Criticizing Yourself For Overeating Won’t Help You Lose Weight
Think of something that you have done in your life that you feel just awesome about, preferably something that is not related to weight loss. Today’s exercise in Loving Yourself Thin is to think of this “something” every time today that you have any negative thought about your weight or your overeating. Any time that you have a critical thought about yourself or your weight just think of that accomplishment, that “something” that you are proud of.
There is so much more to you than your weight, and although it is very important to care for yourself, lose weight if overweight, and increase your level of health, you aren’t going to gain positive change by criticizing yourself for overeating and gaining weight. This will only serve to increase your negative feelings towards yourself and bring you down.
Remember, in these exercises we aren’t focusing on the physical action that is necessary to achieve lasting weight loss, but instead on increasing the love you have for yourself today. The more you love yourself, the more you will be naturally motivated to care for your body and your health, just as you encourage and want your loved ones to care for themselves.
Loving yourself isn’t about criticism and blame, it is about forgiving yourself for indulging in unhealthy habits and recognizing that you have done the best you could at that time. If criticism of your overeating and weight gain worked, then you wouldn’t have any problem with either your weight or your health today. 
Today is Day 12 of Loving Yourself Thin. If this is the first exercise you have done you can find the introduction and a list of all current daily exercises here.
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Great post and I agree wholeheartedly.
Eating healthy is great and a necessary part to lose weight, but my opinion is that you should eat healthy only about 85-90% of the time.
The only 10-15% of the time, it’s FINE to eat a little snack and you shouldn’t criticize yourself for it!
Great post!
Jeremy
http://www.fitness-made-fun.com
Hi Jeremy, thanks for your compliments!
If you don’t have any problems at all with food addictions such as addiction to sugar, flour, unhealthy fats (fried foods), salt, or any other ingredients, and if you can successfully eat foods containing those ingredients in moderation, then I suppose that you could eat something like that once in a while. It’s my experience however, that “one is never enough” and when I indulge in processed, low-energy, non-nutritive foods, I just end up wanting more and more.
Again though, if you don’t have a problem with that and those ingredients don’t give you cravings or cause overeating, then you might not have an issue with food and overweight anyway!
Then the main concern would be eating a healthy diet of whole foods to live a life of high energy. 
I definitely agree that even if you eat unhealthy foods that criticizing yourself for it won’t help you change the behavior, nor will it help change overeating.
Yes, I wish more women did learn how to love themselves instead of criticizing themselves so much (myself included). Magazines, movies, and television are so full of stick-thin women, we forget that is not healthy or normal. Most of them are that way because they are always hungry, living on drugs and cigarettes, and unhealthy. I once had a friend who was a model and was so gorgeous, but her main food groups were diet coke, cigarettes, and diet pills. All of my guy friends thought she was so pretty on the outside, but I knew how unhealthy she was on the inside. Whenever I have a reality check with myself and remember that, I feel OK that I am 10 pounds heavier than I want to be.
Emilys last blog post..Four easy ways to cure insomnia
Hi Emily,
Oh, you bring up such a wonderful point being that you had a close friend living an unhealthy lifestyle, but a friend who if other women saw her in a magazine they’d want to look like her!
You know what’s funny though, is that you don’t even need to starve yourself to lose weigh. This is off the topic of self-criticism but just wanted to mention that if one eats whole foods, non-processed, eats in balance and every couple of hours, you can easily lose weight and not starve yourself.
Anyway, I heartily agree with you that there is way too much self-criticism in our Universe, thanks for sharing in your comment, I appreciate it!