Chrissie Webber works as a writer, business coach and motivation/ leadership trainer and is Managing Director of Life-Shapers Ltd, an online weight-loss motivation company. With over 20 years experience in the field of business and people development she has an expertise in the area of motivation for permanent weight loss.
Following a lifetime of weight issues - at her heaviest, over 21 stone and a massive size 30 – she has personal experience of diets and their devastating effect on size and psyche. With a background in nursing, psychology and business coaching, coupled with a lifetime of dieting, she developed and successfully used a series of models and tools that enhance weight loss motivation. Now over 5 dress sizes smaller and having sustained her weight loss for several years, Chrissie continues her passionate drive to change the mindsets of people away from a ‘Scarcity’ dieting mindset – where food is demonised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – to an ‘Abundance’ mindset where mind, body and spirit work hand in hand with food and nature.
The other day whilst at the gym I attend, two ladies were discussing the results of their monthly weighing and measuring session. One of them was so demotivated by the results that she was expressing her feelings about giving up. On enquiring about why she felt so bad, I was not surprised to hear that she had actually lost a fair amount of weight and inches. Yet it had not motivated her, quite the reverse in fact.
So what is it about weighing and measuring ourselves that can, for some of us, be so destructive and demotivating? As one of the people for whom weighing sessions are negative experiences, I sat down to analyse it and this is what I discovered…
1. It is often a competitive process that creates, in our own minds, winners and losers, even between those who have lost weight.
This is destructive if you are highly competitive with others.
2. We set ourselves personal goals that may not be achieved, no matter how hard we are trying. 3. We may even count down the days to our weighing and measuring sessions. 4. When other people lose more weight or inches than us, we easily hook into our ‘Not Good Enough’ feelings and beliefs. 5. We can spend our time attached too strongly to our own desired outcome and time schedule for this. I am not saying we should not have goals. The point is if we make them the complete focus of what we want to attain, and put deadlines to this, then at some stage we are highly likely to be demotivated. So, for many of us the weighing and measuring sessions, even if only done once a month, can be highly demotivational. The key to this problem is making the strongest focus in our weight loss pursuit, not size, shape or weight but motivation through joy, love and happiness. By concentrating on how happy, energetic and alive the exercise makes us feel we increase our motivation. And what is the result of this change of focus? Gradual weight loss and an ability to achieve and sustain the weight loss we desire, in our body’s own time. The answer then, for some of us, is to stop weighing and measuring, if it has a demotivating effect on you. Focus on the buzz of life or get competitive with yourself, ignoring what anyone else is achieving.
This is destructive because the body does not lose weight in a regular pattern. There are many issues such as our menstrual cycle and water retention that also affect our weight.
This can be destructive as we concentrate our attention on a future point in time, missing the joy and happiness in the moment. 
This is destructive because as soon as this false belief gets its hold on us, the stress it creates only leads us back into our comfort eating.
This is therefore destructive to our motivation as nature has its own time and we cannot control this.
