I have been on the forum for a minute or two, and in that time I have seen many, many posts about self-confidence and self esteem in regard to
weight loss. Almost every post has been that with
weight loss comes greater confidence. I’m not trying, by any means, to say that’s untrue, but I thought the whole self esteem question deserved some further thought.
I haven’t lost a lot of weight yet, but I don’t feel like I lack self-esteem or self-confidence for the most part. So when I lose 30
pounds I’ll be overconfident and start displaying signs of hubris (and, therefore, my own downfall)? What if I lose weight and feel the self esteem increase, then get sick or something and gain weight back. Will it decrease? Is high self-esteem necessary for
weight loss or a mere result of it? What’s the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence, anyway?
So this is what I found (the definition of self confidence came from Princeton and everything else came from Wikipedia
Self-esteem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
Self-confidence is “assurance, freedom from doubt, belief in yourself and your abilities.” Since these things can be easily shaken, I’m going to assume that self-confidence is more how you feel right now in regard to yourself (as opposed to overall).
Self-esteem is harder to define. I know because there are three trillion different definitions in the article. To start, self esteem “is the overall self appraisal of someone’s own worth. It encompasses beliefs and emotions and can show itself through behavior.”
“Psychologists usually regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic (trait self-esteem), though normal, short-term variations (state self-esteem) occur.”
So it refers to long term or short term depending on what you’re thinking when you use the term. The other neat thing I found was this:
“According to the "Contingencies of Self-Worth model" (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001) people differ in their bases of self-esteem. Their beliefs — beliefs about what they think they need to do or who they need to "be" in order to class as a person of worth — form these bases. Crocker and her colleagues (2001) identified six "domains" in which people frequently derive their self-worth, including:
1. virtue
2. support of family
3. academic competence
4. physical attractiveness
5. gaining others' approval
Individuals who base their self-worth in a specific domain (such as, for example, academic success) leave themselves much more vulnerable to having their self-esteem threatened when negative events happen to them within that domain (such as when they fail a test at school). A 2003 study by Crocker found that students who based their contingency of self-worth on academic criteria had a greater likelihood of experiencing lower-state self-esteem, greater negative affect, and negative self-evaluative thoughts when they did not perform well on academic tasks, when they received poor grades, or when graduate schools rejected them (Crocker, Karpinski, Quinn, & Chase, 2003; Crocker, Sommers, & Luhtanen, 2002).
While it doesn’t answer all the questions I have regarding self-esteem’s relationship with
weight loss, #4 sure does look like it says physical attractiveness, but it’s only one of 6 common places where people get their esteem. While I may be more confident on a typical day and have more self esteem overall when I lose weight, I’ll still have several other areas to work on and/or be proud of myself about when it’s gone.
Moral: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Self-Esteem 
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