The Mental Effect of Weight Loss

It’s a very strange thing when your body changes rapidly. When you’re used to seeing yourself one way and all of the sudden it’s different. It can feel like the sizing on clothing is off, the mirror might not be showing you the truth, and one over indulgent meal can make you feel like you regained 100 pounds in one sitting.

*The opinions, views, and experience discussed in this blog are mine alone. If you feel like you might be struggling with body dysmorphia please reach out to your physician or a licensed therapist. This blog post is not intended to diagnose or treat. 

Weight loss is largely a mental game but what we don’t think about is what happens mentally once you’ve lost it.

A lot of the feelings we associate with being larger are the same ones you feel when you’re smaller. 

As women, I think we’ve all had that friend, the perfect one with the smooth tummy and the beautiful figure. Where after one meal, will look at herself sideways, and proclaim she’s as big as an ox! While you silently stand in the background thinking, ‘well, if YOU’RE an ox, what am I?’

But the thing is she isn’t thinking about your body at all. She probably never has thought anything negative about your body. This is a form of dysmorphic thinking she carries for her body and hers alone. 

We have the uncanny ability to view others through a very different lens than the one we view ourselves. One that is full of love, acceptance, admiration, and grace. Where many times the lens we view ourselves through is smudged with years of harsh judgement, verbal abuse, negative self-talk, and lies.

I never understood my seemingly perfect friends harsh criticisms of their bodies. I certainly believed I had more things to complain about and I didn’t complain even half as often. 

But now, being on the other side of things, after losing 130 pounds, I’ve realized that sometimes, the closer you come to a beauty ideal or standard, the easier it is to get lost in trying to achieve it. 

It’s important to prioritize health and well-being, yes. But that doesn’t just mean diet and exercise, it means being judicious and proactive about caring for your mental health as well.

This is especially important for those of us on a wellness journey that includes weight loss. It’s so easy to slip into eating disorder territory, it can be easy to take it too far, lose too much, forget why you started. 

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I knew that upon embarking on this journey that I’d need an anchor, someone or a group of someone’s to keep me safely docked when dysmorphic body image thoughts want to bombard me. 

I’ve found mine in my husband and several girlfriends who have walked a similar road. People I can be brutality honest with in order to check myself. They are my accountability system, my safety net of people that let me borrow their lens of me when I feel like mines gotten dirty again. 

Trust is integral and I have to be willing to be open to believe that what I feel or see or think about myself, sometimes might not be true. 

I have to tether my ship to their view sometimes and work to affirm myself and make it my own. This is the process of cleaning off my own lens so I can see clearly. I feel like this is why I haven’t struggled with being adrift in the raging seas of body dysmorphia, something that commonly plagues women who have gone through similar bodily changes.

Have I struggled with the occasional dysmorphic thought? Of course, I’m only human. But my anchors never let me drift far. I’ve learned to take those thoughts captive, not to entertain them, and instead override them with what I know to be true.

Have you struggled with dysmorphic thinking concerning your body? How have you combatted it? 

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Brittany Williams has taken the weight loss world by storm with her best-selling Instant Loss Cookbook. After reaching a peak weight of 260 pounds and spending a lifetime struggling with obesity, yo-yo dieting, autoimmune diseases, and chronic fatigue, Brittany changed her relationship with food and lost an astonishing 125 pounds in a year through diet alone.

Brittany’s latest book, Instant Loss Eat Real, Lose Weight shows how to make this a sustainable lifestyle with kid and family-friendly meals—from Strawberry Shortcake Oatmeal to Cowboy Chili to Easy 2-Minute Pork Chops. Members of her growing community have reported losing 50 and even 100 pounds themselves, and this cookbook will help others achieve similar success with simple, delicious meals, nearly all ready in 30 minutes or less.