How To Stop Self-Sabotaging

Written By Timothy Walcott

Alright this one will hit home for a lot of you…


Let’s talk self-sabotage.

In the world of weight loss this is MASSIVELY common. Most people have experienced that feeling of absolutely crushing your goals and then all of a sudden you do the worst thing possible for your goals.

And then you spiral.


You start hating yourself for what you did and beat yourself up to the point you fall off completely and now you’re back to square one.


I recently had a great call with one of my amazing clients who was struggling with this.

She was crushing it - dropping weight every week and smoking her workouts. Super consistent and extremely disciplined.


Then one day her mood wasn’t the best, the scale spiked for the second day in a row, and then she made some decisions around food that went the complete opposite way of her goals.

This obviously led to the scale spiking for 3 more days, perpetuating the low mood and frustration.


She was self-sabotaging and didn’t know how to stop.

We hopped on a call and chatted about it. Part of my favorite thing about coaching is supporting clients during challenges like this. These moments are far more important than when everything is going right because the opportunity to take away some valuable lessons is huge.


And it’s these lessons that we learn in those moments that end up being the reason for continued success down the road.

My client opened up quite a bit thankfully, she shared that she absolutely would have quit in the past because of this. I told her that’s understandable. It certainly does not support our goals if we quit, but wanting to quit is definitely understandable. This sort of challenge is extremely frustrating for anyone to experience, especially when it's something that has horrible negative nostalgia from decades of succumbing to it - which is common for most people who struggle with self-sabotage.

As my client was explaining what was happening on her end, I asked her what exactly she was thinking over the last few days throughout this.

She mentioned the thoughts of “screw it, I won't be able to do this”.


This made sense to me. And it also aligned with something else another client I used to work with mentioned to me as well who struggled with similar things (they were successful in losing almost 100lbs by the way).

In the conversation I had with a past client, they specifically mentioned feeling like “if I'm going to screw up anyway, then I might as well screw it up now”.


And then the sabotage began.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think logically it makes sense, to be honest. If you truly believe that you are not going to be successful with your goal and you are going to mess it up eventually, then it makes perfect sense to fall off the tracks now and just enjoy the box of donuts this moment.

It also makes sense from a control perspective. The anticipation of not knowing WHEN you are going to screw it up but believing it WILL happen at some point, it far more uncomfortable than just…. getting it over with now regaining some sense of control.


Because that anticipation and fear of what you believe to be inevitable is essentially two things:


It’s firstly, a lack of confidence in yourself that you CAN do well enough to be successful with your weight loss goal. And secondly, it's the inability to accept the lack of control. The constant feeling of “when is gonna happen to me?” is terrifying if you believe that to be true and you also struggle with the inherent lack of control in that scenario.


This is a hard place to be.


Layer on the fact that you may have a larger weight loss goal that seems MILES away, and now it’s even harder because the road ahead looks so intimidating.


There’s a frustrating and interesting paradox here - in order to be successful with your goal, you require confidence that you don't yet have because you have no track record of being successful with this goal.


This is the reality for many people embarking on a weight loss journey. And it’s a massive reason why most of them fail.


After getting an idea of what my client was going through and what she was thinking in those moments of self-sabotage, I started to offer some clear and specific help for her to latch onto.


Here’s what I said:


  1. Reframe periods of self-sabotage (or even weeks where the scale doesn’t move) as progress - because it is. She is not the same person as she was a week or two ago in my coaching program. She has learned tons. And she is better because of it. That’s progress. Scale is irrelevant in this case.

  2. Reframe periods such as these as neither good nor bad - simply neutral. They just are. We can feel negative emotions about it, but that doesn’t make it bad. If anything, I could argue that they are quite good in the sense that they actually expose flawed thinking that we can improve upon. And that is a good thing, because now we have an opportunity to be better.

  3. Get clear on 3-5 things within your direct control that you can do RIGHT NOW to get back on track. Be as specific as possible. What things do we know for sure will move the needle? What things have worked well for us up to this point? Let’s go back to those.

  4. This challenge and your poor reactions to handling it initially are not a reflection on you as a human - this doesn’t determine whether you are “good” or “bad”. A lot of the things we may tell ourselves in this moment are unhelpful, so it’s important to understand that just because that’s the dominant narrative in our head at the time it does not mean the words we tell ourselves are true. The feelings we experience are very true but the content of our words (especially if it’s self-loathing) are probably not.



If you are someone who struggles with this sort of thing any time you embark on a weight loss journey or start a new diet then I hope this helped you in some way.

If you have any questions about this then just DM me on Instagram or send me an email (contact info below)!

Much love,

Tim

Timothy Walcott
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