How many diets have you “failed” on?

If you’re like most of us, more than one. Perhaps many more than one.

But, it’s not whether you fail or how many times you fail that counts.

It’s how you handle failure that matters in the long run.

the same currency

Failure and success are two sides of the same coin.

Think about almost everything in life. You hardly ever have success without failure.

You learned to walk by falling hundreds, if not thousands of times. But you never felt like a failure and you were never labeled a failure.

Mom and Dad kept cheering you on and you kept getting up and trying repeatedly until you got it right.

You learned to read by messing up your alphabet enough times to finally get it right. Messing up the writing of the lyrics until you got them right. Misspelling and misreading the words until you got them right. Errors were plentiful. But you were never a failure, you were just learning.

Same with riding a bike, driving a car, playing a sport, dating, for God’s sake. Choose a career or a partner, perhaps.

Life is a process of trial and error where failure and success are two sides of the same coin.

What’s different about dieting?

In some ways dieting is the same thing and in some ways it’s different from most other things.

It is the same because failure and success must go hand in hand, 2 sides of the same coin.

It’s different because, let’s face it, you don’t want to diet in the first place. And you probably have negative thoughts and feelings about the diet.

Everyone wants to walk, read, drive a car and have a great career and a great partner. Nobody wants to diet.

The connotations of “dieting” are negative.

And so when you fail or deviate from your diet, since you enter the diet with negative thoughts and feelings in the first place – consciously or subconsciously – you tend to blow those failures out of proportion by looking for an excuse – consciously or subconsciously – to quit.

And when you go off the diet, you inevitably see yourself as a failure, get discouraged, and take a hit to your ego, self-confidence, and self-esteem.

After a while, the pain of that failure wears off.

That’s when you’re ready to try the next popular diet that comes along. Recent statistics indicate that dieters “try” an average of 4 new diets per year.

This is where the big difference of dieting lies. This is the problem.

You don’t learn to diet better from your past mistakes. You will approach and follow your next diet exactly the same way you did your last failed diet. And the one before that and the one before that.

Sure, you change your diet. Switch from low fat to high protein to low carb to heart healthy and so on.

But you don’t change the way you diet.

It is an interesting phenomenon. You learned to walk by falling many times and each time you fell you learned something from the fall and were a little better at walking the next time.

But as many times as you fall on the diet and get up and try again, you don’t get better the next time. Or the next.

Although every failure in life provides valuable information for our minds and bodies to learn to make changes and give us tougher mental skills for the next try, it doesn’t seem to work on diet.

Why failure doesn’t work on the diet

There are several reasons why diet failure doesn’t work to help you learn how to diet better next time.

1. You would never stop learning to walk, read, drive a car, etc. You would never willingly “stop” trying those things, so you never gave yourself the chance to be a “failure” at them. You never took a hit to your ego, self-esteem, and self-confidence from them. He was absolutely determined to do well, failing or giving up was never an option, so he had to learn from his mistakes.
2. You see those other life events as ends. Dieting is never an end…it’s the means to an end…so it’s completely different. You allow yourself to give up “this” diet knowing there will always be another one around the corner. The bottom line is…well…whatever it is for you: looking and feeling slim and sexy; get the job you’ve been longing for; regain your pride and self-confidence; wear a bathing suit or swimsuit without shame; play with your children without running out of breath; impress your friends at your high school reunion; long-term health… whatever. Also, if you give up or fail on the diet, you can (and do) always blame the diet. “Oh, that diet doesn’t work or it didn’t work for me.” But you can’t blame the car if you keep failing your driving test.
3. You have never learned how to diet properly, using all the natural strengths you have that can help you diet successfully. They were encouraged and taught to walk and read and all the other things we have mentioned. But no one has ever taught you your personal Dieting Compatibility Style™, so you end up taking on a difficult task (dieting) without the knowledge, skill, and support to get it right.

putting it all together

Failure is a teacher. He is just a teacher.

In most areas of life, you can use each failure as a learning step in the process of achieving your goals. Failure teaches you and hardens you.

But since dieting is never your goal or end goal, it’s just the means to the end, you’re never really deeply motivated to diet.

You probably confuse dieting with your real goal, that sexy body, for example, but on some level you know it’s not.

Therefore, it is easier to give up the diet than other things in life, and yet when you give up another diet, you still suffer and feel the pain of failure without getting the valuable learning experience from it.

You’re left blaming yourself for another diet flop while still yearning for your sexy body and no better prepared for the next diet than the last.

There are science-based ways to do the right diet, no matter which diet you choose, using your natural strengths and approaching your diet by emphasizing those strengths and modifying your approach to your diet to use those strengths to your advantage.

A first step is to find out what your personal Dieting Compatibility Style(tm) is and how to use it.

Although you think dieting should be intuitive and all the ads have you believe it’s going to be easy this time, your experience and the experience of the roughly 75 million American adults who are dieting right now and going to fail He proves it over and over again. again that is neither intuitive nor easy.

Dieting effectively is a skill that you need to learn and apply to be successful at it. It is not a difficult skill to learn. But successful dieting without the ability to diet is virtually impossible, as most of us have proven time and time again.

Success and failure are 2 sides of the same coin.

It’s time to put dieting in proper perspective, learn from past mistakes, and use the knowledge to make your next diet your last diet.

It can be as easy as walking or driving your car if you do it right.

Copyright 2011 – Dexter Godbey – All Rights Reserved