Is a lack of self-confidence hurting your ability to manage weight and work on your health? Too many times, this leaves us feeling defeated and discouraged in our efforts.
In his May 2021 “Healthy Nudges & News” newsletter, Robert Kushner, MD, renowned obesity medicine specialist, addressed this topic with some helpful tips that linked back to a blog post.
“Maybe [you] have difficulty choosing the right foods or struggle sticking with an exercise program. Or maybe stress keeps getting in the way of [your] good intentions. A lack of confidence can cause many to throw in the towel and give up early, impairing one’s ability to stay on the healthy weight-loss track,” said Dr. Kushner.
So how can you get better at having self-confidence that will support your health goals? Here are some of Dr. Kushner’s suggestions that we’ve summarized.
Start with These Questions
To start, Dr. Kushner recommends you consider some questions that will help you reflect on the inner strengths you use every day in life:
- What personal qualities have helped you tackle new challenges that have come your way?
- How would a family member, friend or boss describe your character strengths?
- What past accomplishments have you achieved using organizational or planning skills?
- When you learned a new skill, how did it improve when you practiced it and paid more attention to detail?
Recognizing these skills, qualities and accomplishments is important because more than likely, you can learn to apply them to your health behaviors and lifestyle goals.
Borrow Skillsets to Boost Self-Confidence
Once you’ve done the exercise above, consider your skills and traits that have served you well in the past by helping you be successful in your career or family life. Here are some examples of skillsets you might list on a resume or use to describe your accomplishments:
- Project planning skills
- Attention to detail
- Computer and/or research skills
- Collaboration and group work
- Hard and determined worker
The idea here is that you can borrow these skillsets from other areas of your life and apply them to your personal health behaviors. By doing this, you can slowly build up your self-confidence and improve your lifestyle to support your weight and health goals. Maybe you don’t realize it now, but these skills can help you with activities like meal planning, researching healthy recipes and using fitness apps, reading and applying the nutritional information on food labels, finding an accountability partner, or asking for support.
Conclusion
Building self-confidence takes time, but it can drastically change your progress in your health journey. For more of Dr. Kushner’s tips to build self-confidence, or what he calls “self-efficacy,” click here. Here’s another related blog post for you on this topic: Strategies for Silencing Your Inner Critic and Boosting Self-Confidence.
