What are the Psychological Benefits of Weight Loss?

It is a known fact that losing weight not only influences your physical health but your mental health as well. Various benefits of losing weight can be associated with your psychological conditions. The physical changes that occur when you are going through the weight loss process are obvious. You have a fit body, you lessen your chances for many heart and brain diseases, cancer, type two diabetes and so on. The advantages are really many and have been talked about vividly here and there.

However, as always, the psychological influence of weight loss has been neglected. We have to understand that besides becoming physically healthier, many people undergo positive mental changes as well. And these are really significant since you have to cope with your new self in an optimistic, productive, and healthy way.

Not only physical but our mental health after weight loss is also affected greatly and most of these changes are positive. Here are some of the psychological benefits of weight loss programs–

Helps Fight Depression

People who are under a Weight Loss process reported feeling better (their depressive symptoms were a legend) when they lost weight. People tend to feel better and more positive when they lose weight. Their confidence level increases and they can easily fight depression under such circumstances. Henceforth it is clear that after people lost a specific amount of weight, their depressive symptoms improved.

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Improved Body Image

Perhaps this one will be quite self-explanatory, to be honest. Studies and researches have been consistently finding upliftment in body image after people lost weight. Body image was normally measured either by someone’s body dissatisfaction, how high or low they rated their body on a scale of 1 to 10, the shape of their body, body esteem, body posture, and others. As you might imagine, body image improvement was the highest among the three domains — the biggest psychological boost that you will notice among these three when you will lose weight is an augmented satisfaction your body.

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The Better Buildup of Self-Esteem

The most interesting thing about self-esteem is that it increases more when people lose weight by a change in behavior in comparison to various surgical procedures or the consumption of pills. Change of behavior means distinctive changes in eating patterns. This basically means it’s more likely your self-esteem will boost more if you lose your weight due to a change in lifestyle or healthier eating, as opposed to undergoing surgery or taking pills. And the relationship between enhanced self-esteem and weight loss seems to be more or less directly proportional, according to a study. It was found that the more weight you lose, the more your self-esteem will increase. This may seem quite self-explanatory and innate, but other studies did not notice this direct effect. And honestly, it doesn’t even matter that much. Most of the studies agree on improvements in self-esteem when you lose some weight. In a few studies, these results could have happened by chance, but this was the wrong assumption as weight loss have direct effects on self-esteem.

Social Benefits of Losing Weight

Once you start losing weight you will notice that your social life is also getting better and your health-related attribute of life improves. The health-related attribute of life can be described as your point of view of your own, psychological, physical and social functioning in which you also may include signs and symptoms of health and disease, as well as possible disgrace you might notice for being fat or overweight.

Studies have noticed several improvements in this social health as well. The highest improvements were normally found for a more specific measure – vitality.

The health-related attribute of life is a trait with the greatest connection to weight loss. By that, one can assume that your self-identified health-related attribute of life is most closely linked to your weight loss. So, the health-related attribute of life enhanced even more than your body image. When people lost 15% or more of their first bodyweight, there was a 7% (or more) upliftment in the perceived quality of life.

The psychological changes that occur in your body when you lose weight are immeasurable. When you shed those extra pounds, you become a lot more satisfied with your body and your appearance in general. Your self-esteem increases, as well as your health-related attribute of life that is your social as well as your mental condition enhance.