One of the most common causes of dieting success or diet failure is the thoughts of the person trying to lose weight. Our own thoughts are often behind our binges, the reason we give up on a workout or even the reason we stop keeping up the strategy altogether.
For this reason, even before we start our diets, our thoughts play a critical role with regards to whether or not we will be successful.
Many of the mistakes we make all the way along the dieting process actually have roots before we started in the first place.
Consider some of the mistakes you can make before you start dieting which can determine whether or not you reach your goals:
• Seeing things in black and white – This is among the most common dieting mistakes. It involves mindsets or rules that involve “good or bad,” “allowed or disallowed,” “I’m all in or not at all,” and so on. This is a common belief among people who see themselves on a diet specifically to lose the weight and not necessarily to keep it off. The goal of these dieters is to drop the pounds – a temporary goal. It is this type of thinking that leads people to feel that if they make one mistake or they don’t lose as much as they’d hoped, then it’s all finished.
• Creating trends that don’t exist – This is a mindset that involves a single negative event but that is interpreted as a trend or the way things are. It occurs when you don’t lose weight one week and you declare that you’ll never lose weight. Or when you binge on junk food one night and you decide you’ll never be able to stick to your diet. It has to do with something that happens once but that you interpret as something defining.
• Selective listening – This mindset occurs when you receive a dozen compliments, but then one person says you look sick or tired or grumpy and that’s all you can remember at the end of the day. Instead of paying attention to the huge amount of praise you’ve received about your progress, you focus on that one person who thought you had bags under your eyes at the end of a long day. This can cause havoc to your confidence and motivation.
Start to pay attention to your thought patterns. Become aware of your style of thinking. When you find that you’re the one harming your diet, make some positive changes. Make this decision even before you start dieting. That way, as your own mental mistakes happen, you’ll be on top of them.
