How To Think About Past Diets

When most people think about past diets, they often feel shame and disappointment that they didn’t work.  Popular diet plans show you other people who have had amazing success on the plans, but if you are reading this, your past diet plans probably didn’t work.  This leads us to have thoughts of shame, feeling that we aren’t good enough, and being scared try something new.

Are You Stuck In the Past?

If you have the goal to lose weight, but you aren’t taking action, it may be that you are stuck on your past diets.  Our brains use the past as evidence for what the future might bring, but the truth is that no one knows what the future holds.  A previous diet not working does not mean you are not capable of losing weight, its just the only thing your brain knows how to look at.  The problem is that this thinking will only hold you back from taking action.

How To Change Your Mindset

How do you move from this mindset to one of being excited to take action?  First stop beating yourself up for past diet failures.  Look at each past diet as an experience from which to learn from.  Write down your past diet plans that you have tried, all of them that you can remember.  Now list everything you learned from them.  You have learned something about yourself from each previous diet, which you can use as a tool to help you moving forward.

Many clients tell me they did not like Weight Watchers because they had to count points, or other diets where they had to count all of their calories.  If this was the case for you, then you have learned you need a diet where you don’t count calories.  If you had a diet plan where meals were included, but then you panicked when you had to eat out or go on vacation, then you have learned that you need a diet plan that does not include prepackaged food and teaches you how to handle eating out.

Beware of Hindsight Bias

Watch for Hindsight bias when you are thinking about past diet plans.  Your brain will naturally remember the part of the past diet that did work.  Most diets will work for a period of time, so you will often remember that you were losing weight while you were restricted to 1200 calories per day, when you correctly counted all of your points, or when you drank all of your shakes and ate nothing else.  My clients will talk about these past diets and say “they worked”.  What I would offer to you is that they did not work, or you would have already lost the weight and  you would not be reading this article.

Look at each diet and try to determine why you quit each one.  What happened that made you stop following it?  The tendency here is to blame yourself.  Do NOT go into blame mode, or beat yourself up about past failures.  Write them down without judgement.  They all taught you something important, so learn from them.  Write down at least three things you learned about yourself from each, including why you eventually stopped following the diet.  Was there any part of it that was good and was working for you?

Ready To Take Action?

Using past diets as a learning tool gives you the mindset so that you can start to take action.  Now that you know what didn’t work for you in the past, you can look for something new that avoids past failures.  The important thing is to keep trying and working towards your goal.