Here we are — the beginning of another new year, and my social media feed is full of diet ads.

I’m that person that either laughs at the diet ads or reports them as offensive. 😉 Seriously, though — there are a lot of reasons why people end up on these programs time and time again — and fail just as many times. In my own opinion, these programs are designed in ways that will inevitably lead to failure; if they had the definitive answers, they’d be out of business. And friends, I think most of us know that the diet industry will never go out of business.

In amongst the noise, here’s a little advice from me, and it’s bound to contradict a lot of these programs. And mind you, I have to take my own advice; I’ve used the holidays as a reason to stray and I need to get my own house in order, but the good news is that I’m fully able to recover from hip-expanding choices, and that’s a major part of my own growth. So, without further ado… things I’ve found that work for me, and maybe they’ll help someone else find a little success.

1. Committing to change can be in stages. You don’t have to jump in and go 100% in on a program immediately — especially if you’ve found that doing so makes you resentful and deprived. If you’ve got a lot of weight to lose and know you need to change, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor if you understand your own nature. If you know you’ll fall off a plan because it’s so overwhelming to change a lot at once, don’t. Ease yourself into your plan in stages; you’ll find yourself growing stronger with each small success and you’ll be much more likely to stick with a plan.
   
2. If you want to wait until you’re “ready”, you’ll never be ready. I used to reject the idea of “fake it until you make it”, but I’m now in my 7th year of living with the happy decisions I made when I faked it until I made it. In the long run, I found I was more ready than I realized.
3. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Break your goals down into small chunks. If you have 210 pounds to lose, set your goals for small, achievable goals. Marathon runners don’t start training by running the entire distance, and you don’t have to, either. When I started my journey, I likely would have quit if I had continually seen the entire goal; I would have considered it too daunting. I knew that, so I worked on 50 pounds at a time.
4. Pick a bunch of ways to gauge success. The diet industry tends toward measuring success with pounds and inches, but those don’t have to be the only ways. Maybe you didn’t lose a single pound or inch, but you’re able to walk for longer distances. Maybe your clothes fit better, regardless of what the scale says. Maybe your A1C went down. Don’t tie yourself to someone else’s idea of success; find your own markers.
5. Reject the lies you tell yourself. I have a long history of justifying weight gains, and I had to recognize that I needed to stop being inflexible and be completely honest with myself. When I hit roadblocks in my plan, I have to figure out why I allowed myself to become sidetracked.
6. Do the heavy lifting yourself. And by this, I mean — learn what’s necessary to be successful. Understand the hows and whys of your body and how it reacts to various input, whether it’s food, exercise, sleep, stress, or any other environmental factor. Often, the diet industry promotes a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t work for everyone; if something doesn’t work for you, figure out what does, and don’t give up being a scientist on your own behalf.
7. Be willing to change. My biggest failures in past efforts were my own unwillingness to adapt as I progressed. What works once may not work in the same way again; we all get older and our bodies change. What worked when I had 210 pounds to lose does not work as well now that I have much less to lose. It pays to occasionally shift and see if the methods used are the best for your own situation; being inflexible leads to failure.
8. It’s okay to fail once in a while. Just don’t live there. Our own muscles grow stronger by tearing in small bits and rebuilding. If you fail, recognize what’s behind it, get up, brush yourself off, and forgive yourself. Move forward and learn. It’s NOT okay to repeatedly fail and not make the effort to understand why it happened.
9. Be transparent. Find what method of accountability works best for you; there’s no need to be alone in your efforts, and the more support you find, however it works for you, is the best. Yes, it’s scary as hell to recruit your support, because it means you’re closing an easy way out, but believe me — it helps.
10. Make sure what you’re doing is something you can live with for the rest of your life; choosing a better way isn’t meant to be punishment or torture. It’s meant to improve your life, and if you feel like you’re constantly punishing yourself, you either need to change your plan or change your mind about why you feel that way.

These are just some of the lessons I’ve had to learn over recent years. If you’re looking to start yet another effort, chin up: you can be successful, but you have to dig in and do the work necessary to make it happen. I promise you, though, that it’s worth the effort.