May Week 3: Creating Your Weight Loss Support Team

How many people are currently helping you with your weight management?  As we head into our third week of “Ask and Allow", I would like you to consider that your weight management journey has more than one person on it.

When we are the only ones supporting ourselves, it can get lonely and disheartening and fattening. There are a lot of people in our lives that may push food on us or tempt us, not because they are mean, but because they just don’t know what to do and how to support us.  We need to train people how to support us for weight mastery.

ASKING FOR SUPPORT FROM OTHERS

When it comes to asking for support from others, many of us are afraid to ask because of past failures:

• I don’t want to draw attention to myself
• I hate to fail publicly
• Nobody will help me they think I’m a lost cause
• My friends will try and sabotage me

Six out of ten clients will say to me, “no one knows I am doing this. I just don’t want to fail one more time.” But, research shows that people double their chances of weight loss success when others share healthy new activities with them.

I agree that it’s demoralizing to announce to everyone “I am going on a diet so you better not tempt me and bring your fattening food around me…” and then break down and get caught with your hand in the cookie jar.  That is not what I am suggesting.

I am suggesting that you might consider trying a different approach, one that is more about creating a team of people that actually have specific ongoing roles in supporting you not on a diet but on getting healthier and being your best self.

People want to be a powerful part of your life, so let them. Most of my friends are also exercise buddies, and so are my family members. My husband and my daughter can make veggies for me as I am heading home from work.  Life gets easier when you have people to call upon to help you out.

CREATE YOUR SUPPORT TEAM

Don’t underestimate the power of creating a list to begin.  It can be very helpful to your success. Take a moment and brainstorm who you are going to enroll on your support team.  In the left hand column write the person’s name, in the right hand column what they can support you with.

SUPPORT TEAM MEMBER                            SUPPORT ROLE

Members can be: Friends, Family, Co-workers, Community member

Roles can be: Exercise partner, help shop, keep foods out of sight

How do you enroll them on your team? You don’t have to make a big speech or announce that you are on a diet. I find the best way to enroll people is to just ask.  Don’t assume they are going to know what to do.

Teach people how to support you, share your visions and goals and tell them how they can support you in it.

Let them know you are starting to make some healthy changes and wanted their support. Ask them for advice (people love this and flattery will get you everywhere). I think when people feel included as part of a “improvement” project they feel excited and happy to help.

Your team can support you by:

• Keeping food out of sight
• Walking or exercising with you
• Buying food when you don’t have time
• Eating healthy meals with you
• Sharing recipes and ideas for menus
• Bringing fruits and veggies into the office or home
• Choosing healthier restaurants to go to

My client Janice slowly got her whole office enrolled in her weight release.  First, just by having them keep candies and cookies out of her sight, then, by making healthier choices when they ordered out for lunch and then finally, she got four other co-workers to walk with her at lunch. Now the whole office has been transformed.

Janice has released over 80 pounds and some of her co workers have lost significant amounts of weight as well.  It all starts with your commitment to make a change for yourself and then asking others to join in.  Janice made the Shift from Fat to thin Thinking in the area of asking for support.

SOME DOS AND DON’TS

DO: Make sure your supporters are staying focused on reinforcing the great weight management skills you are doing rather than pointing to what you are not doing. “Wow, you exercised every day during the week.”

DON’T: Focus them on your weight change. Sure an occasional comment is okay but you want them focused on helping you be healthy and being masterful not being “skinny”.

DO: Keep asking for encouragement.  As you enroll your support team, it is important to remind them from the start that you will want their continual support with these new skills that you are mastering.  Often, once we release the weight, people think “you are okay now” and don’t realize that weight mastery is an ongoing pursuit and that the beginning stages of maintenance is not a time for them to bring back all the junk into the house or start offering you cookies, “here, you look great, have a cookie!” You can even write a list of positive things they can compliment you on achieving, like drinking water, avoiding TV eating, eating more vegetables.

FYI: I have been maintaining my weight for years but still ask my husband and kids to keep foods out of sight or ask for support in getting me time to exercise.  They are happy to support me because they see it makes such a difference to me. And when mama's happy — everybody is happy — who would be happy because you were healthy?  Get them to be on your team!

Okay, I hope that you take this to heart and have a great week building your weight support team. I hope you are including me and your Monthly Mastery Group on your list!