To keep on going with our No Excuses Week at Fearless Fat Loss, how about looking at another very common excuse, an excuse that can stymie you if you don’t take action to move forward.

However as we’ll see, there’s a wonderful way of looking at this excuse so that you can move beyond it.

Today’s excuse goes something like this:

I don’t see the point of trying to change my eating and exercise habits, I’ve tried my whole life and failed. Yeah, I’ve lost some weight here and there but I gained it all back, why should I try again when I know I’ll just fail?

The fear of failure can be a big ‘ole block in the way of your weight loss success, especially if you’re not even aware that you are afraid of failing! But when you examine your thought processes and find a lot of “what’s the use, I’ve tried before and it didn’t work”, or “I’d rather give up before I start, at least that way I won’t be disappointed”, then I’d say it’s likely that you’re tossing some fears of failure around.

What Is Failure?

So let’s look at this another way now – what does it mean to fail? I don’t know what your definition of failure is but here’s mine:

Failure is giving up or never even trying in the first place.

That’s right, in my mind you’re only a “failure” if you give up on yourself and stop trying. And here’s something else that I learned in my 12 weeks of emotional eating work with Shrink Yourself – as long as you learn something you haven’t failed!

So maybe you’ve tried dieting in the past and learned that it doesn’t work (true!). Ok, so you learned something from that and now what about instead of dieting you start making small lifestyle changes? For example, let’s say you start with cutting out all sodas and replace them with water for one week. After you have that change under your belt you move on to removing the excess sodium from your diet.

However even when you make these small lifestyle changes you may have bumps along the way but does this mean you’ve failed? Not if you’ve learned something. You can always seek out more information and continue to make adjustments and as long as you learn and you keep on trying you’re a success in my book. 😉

You May Have More to Learn

Sometimes it’s not as easy as just changing your diet to lose weight because if you don’t have your mind, emotions, and inner spirit on board when you make the dietary change, you just might need to do some more inner work to discover what’s driving you to sabotage yourself and go back to old habits. However, as long as you continue to learn, grow, and make adjustments, no one can call you a failure, even if you don’t drop a single pound (hey, eventually you will and once you get the inner stuff worked out you’ll be able to keep that weight off for good).

For myself, I love to learn new things each day, not only regarding weight loss and fitness but about all sorts of different topics. If I can learn something new each day then I call that a good day. It’s really helpful too, to take that love of learning and apply it to the journey of healing food, overeating, and weight issues. I didn’t used to look at it as a learning process so much but I like that perspective that Shrink Yourself taught me – after all, it guarantees that you won’t fail as long as you learn something in the process!

Failure Isn’t Possible

So you see, it’s not possible to fail at weight loss as long as you maintain an open mind and are willing to learn from both your successes and your mishaps, and doesn’t that feel good? This little shift in your thoughts could end up saving you more time and effort than any physical action you could take because it feels good to know that you cannot fail. This gets into a different topic (the law of attraction) but I want to point that out, the good feeling of this perspective – it’s more vital to your success than you might think. 😉

To sum up, just don’t ever give up on yourself and you are bound to reach your weight loss and fitness goals as long as you continue to take action, learn, and readjust. And remember – you’re really can’t fail as long as you learn so you cannot use the fear of failure as an excuse anymore, isn’t that the best? 🙂