you are in.
Staying in your own lane means putting your blinders on. Just like a horse in the Kentucky Derby, keeping your eyes on the prize (your defined future) will help you keep moving forward. By spending your energy obsessing over someone else’s step 100 to your step 10, you will prevent yourself from utilizing that great energy for YOU! No one can be you… and YOU are what the world needs! By putting your blinders up and staying in your lane, you have a greater chance of not only keeping up your self-confidence, but increasing it as well!
5. Appreciate how far you’ve already come
Self-confidence can be built up within you from so many different avenues of life. When is the last time you reflected on how FAR you’ve come vs. how far you have to go?
Keeping our eyes on the prize can be really helpful to boosting our self-confidence and commitment to our goals, but it’s okay to take a step back to reflect on how far you have come as well on this journey already! By granting yourself a little grace to reflect on all the good you have achieved already (the lessons you’ve learned, the battles you’ve overcome, the achievements and awards or job promotion, etc.), I hope you understand that the bad won’t last forever.
Struggles happen, and so does stress and unexpected life changes and everything else that seem to deter you from reaching your defined future! But every bump in the road has gotten you closer to the light at the end of the tunnel, and I hope you acknowledge how powerful you have become because of it. And when you recognize this? You get back up, again and again, no matter how many times it takes because you are resilient – and that right there is where self-confidence comes from.
