Fixating on weight is not serving you

It makes sense that you feel the need to control your weight. Health professionals, family, and society at largely contribute to the idea that weight is an indicator of health and social status. It’s as though your body size and shape is a manifestation of who are you are. Why wouldn’t you want to invest in that?

But if your goal is health and well-being, is fixating on your weight really helping?

Overvaluation of weight and shape maintains restrictive eating and compulsive exercise [1], which both can move someone further away from well-being. Those disordered habits then further reinforce the overvaluation of weight. This cycle is ultimately destructive.

A narrow focus on weight can displace health promoting behaviors with efforts to control the scale. Rather than exploring what it might look like to honor one's body through movement and nourishment, one may instead adopt dysfunctional habits such as fasting, excess exercise, and food restriction, and potentially promote the development of an eating disorder.

Overvaluation of weight and shape also diminish the value placed on other aspects of health, such as social and emotional well-being. It's not uncommon for someone who is obsessed with weight control to neglect social relationships in an effort to control their environment as a way to limit their potential to go off plan. What once was though to be dedication to health becomes a tool of self isolation. This hyper fixation also requires a high demand of cognitive and emotional bandwidth and robs someone of the resources required to develop emotional regulation skills through self compassion and reflection.

As a coach, I would rather place emphasis on developing health promoting behaviors since weight change is not an actionable behavior. One’s weight can change without improving health or behaviors. In fact, weight loss can often be associated with engagement in poorer behaviors and worsening health, as discussed above.

Weight loss and body composition change can be goals to work toward, but it is not productive to fixate on them. To perpetually tell yourself that in order to have health and fitness, you need to lose weight is to ignore the complex intersection between behaviors, physiology, environment, and psychology.

This is not to ignore that weight can be a useful metric and that there are health implications to both low and excess weight or adiposity. Rather, it is simply recognizing that the overvaluation of weight and shape often times undermines the effort someone puts towards their health and can sacrifice wellbeing.

Are there ways to use weight as a metric without causing harm? It depends, but that is for another blog…

REFERNCES

[1]. Tabri, N., Murray, H. B., Thomas, J. J., Franko, D. L., Herzog, D. B., & Eddy, K. T. (2015). Overvaluation of body shape/weight and engagement in non-compensatory weight-control behaviors in eating disorders: is there a reciprocal relationship?. Psychological medicine, 45(14), 2951–2958. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715000896