Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

It’s for sure that diets fail. Just ask anyone. And, if you want to check this out more scientifically, there are plenty of statistics that support this claim.

Diets are the mainstay of those who try to lose weight. But actually, research on diets shows you can lose weight on any diet. All you have to do is stick with it—stay on the diet, that is.

And the trials and tribulations of sticking with it is a big part of why diets fail. Who can stick with it? Can you? Have you? For how long? Will you stick with it next time? Who knows?

Diets are definitely hard to stick to. There is so much that gets in the way of you sticking to them. You can probably list 10 or more obstacles that can prevent you from staying the course, start to goal weight.

As you can see, what makes a diet work and not fail is you, plain and simple. It is you trying to stick to it who has to make all the personal changes that will make your diet succeed. In fact, these personal changes, like changing your eating habits, being better able to gratify yourself in other ways than with food, and not lifting your mood by binges, are the real movers and shakers when it comes to sticking to a diet. The diet is merely a food plan and as such it has little to do with losing weight other than giving you a guide to adhere to.

So if you lean on your diet too heavily to do your work for you, guess what? This is why diets fail.

by Maria's Last Diet

Unfortunately, many women have complicated dieting histories and their failures outnumber their successes. With this kind of negative experience to call upon, no wonder it is difficult to achieve permanent weight loss. The memory of a failure tends to stay with you and make it difficult to see how you can avoid failing again.  

A diet is all about making progress, having sufficient forward movement to give you encouragement and the satisfaction of knowing you can do it. To achieve good progress, a dieter relies on certain important personal experiences. One of these is to have as much success as possible. Being successful on a diet gives the dieter a truly robust sense of forward movement.  Sticking to the diet, not feeling hungry and deprived, making new lifestyle changes, being able to feed the children and not go off your own diet, bring with it feelings of mastery, a stronger sense of personal capability, increased self-confidence, and more hope of reaching the goal.

Therefore, in order to have dieting success, a dieter’s chief concern should always be “how do I keep making progress”. All too often dieters keep their eyes on the weight loss prize without identifying the important steps they need to take along the way. One good way to avoid this diet trap is to size up the path to the goal and identify the important sub-goals. It is the lack of success with these sub-goals that usually derails the dieter. Success with sub-goals, on the other hand, is usually a sure sign of progress. The dieter gets to close the distance to the larger goal, and does it in a sure-footed way. The experience of successes and the experience of having good skills can wipe away feelings of past failure.  

by Maria's Last Diet

Where weight loss is concerned there is “what is” and “what might have been.” When the consequences are worse for what you did rather than what you didn’t do, you regret what you did. The same holds true when the consequences are worse for what you didn’t do. You regret that you didn’t do it.

There will be times when you’re going to blame yourself for not doing something you think you should have done and times that you’re going to blame yourself for doing something you think you shouldn’t have done. “I should have known better than to skip breakfast.” Or, “I shouldn’t have had seconds on Saturday, even though I was off my diet for Saturday dinner.”  

During the weight loss process you will be riding around in these rough waters a lot. Somehow you will have to negotiate your way through such experiences so you are not diverted from your weight loss course by constant regret, criticism, and condemnation. 

by Maria's Last Diet

The weight loss process is not without its ups and downs, as you might well know. One of the downs occurs quite frequently when you fail. Failing to live up to your promises. Failing to live up to your expectations. There is even failing to do what you are supposed to do. If you have your mind set on losing unwanted weight, you will have to deal effectively with failure.

Can you say to yourself that you still believe you can do what it takes to lose weight after you fail? If so, and if you are sincere about believing in yourself still, then you are way ahead of the curve.

by Maria's Last Diet

When you are trying so very hard to lose your unwanted weight, do you think it’s all or nothing, either you did wonderfully well or you did horribly?

If you messed up and didn’t stay on your diet yesterday, do you think you won’t be able to stick to the diet ever again?

What happens when you fail to live up to your dieting expectations, do you become hurtfully self-critical and undermine your self-esteem?

If these are the paths your weight loss thinking is taking you down, you will easily feel like a weight loss failure.

by Maria's Last Diet

The process of weight loss if it is nothing else is a series of failures. Small failures. Big failures. Failure to reach your end goal. Failure to reach some of your daily goals. Weight loss failures call for you to be resilient enough to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go on.

So remember, when you fail and regret what you did or did not do or should have done, don’t leave it at that. Regret, especially in the form of, “if only I did…” or “if only I didn’t do…”, can be immensely useful for turning failure into success. Thinking of what might have been or what could have happened means you are not letting your failure throw you entirely. Instead, you are contrasting the actual outcome with an alternative outcome, which presents an opportunity for you to manipulate the outcome in your mind so you can come up with a new and better approach. 

Another way to bounce back from a weight loss failure large or small is to think, “it could have been worse.” Perceiving your failure like this has a number of benefits. You will probably feel less blameworthy, have fewer negative feelings about yourself and your failure, perceive other people as being more understanding toward you, and be empowered to make better decisions about what to do differently.

Despite the fact that weight loss failure is so prevalent, you can think your way through the various failure experiences so successful weight loss can be yours after all.    

by Maria's Last Diet

Big failures are often preceded by small failures. If you can recognize your small failures, you might be able to head off the big failure. Often your small failures are part of a chain of events that cause the bigger failure. In this case, recognizing the small failure can be instrumental in stopping the chain of events right then and there.

Do you recognize your small failures so they don’t become big ones? If you don’t, you might have to up the value of small failures so they become worth your time and effort to detect.

Letting things like falling for temptations, not having sufficient diet food on hand, and emotional slights and hurts pile up are examples of what it means to turn a blind eye to your small failures. So be careful. Don’t explain away your small failures, deny or minimize their importance, or even suppress your awareness of them. Magnify your small failures if you can, so you will see them, recognize them for what they are, and then try to prevent these small failures from growing into the big failure you don’t want to happen.