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.
It's happened again! I met some old friends the other day and got that often used greeting "Don't you look well". What do they really mean, I find myself thinking? Have they noticed my weight loss, are they trying to be polite or did I really look that ill when we last met? Then, if I am not careful, I begin to let in some of the old ‘Not Good Enough’ thinking – “Maybe there isn’t that much difference now, from how I looked in the past.”
Eventually I see how silly these negative thoughts are. I began to realise that “Don’t you look well” is a statement used, mostly by men, when they are too embarrassed to say, "You look great. Have you lost weight?" So why is it that people are embarrassed about pointing out our fantastic weight loss yet often, all to ready to point out our weight gain?
I suppose it is the dieting game that promotes acceptance of a blemish and shame culture. But the fact remains, that like every human being, we thrive and are motivated by great positive feedback when we have lost weight, no matter how much.
When we have lost weight we certainly deserve straight compliments rather than the heavily disguised ones. So I think what we need is two fold…
1. An ability to recognise a disguised compliment and turn it into a positive one…
· Turn it around in your head to “Wow, you’ve lost weight and look really great!”
· Respond with “I am, especially since my recent weight loss”
2. A campaign to educate people that positive recognition of weight loss is definitely worth complimenting and celebrating…
· Tell people that a compliment about your weight loss is NEVER taken as a criticism of your being overweight in the first place.
· Ask people to be more positive and direct with their compliments.
Then we can feel the glow of the compliment fully and feed off its motivation for days.
What dusguised compliments have you had in the past? Let me know as I really would like to begin a list of them.
