What’s With This Self-Sabotage?!!!
By Marilu Henner

I am very excited to be part of the Healthy Times family!  Every issue I’ll be sharing with you some of the best information I’ve discovered since beginning my health journey many years ago.

Becoming a healthy fit person is so much easier now.  Back then there were no food labels, no healthy fast food and no health food aisles in mainstream grocery stores!   Today we have better and more accessible information on everything from alternative medicine to knowing what’s inside that can of soup.  There really is no excuse for our NOT being as healthy as we can be.

So what’s the problem?

Why are we sicker, fatter and lazier than ever before?

I’ll tell you why.  Despite all of the great information available to us, we as human beings, with our human frailties, choose to thwart our best efforts, time and time again with …Self Sabotage!

But what is self-sabotage?  And why does it have such a stranglehold on us?

Self-Sabotage is the method we use to set ourselves up to fail.  It’s the excuse we give when we want to blame our failure on something or someone else.  Self-Sabotage is a universal problem.  It’s the reason we bail on our New Year’s resolutions long before January is over.  The key to success is understanding that Self-Sabotage can be controlled, and once the urge for failure is conquered, our goals can be achieved.

I think I understand the reasons for self-sabotage because I sabotaged my best efforts at self-improvement for years.  I list five types of self-sabotage below, and believe me; sometimes I could indulge in all five of them in a single day!  See if you recognize yourself in any of the Top Reasons People Self Sabotage! 

• EMOTIONAL EATING

The emotions that make us turn to food are varied, and some of them start in childhood.  Our parents give us a cookie when we’re hurt, celebrate with ice cream when something goes right, soothe us with comfort food when something doesn’t, or send us to bed without dinner when we misbehave.  Food becomes related to feelings rather than hunger.  I talk about this a lot in my book Healthy Kids because I encourage parents to become aware of this syndrome in order to break the cycle.  It’s difficult as adults to discontinue this pattern because it has been so ingrained in us.  But in order to have the right relationship with food, this cycle must be broken. 

• MISPLACED ANGER

Self-Sabotage is a way of acting out.  It’s a temper tantrum, a rage against yourself because you want to punish yourself.  It’s like a spoiled child who “wants what he wants when he wants it!”  It’s acting like a little brat because you think you deserve to eat anything you want at any time without any consequences.  But it’s really a case of  “I’ll show me!”

• FOOD IS SEDUCTIVE

Let’s face it.  A lot of times we turn to food because it doesn’t disappoint us the way other things do.  Food looks good, smells good, and we know it’s going to taste good. We may feel disappointed in the way we look and feel as a result of our eating, but we’re usually not connecting those feelings at the time we’re doing it.  While we’re lusting after food, we’re not thinking about how our clothes are going to tighten, our faces are going to break out, or our stomach is going to bloat.  For this reason alone it’s important to fall in love with the food that’s good for us. 

• FEAR OF SUCCESS

Sometimes we get close to our goal, get plenty of compliments, and then give ourselves permission to blow it!  Why?  For various reasons as well.

We see our diet as short-term, so when we know it’s working, we go back to our “old ways” because we weren’t in it for the long haul anyway.

Or we’ve hidden ourselves for so long with  “body armor” that when we start to get recognized, we don’t feel invisible anymore, and we feel too much pressure.  We put the weight back on in order to hide again.  We hold ourselves back so that other people don’t get jealous or competitive.  We fear becoming our “perfect self” and purposely sabotage to protect us from that fear, because it takes a lot of responsibility to be even close to the best we can be.

And many times, self sabotage is connected to not wanting to deal with the sexual feelings and pressures that come up when we start to look and feel our best.  We eat so that the sexy, vibrant person inside of us doesn’t threaten our safe haven of discontent.  No one around us is jealous because we stay the way we were.  When we come close to our goal, someone in our old world may want to get back at us for looking good, and we may have to deal with the negative feelings of a sibling, spouse, friend or in-law.

• FEAR OF FAILURE

And sometimes we self-sabotage because we have a vision of what we’re going to be like when we’re thin, and when we get closer to it, it’s not working out the way we thought it would.  We get scared.  We think, “What if I threw a party, and nobody came?”  Or “If I were just thinner, my life would be perfect.”  But then everything doesn’t fall into place the way we imagined it would.  We don’t get the perfect job, the perfect mate, the perfect life.  And we might have to look at a different reason than our weight for why it’s not happening the way we thought it would.  But that can be too painful, so we pile on the pounds because at least then we have a familiar and safe excuse.

These are just a few of the many self sabotage excuses I talk about often during the classes I teach at www.marilu.com . It’s never easy to deal with these issues, but awareness is half the battle.