Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

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.

by Maria's Last Diet

How are you doing when it comes to starting a diet? How are you doing with sticking to a diet? How is your weight-loss progress? Have you changed your eating behavior? Do you have more eating control? Did you stop emotional eating? How well have you been weight monitoring? If you’ve lost weight, how well have you kept it off?

These are all examples of self-appraisals? When you are working away at losing unwanted weight, you make so many self-appraisals that you probably can’t keep track of them. You won’t be surprised to hear, though, that the way you go about appraising your performance makes a huge difference in how you perform—in this case, the performance we’re talking about is reducing your weight or maintaining lost weight.

You can, of course, give yourself positive appraisals. They’re the best. But even positive appraisals are only as good as the reality that you base them on.

Then there are negative appraisals. Sometimes they are warranted. They are just what the doctor ordered. There’s something wrong and it needs your attention.

There’s when to appraise. Shorter times between appraisals are better. They give you more opportunities to look, see, and then take some remedial action. Interventions that you make between appraisals can themselves be appraised.

So it’s not like it’s your dreaded yearly appraisal at work, where you meet with your manager or your boss and don’t know what she or he thinks of your productivity over the course of a whole year. No quaking in your boots. You don’t have to have a million excuses at the ready. Your job is not in jeopardy. You don’t have to worry about not getting that raise.

After all, it’s you this time that is doing the appraising. You are doing it frequently enough to prevent less than satisfactory performance. You are intervening if necessary after an appraisal to tune up your productivity—weight-loss-wise, that is.

Self-appraisal and your weight-loss process should be joined at the hip if the outcome you’re looking for is successful weight loss.