Dieters Lose More Weight When They Treat Themselves, Study Finds: ‘Practice Self-Compassion’
Can’t fight the craving? Don’t beat yourself up instead.
Losing weight can be hard when high-calorie snacks and junk food are so easily accessible and affordable, making it easy to overeat or fall off your diet.
A new study published in the journal Appetite found that those who have more compassion for themselves when facing a setback had higher success in self-control over their eating and exercise behaviour in the hours following the lapse.
Researchers from the Centre for Weight, Eating, and Lifestyle Sciences (WELL Centre) in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences wanted to determine if having self-compassion—treating yourself with the same care and kindness that people treat loved ones—would help a person more easily bounce back from overeating setbacks.
“Many people worry that self-compassion will cause complacency and lead them to settle for inadequacy, but this study is a great example of how self-compassion can help people be more successful in meeting their goals,” Charlotte Hagerman, PhD, an assistant research professor at the College and lead author of the study, said in a press release.
Data was collected from 140 participants who were attempting to lose weight through a group-based lifestyle modification programme.
Multiple times a day, respondents completed surveys that asked about their moods, whether they had experienced a dietary lapse, the extent to which they had self-compassion in response to that lapse, and how much self-control they’d practiced over their eating and exercise habits since the last survey they had responded to.
A dietary lapse was defined as eating more than intended, eating a food they didn’t intend to eat, or eating at a time they didn’t intend to eat.
“The road to achieving difficult goals, especially weight loss, is paved with setbacks. Practicing self-compassion helps people cope with self-defeating thoughts and feelings in response to setbacks so that they are less debilitated by them. In turn, they can more quickly resume pursuing their goals,” Hagerman said.
Hagerman also noted that although weight loss and maintaining that loss are challenging tasks, people tend to blame themselves and their lack of determination or self-control.
“In reality, we live in a food environment that has set everyone up to fail,” Hagerman stressed.
“Practicing self-compassion rather than self-criticism is a key strategy for fostering resilience during the difficult process of weight loss,” said Hagerman. “The next time you feel the urge to criticise yourself for your eating behaviour, instead try speaking to yourself with the kindness that you would speak to a friend or loved one.”
An example of speaking to yourself with grace would be telling yourself, “You’re trying your best in a world that makes it very difficult to lose weight,” rather than shaming yourself with, “You have no willpower.”
Doing this isn’t letting yourself “off the hook,” Hagerman explained, but rather gives yourself the courtesy to keep on with the difficult process.
“It can be easy for the message of self-compassion to get muddied, such that people practice total self-forgiveness and dismiss the goals they set for themselves,” she said. “But we’ve shown that self-compassion and accountability can work together.”
Researchers hope that the findings will allow for more effective interventions in teaching and practicing self-care in moments of disappointment.
They also hope they will be able to study the best strategies to do so, teaching people “how to practice true self-compassion, reducing self-blame and criticism, while also holding themselves accountable to their personal standards and goals.”
