How To Build A Support System
Maybe you need a pat on the back when you’re feeling discouraged about your weight loss efforts.
Or maybe it’s been a long day and you could really bend someone’s ear to get some shit off your chest rather than having to resort to comfort food.
Maybe you need someone to watch your kids while you go to the gym. Or maybe it’d be great if someone in your house volunteered to meal prep your food for the week so you didn’t have to.
Fuck, maybe it’d be nice if someone could suggest where to buy inexpensive healthy food so your groceries didn’t cost so much.
Shit, maybe it’d be nice if you knew someone who’s lost weight before who could tell you what pitfalls to look out for so you can avoid setbacks.
Those are all examples of the three major forms of social support, them being emotional, instrumental, and informational.1Emotional support refers to expressions of caring, concern, empathy, love, trust, and sympathy. Instrumental support has to do with tangible aid and service. Informational support involves the giving of advice, suggestions, feedback, and other types of information. Having a support system that provides one or a combination of the types is vital for the success of any goal, let alone a weight loss one.
How vital are they?
So vital that research has found that social support has a positive influence on goal completion, which is not only why I said it’s important but also why experts frequently implore people to lean on their friends and family for help when trying to reach goals rather than go at it alone.
So stop alienating people!
Now, as important as social support is for weight loss and the achievement of anything else because supportive friends or family members can provide such things like encouragement, advice, and accountability, here’s the thing…
Not everyone is going to want to lend a helping hand.
Nope, not everyone is happy that you’re losing weight.
Some people might actually resent you for it.
These weight loss saboteurs show themselves by their words when they say some real slick shit or via their actions when trying to get you to engage in behavior they know you shouldn’t.
It’s all in an effort to get you to fall off track and return to the status quo of you being closer to death and not much to look at.
Interested in what to do about it?
Yeah, of course you are!
When you go to your mom’s and she begs you to eat something (preferably her fresh baked ziti) because she says you’re looking too thin for her liking, it’s up to you to inflict on her the severe mortal wounds that you know turning down food from her causes.
When your bestie knows the time you’re supposed to work out but asks you to go the bar with them because you kind of owe it to them considering all the time you’ve been spending on yourself, it’s up to you to take them on a guilt trip of their own by reminding them of all the instances they blew you off to do something with that current week’s love of their life.2We both know your BFF is VERY promiscuous!
When you go out to a restaurant as a group of friends and they encourage you to live a little with your menu order because this one time won’t hurt you, it’s up to you to remind them that you are living a little…a little bit longer than them considering the way they don’t take care of themselves, which is placing you in perfect position to enjoy an early retirement when you collect on the insurance policies you’ve secretly issued on each and every one of them.
When your significant other repeatedly tells you that you’ll never get rid of the fat and your plan is doomed to failure anyway, it’s up to you to fire back that you plan on staying the course because you don’t want to add another failure to your list, with you pairing up with them being the biggest among a fuckload of mistakes.
The point is that not everyone is going to support you.
It’s up to you to support yourself.
Be your own damn support system!
Some people don’t have friends because they’re losers. And there are some people who don’t have family for a number of reasons, such as estrangement or their wife/husband/parents/etc dying in some tragic manner to set up the motivation for them to become a superhero to avenge the loss and make the world right.3Here’s a depressing game: look up the number of superheroes with family members that died before they devoted their life to wearing their underwear outside.
Let’s say that’s you and you have no one supportive in your life.
Let’s also say that being supportive of yourself is something that you can’t do.
So what’s a person to do when they don’t have someone to lean on IRL nor themselves?
Why, you can just whip out your phone!
Via the magic of social media networks like Instagram, you can connect to people all over the world who you can share your journey with and then receive encouragement, advice, and accountability from, all of which can help keep you on track with your health and fitness goals just like the receipt of them would from people who you actually know and aren’t complete strangers to!