Self-help 'makes you feel worse'

Yep. Which is how the IMHO crooks like Oprah and her diet/fitness experts operate.

It is a confidence game.

"Bridget Jones is not alone in turning to self-help mantras to boost her spirits, but a study warns they may have the opposite effect.

Canadian researchers found those with low self-esteem actually felt worse after repeating positive statements about themselves."

Which is why the Killer Queen of Daytime TV has to resort to excuses about her thyroid (which is almost certainly untrue) or her depression to lie her way out of why she is such a big, fat cow despite all the trappings that come with extreme wealth.

"A UK psychologist said people based their feelings about themselves on real evidence from their lives."

When all is said and done, after wasting hour after hour listening to the Cow and others of her species, e.g., The View, fans are still fat, unhappy, depressed suckers.

The same is true for the IMHO criminally dishonest "love yourself no matter what" advocates.

It does not and will not work.

"The researchers, from the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick, asked people with high and low self-esteem to say 'I am a lovable person.'

They then measured the participants' moods and their feelings about themselves.

In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not.

However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly.

The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves.

They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.

Writing in the journal, the researchers suggest that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as 'I accept myself completely,' can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem.

Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts.

If people are instructed to focus exclusively on positive thoughts, negative thoughts might be especially discouraging."

The inconvenient truth is that the truth will win in the short run and people trying to fool themselves will quickly lose (not the weight) - over and over again.

If you need more data to move you to reality, just surf any of the fat person websites and see how many of them longed to be thinner and fitter and "healthier," trying for years only to remain failures. Then and only then did they come to the false epiphany of "self-love" is what will cure them.

And now they struggle to love their fat, unfit and sick selves.

This self-love tripe is the type of crap IMHO TV/media fitness/weight loss/self-help charlatans like Dr. Phil, Jorge Cruise, David Katz, Mehmet Oz, Michael Roizen, Bob Greene, Kelly Brownell and their ilk foist on a all too eager to believe public.

Ditto for the politicians, at all levels, where the ranks are engorged with people who plainly and simply are rank.

"The researchers, led by psychologist Joanne Wood, said: 'Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as individuals with high self-esteem, but backfire for the very people who need them the most.'"

Right.

I covered this years ago in the very first version of Why Diets Fail.

So, again, you are left with a choice:

Do you follow sh*t or do you follow what works?

Try to make the right choice.

Your life and the value of your life depend on it.