Pretty on the outside can still be ugly on the inside!

12^th July 2011

We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone. Dr. Loretta Scott

Chuffed, managed to lose 1/2lb yesterday and I’m still off the wine and sleeping fabulously.  Have you noticed it’s always easier to lose weight if you have some support.  I’ve got three friends doing it with me at the moment, so we’re gonna keep each other on track.  It’s important to ask for help when you need it, a dear friend told me that yesterday and she also said, I don’t mean just with your weight – apparently I can be a little self-sufficient, but I’m learning to lean on others one step at a time.  It’s important to surround yourself with motivating and encouraging people.  It particularly helps your weight loss efforts when you know how to ask for and get the help you need.  That’s why Weight Watchers works and is so successful, and successful members know that when they involve the people in their lives in their weight loss efforts, they’re fostering the kinds of healthy relationships that will help them maintain too.  So ask for help from the people who are willing, negotiate with the people who aren’t, and rely on your meeting for outside support.

Research has shown that ongoing social support from family and friends, as well as other sources, may help to sustain weight loss, which makes sense doesn’t it.  when you make an effort to ask for what you need, you’re more actively thinking about what you need.  And through your actions you’re acknowledging, to both your loved ones and yourself that what you need is important and worthwhile. 

When you ask for help - whether from your friends, family, and colleagues or the people at your meeting - you’re putting the power of others behind your efforts.  I had a phone text conversation with a struggling member last night, and just a few texts helped to make her feel better and see clearer, had she not asked for help, I wouldn’t have known she was struggling.  I’m good but I’m not psychic!

If you’re not used to asking the people in your life for assistance with anything (much less with something as big as weight loss), it may feel tempting to just clam up and lose weight in secret.  If seeking help outside your support system seems daunting, you might be tempted to just try to do it alone.  But it doesn’t have to be that way, that way is much more difficult.  If you make it a habit to ask for help – from the people you’re close to and from others – you don’t have to be in it alone.  Plus think about it this way: wouldn’t you rather start asking for help now, so that someday, when you really need a hand, asking is just an everyday habit?

I recently had a new member who was giving me very obvious signals that she wasn’t impressed at all with anything, me, the meeting, life in general I think and I have to say by the end of the meeting she’d actually managed to bring my ‘umph’ and enthusiasm down a little, which just shows how strong one persons feelings can be, how their mood can affect yours.  Luckily by the end of the getting started session, she’d perked up a little (only a little, it’d take more than half hour to change her view on life) and I managed to leave my meeting my usual satisfied self.

No matter how much of your journey you’re sharing with the people outside your meeting, the people at your meeting know a lot about what you’re experiencing, mostly because they’re in similar situations.   That member I’ve just mentioned probably has a lot of reasons to make her feel the way she does and hopefully over the weeks and months she’ll share some of them and start to feel better about things, but we have to learn to be more open.  My meetings are a safe place where anything that’s said is kept in confidence and other members empathise because they are or have been in similar situations. 

I’m going to leave you today with an incident that happened to one of my members yesterday which made me smile, Lorraine was outside the school gates when she had the opportunity to use her quick thinking and sharp tongue - a very rude woman stood next to her thought it clever to say, "fat women shouldn't wear leggings", Lorraine’s quick reply was "Ugly women shouldn't leave the house so what you doing here!". At one time that woman’s comments would have angered and/or upset Lorraine but she now knows after attending my meetings that it’s the woman who has the issue and saying comments like that makes her very ugly inside – no amount of skinnyness or makeup makes up for a mind like that! 

So well done Lorraine for realising your gorgeous and no one can take that away from you. xx