Can Your “Self-Talk” Make You Fat?
July 28, 2014"Be careful how you talk to yourself because you are listening." -Lisa M. Hayes
Weird question: Would you ever knowingly poison yourself? I am betting your answer would be no!
Yet, how many times a day do you talk to yourself in a way that diminishes your value or undermines your self-worth? Every time we call ourselves a name (stupid, fat, an idiot) or repeat a message that confirms we are somehow lacking, or not enough, we are essentially ingesting a small dose of poison and wondering why we don’t feel so well.
What we say to ourselves, and how we say it——matters.
When we put our negative thoughts about ourselves into words and say them (even if it’s just in our own head) those words have a far greater impact on our physiology and behaviors than we imagine.
According to the article: Figure Of Speech: How The Words We Choose Shape Our Lives, by Dr. Habib Sadeghi;
“Research from the University of California at Santa Barbara clearly shows that a weak message repeated twice becomes more valid than a strong message heard only once. Repetition increases our mental validation of anything we’re exposed to."
“Now consider how many times (a day) you falsely call yourself stupid, untalented, ugly, or anything else, and you begin to understand how your internal (messages) shape (and perpetuate) a false self-image.”
Simply put, we tend to believe and integrate as “true” what we hear. Particularly if we hear the same words, said in the same way, over and over. That is how racism works. That is how sexism works. And that is how our inner-critic works.
Developing an “updated” honest but compassionate self-image is the key to success after weight loss surgery. All of our internalized systems——mental, emotional, psychological & physiological——need to work together in order to manifest our goals. To create alignment between our thoughts, self-talk and actions, we need a sort of spiritual “chiropractic adjustment” that will retrain our brains to focus on what we are accomplishing instead of focusing on our flaws.
As you might imagine, making this sort of radical shift in our focus and attention is not something that comes naturally to most of us. Particularly since we live in a culture that has a significant amount of fear, judgment and disdain when it comes to obesity. Most of us have learned to hate and fear obesity the same way the culture does. But for us, hating obesity leads to hating ourselves and treating ourselves with the same disrespect, impatience, and disdain that we see and feel from others.
10 Steps to Change Your Critical Self-Talk
- Look in the mirror and say the things you notice about yourself (out loud).
- Write your comments down.
- Look over your list and circle the words you use most to describe yourself.
- Do these words come from your present experience, or are they steeped in your past view of yourself?
- For each circled word, go back and write “past” or “present.”
- Now go back to the beginning of your list, and write the phrase: “I am telling myself that I am…” before each of the words you used to describe yourself. (For example, if I wrote the word “fat” as something I say about myself, I would write: “I am telling myself that I am…fat.”)
- Notice (and write down) how you feel in your body as you give yourself this message. For example, “When I tell myself (that I’m fat) I feel…(sad and disappointed)
- Next, look in the mirror again and finish the following sentence: “What I need to remember when I talk to myself this way is”…(that I am doing the best I can, or, I have lost ___ pounds and am down __ sizes, for example)
- Then add: “And remembering this helps me feel more…”(hopeful, for example.)
- Now, put all of your statements together like so:
“I am telling myself that I am (fat). When I tell myself this, I feel (sad and disappointed). What I need to remember when I talk to myself this way is (that I am doing the best I can, and I’ve lost __ pounds and gone down __ sizes). Remembering this helps me feel more (hopeful).
Next, rinse and repeat, as they say on shampoo bottles, by doing this process with all your critical “self-talk” statements. Learning how to complete your thoughts by adding compassionate and accepting types of language can serve as your anecdote to years of poisonous self-talk.
 | ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jill Temkin, founder, Living Thin Within: has an MA in Psychology and is a Registered Addiction Specialist, with 30 years of experience working in the mental health and addiction fields. Jill established Living Thin Within in response to her own journey for support after WLS. Her mission is to help women thrive in their new bodies by learning how to sustain health and happiness from within.Read more articles by Jill Temkin! |
