How to Get the Right Support When You’re Trying to Lose Weight
When I first started losing weight, I don’t think I really appreciated how important support would be. I knew that ultimately I was the person who had to make changes to what I ate and how active I was, so it was easy to think of weight loss as something that was largely down to me. Having since lost more than 10 stone, regained weight and spent a lot of time looking back at my relationship with food, I see things rather differently.
Support can make an enormous difference, but only when it is the right kind of support. Someone watching what you eat, asking whether you are “allowed” something or wanting an update on the scales every week might believe they are helping when actually they’re making the whole thing harder. Equally, having someone you can talk to when you’re struggling, a friend who will go for a walk with you or a healthcare professional who actually listens can be far more useful than another person telling you what you should and shouldn’t eat.
I’ve also realised that sometimes what looks like a weight problem isn’t something that can be solved simply by concentrating harder on weight loss. If you’re eating because you’re stressed, struggling with food noise, constantly hungry or using food to cope with difficult emotions, you might need support with those things rather than another diet plan.
Work out what support would actually help you
Before asking people around you for support, it is worth thinking about what you actually want them to do. This sounds obvious, but I don’t think I always knew myself.
When somebody says they’re trying to lose weight, other people can immediately go into helpful mode. Unfortunately, their idea of helpful might be commenting on your dinner, asking how much you’ve lost or reminding you that the piece of cake you’re eating probably has a lot of calories in it. If you’ve ever experienced this, you’ll know how quickly encouragement can start to feel like surveillance!
It might be much more helpful if your partner stopped buying you chocolate as a surprise, ate some of the same meals as you or came for a walk with you in the evening. On the other hand, you might actually prefer your family to do absolutely nothing differently and simply stop discussing your weight.
There isn’t one correct way for someone to support you, which is why telling people what you need can make such a difference. If you don’t want comments about your body, food or weight, it is perfectly reasonable to say that. You can still appreciate someone’s support without wanting them involved in every decision you make.
This is particularly important if you’ve spent years dieting because weight can gradually become something everyone feels entitled to discuss. I certainly became very used to people knowing I was losing weight when I lost 10 stone, and when you’ve lost a significant amount it is almost impossible for people not to notice. Looking back, though, I think there is a difference between somebody being pleased for you and your weight becoming a topic that is constantly up for discussion.
What if the people around you aren’t supportive?
Changing how you eat or becoming more active can affect the people you live with, even if they aren’t trying to lose weight themselves. If you’ve always had a takeaway together on a Friday night, for example, and suddenly you want to do something differently, your partner might see that as changing something you both enjoyed rather than simply changing what you’re eating.
This is why I think it can help to talk about what you’re trying to change rather than expecting everyone else to automatically understand. You don’t necessarily need the whole household to follow the same diet or suddenly become interested in nutrition, but there may be small compromises that make things easier. You might still have the takeaway but choose something different, cook meals everyone enjoys rather than making separate “diet food”, or find something else you can do together that doesn’t always revolve around food.
Of course, there is a difference between somebody finding changes difficult and somebody deliberately undermining you. If you’ve explained that something matters to you and someone repeatedly mocks your choices, pressures you to eat things you don’t want or makes you feel bad for trying to look after yourself, that isn’t particularly supportive.
Sometimes you need more than encouragement from friends
There is only so much friends and family can help with, especially if there are things going on underneath your eating habits that you don’t completely understand yourself.
This was something I had to learn.
For a long time, I focused very heavily on the practical side of losing weight. When I lost 10 stone I became very good at following the plan I was using, planning food and concentrating on what the scales were doing. What I didn’t necessarily understand was everything that was going on behind my relationship with food.
Over time I’ve realised that changing what you eat and understanding why you eat are two very different things.
I’ve experienced emotional eating and food noise, and I’ve also had periods when my behaviour around weight loss became much less healthy than I recognised at the time. Counselling and CBT helped me start understanding some of those patterns rather than simply assuming that whenever I struggled I needed to be more disciplined.
That’s why I am much more cautious now when I see weight-loss advice that boils everything down to motivation or willpower. If you find yourself eating when you’re anxious, upset, lonely, bored or overwhelmed, knowing the calorie content of your dinner doesn’t necessarily help with what happens later that evening when those feelings appear.
Sometimes getting support for your mental health or exploring your relationship with food can be every bit as relevant to weight management as learning about nutrition.
Talking to your GP about your weight
Going to the GP to talk about weight can feel daunting, particularly if you’ve had previous appointments where you’ve felt judged or where losing weight seemed to be suggested as the answer to almost everything.
There are, however, situations where getting medical advice is important. Weight can be affected by many different things and your GP can look at the wider picture, including your health, medications and any symptoms you’re experiencing. Depending on your circumstances, there may also be NHS weight-management services or other forms of support available.
The options for managing obesity have changed considerably over the years too. Alongside lifestyle support there are now medical treatments for some people, as well as specialist services and bariatric surgery pathways for those who meet the relevant criteria.
I’ve explored some of these options myself, and doing so changed quite a lot about the way I think about obesity. I used to see weight loss much more simply than I do now. The more I’ve learned and experienced, the less I believe there is one solution that everyone simply needs enough willpower to follow.
If you find appointments difficult, write down what you want to discuss before you go. Think about how long you’ve struggled, what you’ve already tried and what you are actually finding difficult. That gives the conversation somewhere useful to start rather than it becoming another appointment where you’re simply told you need to lose weight when you already know that.
When your relationship with food needs support too
One of the biggest changes in my own thinking has been realising that losing weight and having a healthy relationship with food aren’t automatically the same thing.
When I originally lost weight, the number on the scales mattered enormously to me. Seeing it fall felt like proof that I was succeeding, which made it very easy for weight loss to become something I thought about far too much.
With hindsight, some of the behaviours I developed around food and weighing weren’t things I would encourage somebody else to do now. At the time, though, it was easy to justify almost anything if it resulted in another loss on the scales.
That’s partly why I don’t like the idea that successful weight loss is simply about being stricter with yourself. If you’re becoming frightened of foods, regularly skipping meals to compensate for eating, obsessively weighing yourself or avoiding social occasions because you’re worried about food, making your diet even stricter is unlikely to solve the real problem.
This is where appropriate professional support can become particularly important. Your physical health matters, but so does what trying to change your weight is doing to your head.
I wish there had been more discussion about that when I was losing weight. There was plenty of praise for the amount I’d lost, but much less conversation about what it felt like to constantly think about food and the scales.
Finding people who understand what you’re going through
Friends and family can be wonderful, but there are times when it helps to talk to somebody who has experienced similar struggles.
For some people that might be a traditional weight-loss group. I lost my 10 stone with Slimming World, and at that point in my life I enjoyed having a group around me and found the accountability motivating. My feelings about dieting and weight loss have changed since then, but I can still understand why that type of support works well for some people.
There are lots of other possibilities too, from walking groups and exercise classes to online communities and specialist support groups. What matters to me now is less about what kind of group it is and more about how being part of it makes you feel.
If you come away feeling encouraged, understood and able to make realistic changes, that’s very different from leaving feeling guilty because somebody else lost more weight than you did.
The same applies to social media. There are some brilliant people sharing their experiences online, but there is also an extraordinary amount of nonsense surrounding weight loss. I’ve shared my own experiences on Just Average Jen for more than a decade, but I would never suggest that something is automatically right for you simply because it worked for me.
Personal experience can help you feel less alone and give you ideas to explore, but it shouldn’t replace individual medical or nutritional advice when you need it.
Perhaps weight loss isn’t actually the thing you need help with
This is something I think we miss when we talk about weight-loss support.
Imagine somebody who wants to cook healthier meals but is exhausted every evening after work. Giving them more recipes might not solve the problem. They might need ideas for meals that require virtually no preparation, help with batch cooking or ways of sharing the cooking with somebody else.
Someone who wants to exercise might already know that walking would be good for them, but if they’re embarrassed about exercising in public because of their size, telling them to walk more isn’t particularly useful. Building their confidence or finding ways to exercise privately at home could be what finally makes movement feel possible.
The same goes for hunger, emotional eating, money, mobility and dozens of other things. Instead of asking yourself why you can’t stick to a diet, it can be much more useful to ask what keeps getting in the way.
Once you know that, you have a much better idea of the support you actually need.
The support I need now isn’t the support I needed when I lost 10 stone
I’ve changed my mind about quite a few things over the years, and I’m actually glad I have.
When I was losing 10 stone, my main focus was losing weight. I wanted the scales to go down and I was extremely determined to make that happen. After regaining weight, experiencing problems with my relationship with food and exploring other approaches to weight management, I see the bigger picture much more clearly.
That doesn’t mean I regret losing weight or that I don’t think weight loss can improve someone’s health. It means I no longer believe the only measure of success is how quickly you can make the number on the scales smaller.
Sometimes progress might be cooking more meals at home, becoming a little more active or understanding why you reach for food when you’re upset. It might be asking your GP for help after avoiding the conversation for years, finding an exercise you don’t dread or simply getting through a difficult period without abandoning everything you’ve been working towards.
Your support needs can change as your life changes too. Something that helped enormously five years ago might not be right for you anymore, and you don’t have to keep doing it simply because it worked once.
After everything I’ve experienced with weight loss, I think the most useful support is the kind that helps you make changes you can actually live with while understanding yourself a little better along the way. For me, that has meant gradually moving away from thinking only about diets and numbers and looking much more at health, habits, confidence and my relationship with food.
You might find that support from one person is enough, or you might need different people for different things. Either way, there is nothing particularly admirable about struggling on your own when the right bit of help could make things much easier.
