Why trying to lose weight can lead to stress

Although it isn’t particularly enjoyable being overweight, particularly if you’re carrying significantly more weight than is healthy for you, sometimes the thought of having to change your eating and exercise habits puts you off even trying to lose weight. If you intend to lose weight you obviously have to reduce your calorie intake and increase your calorie expenditure, which ultimately requires you to do things differently in your life. Unfortunately, this can be a source of stress and when you’re stressed it is harder to do what you need to do in order to achieve weight-loss success.

When you’re trying to lose weight you actually have to pay close attention to the kind of food you eat and the quantity, as otherwise you won’t be able to reduce your calorie intake enough to lose weight. To reduce your calorie intake you have to start making healthier food choices and to avoid excessive snacking, although you shouldn’t skip meals either, while you also have to think about reducing the amount of food you eat. This can be quite a challenge when you haven’t bothered to count calories for years, particularly if you don’t really know what you’re doing.

If you don’t know what constitutes a healthy diet or what your calorie requirements are you may not be able to figure out what to do. You might think that you’ve reduced your calorie intake enough only to step on the scales and discover you’ve not lost a single pound. However, you shouldn’t let this get you down as it is all a process of trial and error and at least you will know for next time that you have to make a few adjustments to your diet and start doing more exercise.

Once you get into the swing of things it isn’t quite as difficult to stick to a calorie-controlled diet and to exercise regularly, but sometimes the unexpected can happen and your weight-loss plans are derailed. It may be something that affects you emotionally, such as a death in the family, the loss of a job or a relationship breakdown, which causes you to seek comfort in food. It could be that you fall ill or injure yourself and so have to put your weight-loss plans on the backburner as you need to eat properly to get better and to let yourself heal, which may not always make weight loss possible.

Being overweight can definitely be stressful and so losing the weight makes you feel less anxious and more positive overall, but the actual steps you have to take to reach your goal can leave you quite stressed about whether you’re doing everything you need to in order to lose weight and whether you will even be able to keep the weight off.