The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Lose Weight

When it comes to losing weight, it’s been estimated that as high as 95% of all diets fail and that even for those who do lose weight on them, it is often gained back within a year.  Clearly for those wanting to lose weight the odds are stacked against you.  It’s no secret that losing weight is hard work, if it were easy and required little effort and commitment, we would all have our dream bodies! But the truth is that like anything worthwhile in life, to lose weight you are going to have to put in hard work, effort, and make sacrifices to reach your goals.  So what is the most important thing you can do to lose weight and avoid failure? You must shift your perspective from the “diet” mentality to having a mindset of being on a lifelong health journey.  Diets are built for failure. They involve strict rules, restrict certain foods, place limitations on calories, etc.  An ideal standard is created for eating and as a result, an “all or nothing” mindset is maintained by those following the diet. So when we mess up and eat a “forbidden” food or go on a binge at a celebration we often give up and quit the diet at that point. The diet mentality is founded on perfection and guess what my friends? None of us are perfect!  There’s going to be parties, holidays, bad days, and stress and those delicious foods are going to be there waiting for us!  If we buy into the diet lie of needing to be perfect all the time, we will never get far.

I’ve shared with readers numerous times that prior to shifting my perspective from the “diet mentality” to the “journey mentality” that I had tried just about every awful diet out there.  I would begin a diet all fired up, make a hundred changes to my diet at one time and follow whatever crazy strict rules were required of me.  I would lose weight, feel better and continue following the prescribed rules….but then life would happen and I would mess up and “cheat” on the diet which would then lead to feelings of guilt, shame, regret, and unworthiness.  These emotions would then create a downward spiral of quitting the diet, eating like a pig again, regaining whatever weight I had lost and ultimately being heavier than when I initially began the diet. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “yo-yo dieter”, I could have been the textbook example of one.  I was an all-star failure of diets for over 10 years of my life! Let me save you some heartache my friend, the sooner you breakdown the walls of perfection that diets require of you and shift to the perspective of being on a lifelong journey to health, the sooner you will be on your way to reaching your goals.  Let’s be honest- you will have bad days, hell, you may have bad months and you are going to mess up but you must develop self-grace and be able to forgive yourself when you mess up and then continue on your journey.  Forgiving yourself is necessary to prevent those lies of guilt, shame, and unworthiness from taking root in your life and enslaving you.  You can’t allow mess ups result in you giving up completely. It’s not about perfection my friends, it’s about persistence! You must continue on your journey and persist despite whatever oppositions you may face or how hard you may fall. When you fall, get right back up again and press on.  Be relentless in your pursuit and remove the option of quitting off the table completely! It’s impossible to fail if failure is not an option! In the end, perfection doesn’t matter, the times you fell will not be counted but what will matter is that you persevered through all of the obstacles and reached your goals!  If you are ready to receive new results, it’s time to break free from the old mindsets that have been imprisoning you to the vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting and step out with the new mindset that will lead you to success!