What does it take to be mentally tough enough to stick to your diet?
Here are some of the personal attributes that have been discovered through psychological research.
A mentally tough person has a strong sense of self-belief, is not stopped by adversity, perceives herself as being in charge of her own destiny, and sees herself as influencing rather than being influenced. She looks forward to the opportunities provided by challenges rather than seeing these challenges as potential for self-defeat. In fact, she involves herself fully in the challenge, and has faith that she will prevail and be successful.
As you can see, this is the antithesis of low self-confidence and low self-esteem.
So, how do you go from having low self-esteem to having mental toughness and confidence?
Well, what if your self-esteem and confidence have been damaged by repeated dieting failures. It’s clear not only from research, but also from personal experience that failure to achieve self-relevant goals decreases self-esteem. Even little failures like not achieving your weekly weight loss goal can, if it happens repeatedly, take its toll on the very personal strengths you need to stay the course—the ones described above.
The first order of business to jump-start you down that road toward mental toughness is to find ways to protect and restore your self-esteem and self-confidence. There are various strategies you can use. You can learn to attribute failure to external causes rather than to yourself. For example, you can think of your dieting difficulties as the result of too busy a schedule and not due to something permanently wrong with you. You can compare your failure with another time when you failed worse, and think; at least this time was better. You can also compare yourself with others who you know have done worse than you have. You can look to other areas of your life where you have been successful and think that you do indeed have the capacity to succeed.
These mental actions help to create mental toughness, which leads to better dieting skills and dieting success.
