Your Excuse: "I'm Afraid if I Start a Diet or Weight Loss Plan, I'll Fail"

The Excuse Buster: With almost every weight loss attempt, there is an underlying sense of "walking on eggshells". Have you ever felt like you must do everything exactly right or be doomed to failure? Have you ever worried that "this time" would end up being like all the rest of the times you've tried to lose weight and couldn't stick to it?

This line of thought stems from fear and it is more destructive than you can imagine. Why? Because the more you fear or worry about something, you are more likely to act in ways that perpetuate it. For example, if you fear that one wrong move will ruin your diet completely, what do you think will happen if you do slip up and eat a food that is not on your plan? Most likely you'll conclude that you have failed and throw in the towel. Underlying this fear of failure is the belief that you will fail no matter how hard you try to succeed.

Don't allow fear-based thinking to destroy your attempts to create a better life. Begin today by expecting success with your healthy habits and everything else you want in life. Learn to see minor slip-ups as learning experiences. Analyze them and understand why they happened, and come up with ways to prevent them from happening again. Develop a better awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses, and strive to improve in all areas - not from an unrealistic expectation of perfection, but from a desire to do the very best you can in everything you do.

Start each day with a positive expectation of success. Believe you are already successful, and you are becoming more successful every day. Just like fearing failure makes it more likely to happen, expecting success make it much more likely to happen. You just have to choose which one you will give most of your focus to.