Yikes. Failure.
I don’t even like to think about the word sometimes. Especially when it comes to weight loss. What kills a diet more quickly than a single slip?
If you want to commit to losing weight, then you need to be able to persist through failure. Everyone who has accomplished something of note has struggled with failure at one or more points in their ascent. The difference is they persisted through it and learned a lesson.
Those is the two keys in dealing with failure. You must persist and learn.
If you slip on your diet, or miss a day of exercise, don’t fret about it. Don’t let it derail you. Push it from your mind. Focus on all your positive days, not the one slip up. Picture yourself at your goal weight, not in the act of devouring that donut you shouldn’t have. Treat it as a cheat day and move on. This is how you persist, failing for a day is OK, just don’t let that day stretch into a week and then a month.
You have to accept failures as natural and develop a tougher skin to deal with them.
The second step is to learn from your mistakes. Quite often learning from your mistakes will be more efficient than than learning from your successes. When you fail, treat it as a lesson learned. it is just like in business, when you fail at something, you learn the things that don’t work. This is the same with weight loss. If you have slipped off your new diet every time you drink, then maybe you avoid drinking. If you realize that every Friday you miss out on exercise because of a late work meeting then reschedule your workout.
Failure is natural part of life, along with death and taxes. You can’t avoid it, and even if you could you wouldn’t want to. Your life’s lessons are learned through your failures along with your successes. Don’t fear failure, persist through and learn from it.