According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Obesity and overweight have become two of the most important problems that occur in human societies worldwide.
They are health disorders with the capacity to erode people’s quality of life through a wide variety of pathologies: hypertension, diabetes, wear and tear of the leg joints or hypercholesterolemia, to give some examples.
But beyond the conditions that are expressed in specific organs and cellular tissues, there are also other ways in which being overweight negatively affects us, and that have to do with its psychological impact.
Many times, the main reasons why people with obesity want to lose weight have not so much to do with extending their years of life, but rather with stopping feeling bad about themselves, to the point where they They come to feel very guilty about something over which they actually have less control than it seems
These psychological effects of obesity and being overweight are, usually, anxiety when seeing oneself in a mirror, insecurity when interacting with others, the fear of showing too much by wearing a swimsuit or going out to parties, the belief that one cannot be liked. physically to anyone, etc. In practice, these types of problems have as much or more persuasive power than biomedical reasons for deciding to try to lose weight.
However, This psychological factor is usually taken into account only when thinking about the reasons to burn fat and adopt a more defined appearance. The role that psychological variables play throughout the weight loss process is not talked about as much, although in reality they are fundamental.
The importance of psychology when combating overweight
The belief that losing weight simply consists of eating healthy foods can leave us in a worse situation than we were. The reason for this is that this strategy is based on the idea that overweight and obesity are a problem of lack of willpower, something that occurs when one acts inappropriately, giving in to impulses and not putting into practice what the law says. theory of healthy eating.
As a result of this, It tends to be overlooked that the tendency to accumulate more or less fat has a good part of its causes in genetics so many people end up being unable to follow a diet without any other plan than to strictly follow it, and then the rebound effect appears and feelings of guilt for ending up throwing in the towel.
Due to the lack of information on the link between genetics and propensities to accumulate fat, they do not consider the possibility that their starting situation is much more disadvantageous than that of the models with which they want to identify themselves, and which therefore need more than having a weekly food table as a reference.
So that, Any weight loss formula that relies all your weight on the need to follow a diet plan will be hopelessly lame , because it will overlook two things. First of all, it will ignore that the genetic makeup of each individual means that they can only stay below a certain weight consistently and without compromising their health.
Secondly, it will be overlooked that, under the idea that it is “willpower” that must promote the transformation of the person, hundreds of psychological variables are hidden, interacting with each other in a very complex way, and that if We can learn from them, getting closer to the right weight is much easier than forcing yourself to eat certain things every day.
Long-term, emphasize the adoption of new habits and routines of general behavior and stress control It is much more useful than blindly trusting the diet, as if the fact of hanging a food chart on the refrigerator already led us to follow that nutrition plan for several years in a row.
In the vast majority of cases, what overweight people lack is not information about what it means to eat healthy, but other habits, something that introduces them to the dynamics of having a healthier life, in the same way in the that knowing how a bicycle works does not make us capable of using it. The price of overlooking this can be not only feeling bad for stopping the “weight loss” diet cold, but also gaining even more weight than you had before starting the diet, because of the sudden rebound effect caused by the reaction. of the body when adjusting to abstinence.
To do?
As we have seen, achieving weight loss consistently involves have a global vision of all the elements that come into play in the accumulation of fat : biological predispositions, food intake, exercise and behavior patterns modifiable from psychology. Focusing on just one of these areas will not only not add up, but will add problems to those we already had before trying to be healthier.
With regard to psychological variables, we must take into account such relevant aspects as stress management, the existence or not of binge eating due to anxiety, problems falling asleep, expectations of success when trying to lose weight (modulated by the interpretation of what happened in previous failures), fatigue from work, level of self-esteem, and many more.
This is important especially at the beginning of a weight loss program, since in that phase people experience how their focus of attention tends to focus more on everything related to high-calorie food. But It is also essential to maintain a healthy life consistently over the years because otherwise, you return to a lifestyle in which you do not pay attention to what you have to eat.
For all these reasons, when losing weight it is advisable to have the supervision of both nutritionists and psychologists, so that the biological and psychological variables are monitored and, consequently, our capacity for self-control has positive effects on the results we achieve. we get in our body.
