Belief of Weight Loss
Want to lose weight and eat healthy? Success may depend on whether you believe you can.
For a group of older women, “self-efficacy” had a strong influence on whether they decided to eat healthy or exercise more. That’s the finding of a researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
Self-efficacy is your belief that you can change what you want to change, no matter what the circumstance are. It means, for example, that you feel confident you can eat a healthy diet even when you’re pressed for time, faced with a holiday dessert table, or bored and unhappy. Your level of self-belief helps determine how long you stick with your plan, even when you run into a bump in the road.
In the Queensland study, researchers surveyed more than 500 women between the ages of 51 and 66 about their eating and exercise habits. About two-thirds of them were overweight, and this group was more likely to have low self-efficacy and not believe they would be able to stick with a weight-loss plan. That, in turn, made them less likely to succeed – and reinforced their beliefs about failure.
So how can you increase your self-belief? Work at it: Ask for encouragement from your friends and family, and find a realistic role model so you can tell yourself, “If she did it, I can, too!”
Change is hard. But it is possible, and healthy changes come packed with positive payback. Arthritis Today provides easy tips to make your changes stick.
