I've been on diets all throughout my life. All of them have failed so far, except for the one I'm on now. I just figured I'd reflect on what mindsets caused my past diets to fail so you might have a chance of avoiding them.
I've always been a dreamer - someone who gets excited when I think about the future and what I could accomplish. When I was little, I wanted to be rich when I grew up and thought about how amazing my life would be.
This also meant that any time I started on a diet, I'd imagine myself as a jacked bodybuilder in the future, and I'd get a ton of motivation early on. I'd do extreme versions of diets and exercise to prove to myself that I was badass and was going to crush this goal. And it worked! For a while.
The problem is that no matter how hard you run or how little you eat in a week, you can't physically lose 100 pounds. Whatever your routine, you're going to have to do it for a long time.
Inevitably, I would make a ton of early progress and be happy with that, but would hit a plateau pretty hard. I would power through it for a couple more weeks, but without the fire of motivation, I would inevitably slip. And because I didn't plan for a lighter routine, I would just slip back into my old lifestyle, which would cause me to gain the weight back.
Now I know better. The key is to start out as easy as possible so that you can get yourself used to a routine - just the mechanics of tracking a diet and seeing the progress. Once you see some progress, you can use that to give you motivation to up the intensity a little. By that point, I usually want to up the intensity to see how much I can do! This is the healthy way to approach it.
Eventually you'll earn the right to be intense and make a montage video of you lifting huge weights at the gym, but until then you need to prioritize the day to day monotony as much as possible.
Related to starting too intense, I would get impatient with my progress after a while. Inevitably, as you work on a large goal you are going to be frustrated with how long it's taking. Usually this is at it's worst when you hit a plateau and don't see progress even though you're working hard.
The antidote to this is to fall in love with the journey. Find a way to celebrate your intermediate wins and even enjoy the challenge of the workout or diet. How can you make it a game where you try to beat your "personal best"? It helps quite a lot to track your progress concretely (both calorie intake and exercise) so you know how far you've come and know what you have to beat in the future.
The other thing I keep in mind these days is that anyone who is super successful (in fitness, business, or really anything) has put in a ton of reps. Some people call it "time under the bar" in fitness - you just have to put in the hours to get where you want to go. Not every day is going to be great, but you'll never get anywhere unless you put in the effort. And the amount of effort required to achieve greatness is usually an order of magnitude or more higher than what you expect at first.
Just remember, it takes years of dedicated gym time to gain significant strength and muscle mass, and the same amount of time to lose 100+ lbs. Everyone takes this long, so you might as well get started now!
As the kid who could get good grades without studying, I also didn't really experience much effort and failure as a kid.
As an adult, this meant that I would get really demotivated when I failed at my goal - even something as small as seeing my weight go up a few lbs after slacking. Of course, any time you let yourself get super demotivated is a risk that you'll give up for good.
Now, I realize that failure is part of the journey. I don't ever seek out failure - I'm trying to hit my calorie and exercise counts daily, but I know that it won't always work out. Sometimes it's understandable (i.e. on a vacation and can't track calories), and sometimes it's not (I just feel crappy today and give in to a craving).
But you haven't really failed unless you let a setback cause you to give up. Now when this happens, I think of it as an opportunity to learn how to avoid it in the future. I don't even beat myself up about it anymore - I know this will happen and I don't feel demotivated as long as I do well the next day.
Because I don't let failures demotivate me anymore, they end up impacting me much less overall.
Some of the most painful failures were because I'd get overconfident about my past progress. I'd lose 20, 30, even 50 pounds and start to feel really good about myself. I'd think success is now inevitable, and I'm too strong to let this diet fail.
Inevitably, I would get really comfortable with my routine, and start to allow myself to slip a little. Say, I'd let myself have an extra bad cheat day, or cheat an extra day in the week, or skip an exercise. The first time this happens, it's just a little slip up, but it would keep getting worse because I'd get used to the comfort of not having to stay on the grind.
By skipping and not correcting, I was subconsciously convincing myself that it was okay to slack a bit. And usually, I was not tracking my progress concretely, so it was harder to tell how often/bad I'm slacking. Worst of all, with fitness, you don't notice the downward trend in your appearance right away! It takes a lot of poor eating / not exercising to start to see the weight gain, and by that time you have probably given up anyway.
These days, I make sure that I track my progress numerically - in my case I am tracking calories in a sophisticated spreadsheet that tells me both my daily intake as well as 7-day, 30-day, and overall averages. This way, I don't have to feel too bad about being over on one day if the averages are all under 2,000 calories - and I know to be concerned if my 30-day or overall averages creep up.
Did you fail in any of these ways too? Still struggling with it? DM me on twitter @dackerman and I'm happy to help talk you through it!