How People Pleasing Behaviors Prevent You From Losing Weight and How to Change That

Many high-achieving women like myself grew up with the expectation to be agreeable, helpful, and always put others first. While these qualities are admirable and may have even helped propel our careers at times, they have also led to behaviors hindering our personal goals, particularly weight loss. Unfortunately, people pleasing behaviors can significantly impact your health and make weight loss hard to achieve! In today’s post, I’ll share the top five ways people-pleasing might prevent you from losing weight and what you can do to reclaim your health.

1. Avoiding Conflict—People Pleasers love to keep the peace to prevent conflict. When you avoid conflict, you often internalize your feelings and concerns, increasing your stress and anxiety as unresolved issues continue to weigh on your mind. Many people use food to cope with stress and comfort themselves, especially after a difficult day. I know I have been guilty of avoiding conflict to “keep the peace” and then finding myself stewing over the situation and ending up with a delicious charcuterie board on my coffee table late at night that seemed to be the answer at the time to making me feel better! And while there’s nothing wrong with the occasional charcuterie board, when this becomes a nightly ritual, or when it’s not what you intended to eat, you can quickly find yourself overweight, as I did years ago!
2. Social Pressure – People Pleasers don’t like upsetting others. They tend to put immense pressure on themselves to ensure they don’t upset or offend anyone else, which can be particularly challenging in social settings. They feel uncomfortable declining the homemade cookies from their co-worker in the office. They feel uncomfortable not having a glass of wine when their mommy friend comes over since she likes to drink, and that’s what they’ve always done. People-pleasers are more concerned about how others may react and are willing to put their personal preferences behind them to accommodate others’ potential reactions.Over and over, I see corporate moms struggle to build healthy habits because they fear what others say or how they react in social settings. They’ll say things like, “I HAVE to have a glass of wine while entertaining clients,” or “Drinking at Thursday night happy hour is the ONLY way to get facetime with the boss.” And while I’m sure there’s some truth to their comments based on the history of what they experienced in their career, I challenge them to consider the alternative. Some people do not drink at work or home and STILL entertain clients. Some people DO find a way to have face time with their boss and don’t have a drink at happy hour. It may require getting a little creative, but you have more control over these social situations than you realize, and learning not to fear others’ reactions will help you to better align your intentions with your actions to support weight loss. It may help you positively change your company’s culture to support healthy behaviors, as I’ve seen with many clients. As these women moved into leadership positions, they swapped Zoom meetings for walking meetings or happy hours for coffee chats, creating a more supportive and healthy environment where younger employees don’t feel as pressured to participate in corporate drinking as they experienced earlier in their careers.
3. Boundaries—People-pleasers often struggle with boundaries. They take on too much, leaving no time to exercise or meal plan.Take on that big new project at work with no pay increase? Let’s do it!Volunteer to run your kid’s school bake sale? Sure!Coordinate your mommy friends’ paint night? OK!Plan your extended family’s trip to visit relatives in Ireland? No problem!People-pleasers take on and overcommit to so much that they have no time to exercise or meal plan, making staying focused on their weight loss journey harder. By learning to set boundaries and say no when necessary, people-pleasers can relieve some of this pressure and stress, making it easier to prioritize their health. This is where practicing saying “no” comes in handy. Like any new skill or habit, you have to put in the reps and practice to improve, so I encourage my clients to seek out small opportunities where it feels less intimidating to say “no” when asked to volunteer their time.
4. Seek External Validation—People pleasers seek external validation and approval. This need for external validation is often rooted in insecurities and a fragile sense of self-worth. People-pleasers may base their self-esteem on how others perceive them rather than their accomplishments and self-assessment. When they don’t get that external validation, they feel inadequate and even less motivated to stay committed to their weight loss goals. Developing a solid sense of self-worth that is independent of others’ options is crucial. People-pleasers can benefit significantly from self-reflection and self-compassion practices to build intrinsic self-esteem. While therapy is out of my scope of practice and could probably benefit people-pleasers greatly, there are ways you can support this on your own with weekly accountability check-ins that pose questions for you to reflect on your accomplishments and successes, supporting you to see the evidence of your achievements on your own and so you can rely less on feeling the need for external validation. That's why we've build in this practice into the The Corporate Mom Collective so members have the opportunity to self-reflect on their accomplishments.
5. Inconsistent Routines—People Pleasers may end up with very inconsistent routines because they always prioritize others’ schedules over their own. This makes it hard to see progress in losing weight when they can’t regularly work out or plan balanced meals. Being a member of a membership or community where you can see others consistently show up for their workouts and meal planning and say NO to others’ requests for their time may be all it takes to see that it is possible! This, plus easy-to-follow workouts and accountability, can help you stay consistent and on track with your workouts.

Are you ready to say goodbye to your people pleasing behaviors and say hello to a group of high-achieving, successful women who are getting comfortable saying “no” to others and “yes” to themselves?

Then it’s time to check out The Corporate Mom Collective – Your home for fitness and health!