Let’s Make a Community Together

This blog post calls for the obese and morbidly obese who fight to lose weight and get physically fit to join together and make a community. For increased success in weight loss, you need to make a community of support of like-minded individuals who are going through the same thing. It’s important to show the journey and the process of weight loss and fitness, not just the results. By showing up and writing about my own trials and tribulations (and maybe showcasing those of others as well), it will help myself and others in the community stay accountable to the process. It’s easier if we all fight the same fight, together. 

Celebrate your small efforts within the weight loss community- this takes a long time:

Social media in the weight loss community largely centers around people who have already attained their weight loss goals. Whether they’ve lost weight through simply diet and exercise or through other valid methods in combination, what you see on social media is largely the “afters” followed in large part by a bunch of hopeful “before.”

I’m not knocking that- people who have achieved great success deserve applause. The many success stories can serve as motivation. We strive to emulate many people that we follow online. These people have lost hundreds of pounds and overcome obstacles and hurdles of all kinds.

However, we didn’t get to see all the work and effort they had to put in along the way. It can be discouraging because we’re only witnessing their life after their success.  Not when they dealt with the problems of being morbidly obese that caused them to falter along the way. That can make people focus only on the result, and not on all the work they’ll need to put in to get there. That is a detriment to the weight-loss process.

What we want is to see more social media posts from people at every stage of self-improvement.  We want to follow others who are, right now, facing the same choices, struggles, and circumstances we are. We want them to follow us, too.  Which leads us to:

Make a community of support:

We want to find a diverse online community of people in similar situations to us. This can lead to more emotional support and motivation. It can also lead to better advice about resources others use and why along their journeys.

We empathize with better with others who are in a similar boat to us. Because we’re overweight, we understand the challenges involved, and the trials and tribulations of combatting social stigmas- all the issues that fat people have with the medical community at large, for instance.

Increased empathy leads to increased engagement in the weight-loss process for all of us.  And when we’re dealing with others in a similar situation, our increased empathy can increase our compassion not just for others, but for ourselves.

Being able to achieve small successes together along the way can be highly motivating.  When our successes motivate us, we’re more likely to stay on track.  And we’re more likely to be successful if we set small, attainable goals. Small successes can snowball into larger ones, which leads to more motivation and more engagement in the process. 

When we’re talking to someone of a similar weight, we can discuss the different strategies I’m using to diet and exercise. We can listen to feedback from others. We want to be able to ask other “what type of diets work best for you?” and “what supplements are you taking and why?”  From sharing diet tips to recipes, to simply showcasing different exercise regimens that are appropriate for the extremely overweight, we can share what’s working for us and how we’re doing on a daily basis. We’re also able to get immediate feedback from the community at large.

Strive for accountability within the community:

We’re more likely to stay on track with our weight loss plans if we have a solid support system in place.  When you and your community are accountable to each other, you can get a realistic idea of what progress looks like on a day-to-day basis for most people, versus just seeing the results. 

When you can count on others and know others are counting on you, it leads to a heightened accountability system.  Suddenly, we’re not just doing this for ourselves anymore, we’re doing it to help motivate our friends in the weight loss community.  At the same time, we are gaining motivation from them as well.  And when someone faces a challenge, the community can be there to support them and help them through it.

Last thoughts:

When you focus on what you and others are going through, you’re more like to be engaged in weight loss and not just the end result you want.  That end result is a long way off for most people. We as a community need to learn to bask in the glow of small achievements first. Having a weight loss community of like individuals to rely on leads to higher motivation, better empathy and compassion for others and for yourself. It also leads to the ability to find out more information and learn new things. That community can hold you accountable to your goals in a way that going at it alone can’t. 

We’ve got this.