How Loved Ones Can Sabotage Your Fitness Efforts
It happens to everyone. You start to make progress, feel good about the changes you made, and then your closest people will try to sabotage your fitness efforts. Let’s see why this is happening.
There are as many sabotage clichés as fitness quotes: “I liked you the way you used to be,” “You’re just wasting your time,” or “Come on, what’s the harm in eating pizza from time to time?” “Does your family hate you? Probably. But that’s not what motivates them in this case. Instead, they are just people; there are both physiological and psychological reasons behind their passive aggression.
The first has to do with psychological cognitive dissonance that occurs when we have multiple conflicting desires. Effective weight loss trainer Adam Gilbert explains it here:
For example, a smoker may rationalize his behavior, believing that few people get sick from smoking, this only happens to people who smoke more than they do, if smoking does not kill them, something else, they will quit smoking next year, this is too expensive to quit smoking, or they only live once and deserve to smoke. Basically, they need to either take action (quit smoking and get whatever help they need) or they need to feel better rationalizing their smoking – which most people do).
One way to smooth out cognitive dissonance in immediate family members is to try to sabotage your goals. In fact, their love for you may be the main reason for their actions. Relatively new research from the Oxford Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neurobiology confirms that loved ones can be especially critical of changes in your life in that they are simply projecting their own insecurities .
What does this mean to you? If you start a weight loss program, be prepared for a little rebuff from those closest to you. The most rewarding thing you can do is brush away their negativity, realizing that this is only because they are human and people are stupid creatures. If they didn’t love you that much, they probably wouldn’t care about your efforts.
Why are our friends and family sabotaging us | My body mentor