Weightloss and love: the connection
Reported July 19, 2011
Research has just shown that love really does makes a difference when it comes to helping people lose
weight.
A new European study, which was a collaboration between researchers from Portugal and my home country of
Wales, discovered that overweight and obese women aged between 25 and 50 overcame emotional (comfort)
eating habits and lost more weight when they were helped to love and accept themselves. More than 200
women, who had no other health concerns and were free of medication, participated in the study.
What the researchers did
In the one year program, researchers asked the women to attend weekly sessions, including 30 group
sessions, where topics such as exercise, eating habits, emotional eating, body-image and acceptance, and
goal setting were discussed. The study aimed to help the women autonomously change their lifestyles, with
a focus on changing their eating and exercise habits. A control group attended a general health education
program on topics such as: “preventive nutrition, stress management, self-care, and effective
communication skills.”
When I read this study, as a health coach I was overjoyed because it echoed some of the sentiments from
an article I wrote in 2008 about self love [link downloads article as PDF]. In this new study, the
authors focused on helping the participants love and accept themselves in two unique ways:
The women created an more realistic ideal body shape for themselves;
The women felt greater acceptance for how they looked and realized that they were more than just their
looks;
How did the participants achieve this?
The researchers encouraged the women to:
Look at and gradually explore their body in the mirror at home;
Establish realistic weight reduction goals by confronting their ideal physique with the limits of their
biological abilities;
Take part in dance and relaxation classes;
Change their concept of body image;
Recognize the social roots of their own body development;
Keep a self-monitoring diary and record critical body image experiences where they felt self-conscious;
Restructure their thoughts on looks and happiness.
Have womens’ minds been played with by the media?
Since the more widepread adoption of television in the late 1950s, the media has presented women as sex
objects; women have become pretty eye candy, with a heavy focus on women being objects of physical beauty
and male desire.
Women’s generally superior emotional skills and equal intellectual abilities have not been focused on to
the same degree as their physicality. Why is this? Has this been an attempt to slow the pace at which
women come into power so that the greediness and heartless intellectualism of a male-dominated society
could continue for longer?
As a result of being portrayed as pretty sex-objects for the past 50 years, women in the ‘civilized’ West
have been subjected to a social experiment. They have been bombarded with images showing that all men
supposedly want slim women (which research has shown to be false), and that only slim women are
attractive to men (which is also false); slim chicks marry the guys with money is the message of the
media fairy tale, and many millions of women have unknowingly swallowed the message.
Our movies and TV shows portray the illusion that only women who look slim and attractive are happy,
successful, and live the dream life. How wrong they are. There are plenty of men and women who have a
lean, toned body, yet they too are unhappy, low on financial resources, and are unsatisfied with their
lives. Happiness is independent of our looks, it’s about being content with what we have in each and
every moment, regardless of what we’re doing, what we look like, and how much money and material objects
we have.
The media has made being slim acceptable, and being overweight unacceptable. They’ve done this by hiring
only slim, stereo-typically ‘good-looking’ television and film actors. When was the last time you saw an
obese actor play a leading role in a major Hollywood movie?
How the media has distorted womens’ self acceptance
The researchers in this study were helping women to deprogram themselves from having believed the media
myth that they could only be happy with how they looked when they were slim. However, a person’s weight
or looks does not determine their happiness – unless they choose to believe it does.
If you have unknowingly believed the media illusion – and the media makes it easy to believe by designing
images and film scenes that gently push your unconscious emotional buttons and bypass your questioning
conscious mind – you may believe deep down that you’re not good enough, not attractive enough, and can
only be successful when you look the way the media has told you you must look: slim. I know successful
women who are overweight and their weight does not affect their ability to be excellent mothers,
employees, or entrepreneurs. Their size and shape has no influence on how kind, intelligent, and
thoughtful they are.
Because of the constant bombardment of slim female images in magazines, films, television shows, internet
pages, make-up, lingerie, and clothes adverts, women who don’t match the ideal body shape have felt great
pressure to comply with the skinny stereotype. It causes them much heartache and sadness when they look
in the mirror, try on a new pair of clothes, take a bath or shower, and when they exercise. This has led
to some women seeking comfort from their feelings of inadequacy and eating unhealthily when those
feelings arise.
Main result of the study
This study showed that when the participants realized that their looks were less important than their
sense of self and the importance of their life, they changed their emotional eating habits; they lost
seven percent of their starting weight, whereas women who did not make this psychological realignment
lost two percent. For a woman weighing 200Ibs, that’s a 10Ibs difference.
Reality check
The following words apply equally to men as well as women:
Start realizing that you ARE beautiful.
That you ARE more than what you look like.
Anyone who sees you as a sex object is missing the REAL you.
True happiness in available to you in every moment, whatever you look like – Look around, and feel
content & grateful that you have what you need right now, in this moment.
You are not your looks, your body is just a space suit, designed to protect your organs from the rigors
of everyday life. Whether you’re wearing a NASA space suit or a Roscosmos space suit, to see the real
astronaut, you have to look beneath the suit. Beneath the suit lies the real you, the you who can be free
of fitting the media stereotype.
The media illusion of slim = beautiful = happy = successful is untrue for most people. It is a cookie-
cutter, one-sized fits all formula. You are individual, rewrite the formula to suit you.
Start doing the activities which help you to rebuild yourself self-love and self-acceptance. Weightloss
will follow eventually – you can take your time now that you know that self-acceptance creates success.
When you see images of slim, toned fit people in magazines, movies, online, or in television shows,
silently tell yourself that you can be you, they can be who they are, and you can be happy right now
looking how you do.
Implications for health professionals
The time where health professionals such as doctors, dieticians, nutritionist, personal trainers and
other professionals tell people what to do to lose weight is over. A professional can give a patient or
client the best diet plan and exercise program in the world, yet if the client cannot get past their
psychological barriers to making the change, the plan is worthless; the client’s emotional state and
self-image is disturbed to the degree that they can’t access the motivational state to be able to enact
the daily nutritional and exercise habits needed to create weight loss.
Health professionals need to help women and men adjust their body image and acceptance to reduce the
emotional resistance to eating healthily, increase feelings of motivation, and increase the likelihood of
permanent weightloss.
Source: Carraca, E. V., Silva, M. N., Markland, D., Vieira, P. N., Minderico, C. S., Sardinha, L. B., &
Teixeira, P. J. (2011). Body image change and improved eating self-regulation in a weight management
intervention in women. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, (in press).