5 Best Ways to Avoid Failure with Eating Habits & Weight Loss

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Related Episodes:

• Why Weight Loss Feels Hard
• Thought Habits and Your Results
• Why Willpower Fails

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Full Episode Transcript:

5 Best Ways to Avoid Failure

Hey there, my lovely, welcome to the podcast. Let’s talk about the five best ways to avoid failure.

Whether that be failure with getting control of your eating habits or losing weight. And what I mean by failure is either not making any progress at all. Or, making some progress, but then giving up. Also, making some progress, then losing that progress, and everything between.

No one likes failure, so that’s why I wanted to bring this podcast episode to you. It’ll help you to avoid the thing that doesn’t feel good at all. And I want to mention that true failure is giving up. Because you don’t fail until you stop doing. Until you stop working toward your goal.

Even if you feel like you’re failing due to lack of progress, you’re still in the game so to speak. You can still succeed.

But, if you give up completely, then there’s no chance of succeeding right? You’re causing yourself to fail.

So that’s my definition of true failure, but I know that your definition might be different. Your definition of failure might be not making enough progress, or making some progress, then losing that progress. Or, it might be feeling like you haven’t made any progress.

Before I jump in, speaking of feeling like you are failing, I am doing a workshop on How to Manage Food Cravings. That includes food in general, or a specific type of food or even ingredient like sugar.

The workshop is free and it’s virtual via Zoom. It’s on Wednesday, March 29th at 12pm (noon) Eastern Time, so NY time. So that would be 11am Central Time, 10am Mountain Time, and 9am Pacific Time. If you’re listening in from another country, I don’t know all the other time zones, so I apologize.

Why you’re going to want to sign up for this workshop is because if you have cravings, I know you’re trying to fight them without success. I can guarantee it.

I will be teaching you a tiny bit of the science behind cravings, so you can understand your cravings. I will also be teaching you what to stop doing. Hint: Fighting them. I’m going to tell you why fighting cravings isn’t working. I’ll also teach you how to manage them instead, so you can finally have some freedom from them.

If you can’t make the live workshop, sign up anyway. If you’re on the list, I’ll send you the replay the day after. That way, you don’t have to miss out and can learn how to manage your cravings too.

Alright so, these five best ways to avoid failure are in no order, but #5 helps with all four of these.

And might I add that these are the five best ways that I thought would be easy to explain in a podcast episode. However, there are additional things that will help you to avoid failure. Lots of them. I’m only going to discuss the top five though, because these five will be the most useful to you. They’re also easy to understand.

Well, number 4 is a little more of a concept than the others. So, listen closely on that one if you’re not doing something like driving.

The first one that I want to talk about as far as one of the five best ways to avoid failure, is to find and address your triggers. What I mean by trigger is what is triggering you to do a particular action or not do a particular action.

So, what is triggering you to dig into the potato chip bag when you get home from work? What is triggering you to choose the hamburger over the salad? What is triggering you to eat more than you needed to at dinner?

Finding your trigger is very important, because if you want to break any sort of bad eating habit, you can’t keep letting the trigger, trigger you. Or, you must learn the skills to be triggered by the trigger, but not let it cause the behavior. Said differently, you have to learn the skills to encounter a trigger, but not act upon it.

You might have an idea of what one or two of your triggers are. You’ll have the most success with changing your eating habits or losing weight, by knowing all your triggers. Then, addressing all them period of course, you don’t have to address all them at once.

That can be too much. But managing each of them over time, will work wonders with helping you to be more intentional and future focused with your actions. And not act instinctually or habitually. Managing those triggers will help you gain control. It’ll help you not feel like you’re using a lot of brainpower to control your eating behaviors.

Alright, another best way to avoid failure with changing your eating habits or losing weight, is to make small changes. You might feel like you’re not making a lot of progress with weight loss. Or you might be losing weight and then gaining it back because you’re making too large of changes.

Too large of changes with foods and amounts. That is so difficult for your brain. Your brain likes subtle changes.

Making drastic changes, you might find that you do well with your eating habits for the first couple of weeks. You will find that it’s too much and you end up giving up. That’s that true failure I talked about.

And that doesn’t mean anything about you. That’s because our brains were not wired to like change. Our brains don’t want drastic change. Our brains were wired to resist drastic change.

To our human brains, a big change means instability. So, if you find something hard to maintain, it’s because it’s too big of a change period go smaller. With eating habits and weight loss, it’s not go big or go home, unless we’re talking about dream goals. It’s go small or go home.

Okay so the next of the five best ways to avoid failure with eating habits or weight loss, is to be as consistent as possible. And as frequent as possible.

Consistency and frequency are huge when it comes to habits. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you’re going to have to build the habits that assist with that. That’s more than what you’re eating might I add. It’s also more than exercise, and even hydration and sleep habits.

There are other habits involved that assist with weight loss. They also assist with any eating habit change, even getting control of emotional eating.

There are thought habits that need to form and thought habits that need to be broken. There are even habits when it comes to your feelings and emotions. It is all linked together.

These are huge when it comes to creating the results that you want. That’s what I help you with. That leads me to the 4th best way to avoid failure when it comes to weight loss or changing your eating habits.

Again, though these are not in order as far as ranking of importance. I put them in this order because This made the most sense to me as far as flow.

So, this next best way to avoid failure is using your own thoughts to your advantage. What do I mean by this? This is something that you can do a little bit of by yourself that will make a massive difference in your results. A lot of this is done by working with me, a coach.

That’s because a coach doesn’t just coach you on the actions and the skills, but also on your thoughts. This is why I love coaching so much. Your thoughts are powerful.

Coaches help people with their thoughts. We help people create results that they want by using their thoughts to help them. We help people avoid creating results that they don’t want.

We do this by helping them use their thoughts to avoid those undesired results. An example of an undesired result would be if you’re trying to lose weight, but instead you gain 10 lbs.

So, you’re probably asking, how does this work?

When it comes to eating habits and weight loss, what do you think gets in your way of doing the actions you need to do to create the results you want? Or what do you think can sometimes cause actions that will help you get the results you want with eating habits and weight loss?

Your feelings. Your feelings are also known as emotions. You might feel motivated or excited to go grocery shopping for some healthy foods. Then throw away all the “junk” foods in your kitchen at the beginning of your eating habit or weight loss journey. You might feel stressed and eat a few cookies to decrease that stress.

Those feelings or emotions you experience are sensations felt in your body. Now, what do you think causes your feelings? Your brain. More specifically, your thoughts.

Your emotions are physical sensations felt in your body because of your nerves. Your nerves get their signals from your brain. Specifically, your thoughts.

So, what kind of a thought might produce a feeling of motivation when you throw away the “junk” food in your kitchen? Something like, “I can’t wait to not have these tempting foods in the house, so I can finally lose weight.”

By the way, I don’t necessarily think that throwing away the junk food in your house is solving the problem. Sometimes, it is helpful not having it there.

It’s also easy for you to go to the grocery store and buy all the junk food again, right? It can help but isn’t a real solution. Kind of like a band-aid. Helpful, but not going to “treat” the underlying issue.

And that’s a perfect example of why working on your thoughts and feelings assists with your actions. A note, another word for actions that I use is behaviors. Behaviors also includes inaction and reaction. So not doing actions or doing actions as a reaction to something.

So part of using your thoughts and feelings to help you do the actions or inactions that will lead to the results you want, is awareness of your thoughts. Awareness also of the feeling that each thought causes in your body. Also, awareness of the actions, reactions, or inactions that that feeling produces.

You can then decide if you want to shift that thought. Shift it to one that creates a different feeling in your body. Leading to different actions, reactions, or inactions.

Many times you aren’t even aware of these thoughts and how they are affecting your results. This is why it’s so helpful to have another person, a coach, help you to identify and manage this.

So, think of it like this.

I of course must use a medical example because of my background in medicine. But think of this. You might be experiencing some symptoms and can identify what they are. This can make it easy for you to self-diagnose without a background in medicine.

You can then take an over the counter medication, prescribe yourself some rest. Use an ice pack if it’s something like a physical injury, eat some chicken noodle soup, or do any other home remedies. But there are also some things that you can’t diagnose yourself and you can’t treat yourself either.

That’s why it’s helpful to go to a doctor or a Physician Assistant. Let them ask questions, do an exam, any tests or labs, make a diagnosis and provide a treatment plan.

So same thing with your thoughts and feelings that are causing the actions and results that you have. Sometimes you’re aware of some of them and might even be able to work on them yourself, to get some results that you want.

Sometimes you need a coach who can help you with this. This leads me to last of the five best ways to avoid failure with eating habits and weight loss.

You guessed it, work with a coach. But seriously though, of course this is going to significantly decrease your risk of failure.

And I’m going to take it one step further and say work with a coach on a weekly basis. I ONLY work with my clients on a weekly basis. If you go longer than that like say every other week, what ends up happening is it’s very easy to slip back into old habits. Whether that be your thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.

Of course, things can come up like illness and whatnot, but we work around that to keep it as consistent as possible. It’s that important.

Consistently working on all these changes and meeting with a coach on a weekly basis is going to increase your chance of success exponentially.

It’s not even just the accountability, support, or encouragement. That’s a piece of it, but most of it is consistency with making progress with skills. Also, consistency with making those small changes I discussed earlier. Consistency with being consistent, right?

Plus, consistency with working on your thoughts. And making sure you’re feeling more of the feelings that are good fuel for the actions needed.

And, referring back to the other ways to avoid failure, remember how I mentioned finding ALL your triggers and addressing them? Well, having a coach helps with that, because there are usually some you’re not aware of.

If you are aware of your triggers, do you know how to “treat” them? No, probably not and why would you? You have a career that’s probably not in the world of eating habits or in the coaching industry, right?

Also, it can be very tempting to not stay on track with those small changes. Sometimes, you might feel like challenging yourself to making ALL the drastic changes. But, I will keep the reins on you so you don’t make that mistake.

Trust me, I get it. You’re driven and it’s easy to want to try to do it all, but in the case of habits, again, those small changes are better.

Of course you can get results doing your own thing. But if you want to decrease the risk of failure as much as humanly possible, then take into consideration these 5 best ways to avoid failure.

And remember, having someone to help with that and more, makes the journey to getting the results you dream of so much easier and more direct.

Less yo-yoing if you’ve heard that term before. Meaning, less going up and down with your efforts and results. Less of a roller coaster ride and more smooth sailing. Alright, I’ll stop with the cheesy analogies.

So, see which of these you’re doing well already and which you may need help with. Give yourself credit for what you’re already doing. Give yourself credit for awareness of where you need help.

I know its tough asking for help sometimes. I have struggled a lot with that my whole life but am much better now. And believe me, I don’t want to go back to trying to do it all on my own. Not worth it for the important things, like health and well-being.

Maybe the smaller things like painting a few rooms in your house, but not the things that really affect your future.

Alright, that’s what I have for you on how to avoid failure with weight loss and eating habits. I’ll talk with you next week.