Here you are, faced with going through the weight-loss process. It’s not your first time. It’s not your fourth or fifth times. It’s too many times to count, and this is just one of those times. Well, to put it mildly, you’re not only faced with losing some weight again, you’re faced with the danger of repeating the weight-loss failure you’ve suffered so many times before.
What to do? First of all, you can’t simply disregard all those other times. So most likely you will try to prevent the diet problem or the weight-loss difficulties from recurring. You’ll put on your prevention cap, which means you will work to avoid the same negative outcome. You will most likely put your emotional safety and your sense of self-esteem first. Failure does that. It makes you avoid the potential emotional disaster rather than advance with confidence.
Taking such self-protective precautions means you will have in mind what you did wrong in past weight-loss tries, and you will select weight-loss steps that avoid the same pitfalls. This may sound altogether reasonable. But it can be constricting. By being too failure-conscious, and being so determined to avoid weight-loss failure again, you close off the possibility of developing confidence through the use of new and better weight-loss strategies.