The conversation around weight management often revolves around: calories, macros, competing diets, and exercise. But for many, there is also a constant background static. It’s a mental fog that makes simple decisions feel frustrating and needlessly difficult. 

Depression is a clinical condition that impacts your brain chemistry, your energy, and especially your mindset. It is not simply feeling sad. And it can impact how successful you are with not only losing weight, but also keeping it off. 

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If you have ever tried to look through a blurry lens, you know how frustrating that is. Think about when you take a photo with a dirty lens on your phone’s camera, and the difference it makes to wipe the lens clean. In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), we look at how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours interact with and influence one another. 

Depression acts like a cloudy lens. It distorts how you see yourself and the problems in front of you. If the lens is cloudy, then a small mishap or a single missed workout, is not just that. We don’t take it for what it is, nor encourage ourselves to move forward and take other positive actions. We extrapolate that lapse into a personal failure, triggering a downward spiral of negative thinking and anxiety.

What’s all this got to do with weight management? Depression is impactful in two ways: 

  • Directly: It disrupts cortisol, sleep, appetite, and metabolism. 
  • Indirectly: It lowers executive function and motivation, and makes small actions feel impossible.

What can I do about it?

  • Mindset: Shifting how you view yourself helps you navigate obstacles, instead of feeling or being paralyzed by them. Also, this is not the only answer, and you are not alone. 
  • Psychotherapy (Counselling): Engaging with this type of care and support is a helpful way to reframe negative thinking or thoughts that tend to get in our way and not serve us positively. 
  • Pharmacotherapy (Medication): An excellent first-line treatment for depression, which helps greatly, and makes it easier to action and go deeper on points 1 and 2 above. 
  • Lifestyle Medicine: Prioritizing healthy stress management, high-quality restorative sleep, and setting small, achievable goals, are examples of approaches that build momentum, which then helps with both mood and weight. 

So if you are struggling to lose weight, but may not have addressed some of the thoughts and feelings linked to the behaviours related to sustainable weight management, consider shifting your focus. 

Though challenging, doing this work means that decisions such as choosing a nutritious meal or going for a walk feel easier and less overwhelming. 

Get the mind right first, and let the motivation and actions (and yes, even the results) follow. You are not lazy… you might just be looking through a cloudy lens. 

PS. If you need mental health support, please feel encouraged to connect with your professional healthcare provider. If you are in an acute mental health crisis, please contact 24/7 acute care services. 

The Bottom Line

Depression is a powerful driver of our health behaviours. Navigating the world with it is like looking through a cloudy lens. Self-care feels like a chore and self-sabotage feels like the only escape. By addressing mental health through mindset, therapy, medication, and/or lifestyle changes, you clear the lens and the view. Once your mindset shifts, physical results follow, and feel much easier to achieve.