Self-concept
When You Keep Letting Yourself Down
Have you ever felt as though you're constantly letting yourself down?
Perhaps you've found yourself saying,
"What's wrong with me?"
"Why can't I just stop?"
"Why do I keep doing this?"
Maybe you've called yourself lazy.
Weak.
Greedy.
A failure.
Or convinced yourself that you simply don't have enough willpower.
Perhaps you've found yourself looking at other women and thinking,
"Why do they seem to find this so much easier than I do?"
"What have they got that I haven't?"
Maybe you've felt frustrated because your choices don't seem to reflect what you truly want.
You desperately want to lose weight.
You think about it every day.
You'd give anything to feel comfortable in your own body.
Yet somehow, your actions don't always seem to match those desires.
That can leave you feeling confused.
Frustrated.
Sometimes even anxious.
As though you're constantly being pulled in two different directions.
Over time, it's understandable how those experiences can begin to change the way you see yourself.
Not just the way you feel about food...
But the way you feel about you.
If any of that feels familiar, I want you to know you're certainly not alone.
My Struggle Felt Endless
For years, I genuinely believed I was the problem.
Not my relationship with food.
Not the years of dieting.
Not the emotional eating.
Not the constant food noise.
Me.
I believed I lacked willpower.
I believed I wasn't disciplined enough.
I believed I just couldn't be trusted around food.
Every time I regained weight, those beliefs became a little stronger.
And it wasn't just the conversation I was having with myself.
It was the conversation I was having with other people too.
Whenever I found myself back where I'd started, I'd often hear things like,
"Maybe you just don't want it enough."
"You need to want it more."
"If you really wanted it, you'd stick to it."
Those comments were rarely said to hurt me.
Most people genuinely believed they were helping.
But every time I heard them, they reinforced what I'd already begun believing about myself.
That I was to blame.
That I simply wasn't trying hard enough.
The hardest part wasn't the weight.
It was the conversation I was having with myself every single day.
"What's wrong with you?"
"Why can't you just stop?"
"You've done it again."
"You'll never change."
"You're useless."
"You always ruin everything."
Looking back now, what surprises me is that I hardly even noticed I was speaking to myself that way.
Those thoughts had become so familiar that they simply sounded like the truth.
For years, I also carried this constant feeling that I could never quite explain.
I desperately wanted to lose weight.
In fact, it was one of the things I wanted most in my life.
I thought about it every day.
I invested time, money and energy into trying to achieve it.
Yet my choices didn't always reflect how deeply I wanted it.
That left me feeling confused.
Frustrated.
And if I'm honest... anxious.
Not because I didn't care.
But because I couldn't understand why there seemed to be such a gap between what I wanted and what I found myself doing.
Years later, after training as a behavioural therapist, I learnt about something called cognitive dissonance.
It's the discomfort we can experience when our actions don't seem to match our beliefs, intentions or values.
I remember reading about it and thinking,
"That's it."
For the first time, I had words for something I'd been feeling for years.
At the time though, I didn't understand any of that.
I just assumed the only explanation was that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
Why You've Struggled
Looking back now, I don't think I'd discovered the truth about myself.
I think I'd reached understandable conclusions from an incomplete understanding of why I was struggling.
When our behaviour doesn't seem to match what we truly want, our mind naturally tries to make sense of it.
We want an explanation.
For me, I desperately wanted to lose weight.
Yet my choices didn't always reflect how deeply I wanted that future.
As you know from the previous section, years later I learnt there was a name for that uncomfortable feeling I carried for so long.
Cognitive dissonance.
The problem was, I didn't understand why I was experiencing it.
I'd spent years being told that losing weight was simple.
Eat less.
Move more.
Be more consistent.
If you struggle...
Try harder.
So when my behaviour didn't match my intentions, there only seemed to be one explanation left.
The problem must be me.
That wasn't a conclusion I reached overnight.
It happened slowly.
Every time I regained weight.
Every time I promised myself Monday would be different.
Every time somebody told me I just needed more willpower.
Every time I criticised myself for struggling.
Little by little, those experiences started creating a story about who I believed I was.
I wasn't just somebody who struggled with emotional eating.
I became an emotional eater.
I wasn't just somebody who struggled with consistency.
I became an inconsistent person.
I wasn't just somebody who regained weight.
I became someone who always regains weight.
The more I believed those things, the more naturally they began to shape the way I spoke to myself.
"You've done it again."
"You'll never change."
"What's wrong with you?"
"You always ruin everything."
At the time, I thought that voice was keeping me accountable.
Looking back now, I can see it was simply repeating the story I'd come to believe about myself.
The difficulty is that the story we believe about ourselves quietly influences the choices we make.
If you genuinely believe you're somebody who always gives up...
One difficult day feels like proof.
If you believe you can't be trusted around food...
One moment of emotional eating confirms it.
If you believe you've always failed...
Every setback feels like evidence that nothing has changed.
Instead of seeing those moments as experiences you've had...
You begin seeing them as confirmation of who you are.
And that's one of the reasons self-concept contributes to weight regain.
Not because thinking negatively magically makes the weight come back.
But because the story you've come to believe about yourself influences your confidence, your hope, your resilience and the way you respond when life inevitably becomes difficult.
When you believe you're someone who always fails, it's much harder to believe one difficult day is just one difficult day.
It's much easier to think,
"I've blown it."
"I knew this would happen."
"I'll start again on Monday."
And before you know it, one moment becomes another cycle of weight regain.
Looking back now, I don't believe there was ever something fundamentally wrong with me.
I believe I'd spent years trying to explain understandable struggles through an incomplete understanding of why they were happening.
And if the explanation I'd been given was incomplete...
Perhaps the story I'd come to believe about myself was incomplete too.
What This Understanding Meant For Me
Understanding this completely changed the way I looked at myself.
For years, I'd been trying to become a different person.
More disciplined.
More motivated.
More consistent.
More in control.
I genuinely believed those were the things standing between me and the life I wanted.
Looking back now, I can see I wasn't trying to change my weight.
I was trying to escape the person I'd come to believe I was.
One of the things that surprises me most is this.
I've never liked bullies.
I've never liked people who judge others for struggling.
I've always believed in building people up, not knocking them down.
Yet every single day, I was doing exactly that to myself.
I'd call myself lazy.
Weak.
Pathetic.
A failure.
I'd say things to myself that I would never dream of saying to another human being.
And the strangest part was...
I didn't even realise I was doing it.
I thought that voice was keeping me accountable.
Looking back now, I don't think it was accountability at all.
I think it was pain.
It was years of blame.
Years of disappointment.
Years of believing I'd finally discovered the truth about who I was.
Once I understood how that story had been created, I stopped accepting it as fact.
Not because I suddenly became full of confidence.
Not because I started pretending everything was positive.
But because I finally understood that those thoughts weren't evidence.
They were conclusions I'd reached from years of incomplete understanding.
That changed everything.
Because instead of asking,
"What's wrong with me?"
I started asking,
"What happened that led me to believe this about myself?"
That one question replaced years of criticism with curiosity.
And curiosity changed far more than criticism ever had.
Before We Move On..
Understanding how I'd come to see myself differently was one of the biggest turning points in my journey.
For the first time, I realised I wasn't the person I'd spent years believing I was.
But there was something else I still hadn't stopped to consider.
For years, all of my attention had been on one kind of weight.
My physical weight.
The number on the scales.
My appearance.
My health.
I was so focused on the consequences of carrying physical weight...
I never stopped to ask myself whether I was carrying another kind of weight too.
Looking back now, I realised I'd been carrying years of shame.
Regret.
Stress.
Self-criticism.
Painful experiences.
The pressure of trying to hold everything together.
And it turned out that some of the struggles I'd always believed were simply about my body...
Were also being influenced by everything I'd been carrying emotionally.
That understanding changed my journey in ways I could never have imagined.