Everyday Systems

I have started over here so many times I've lost count but I am finding whether I blame myself for the failure or smile about it, it is still there staring me in the face and day one is pretty much the same regardless of how I rationlize the failure. It is still day one. And for me, it is the last one.
The more I read success and failure stories here, the more I am realizing the people who are making it are the ones who have a plan for every contingency and they are the ones who make the commitment to ride out every single hunger espisode, every single stressful life situation and every single major party/holiday etc. with no excuses. They do it or they don't do it. They store up reasons why they were successful for future reference like a guidebook to success. When they fail, they don't dwell on the reasons or excuses why they failed and use them like a mantra to insure more failures in the future. They make a plan to avoid those mistakes in the future.
The people like me who give in easily when the pressure is on (and if you look around at the amount of obesity in the world, I have lots of company). have a lot of traits in common as well. When I am successful, I don't commend myself and dwell on the reasons I was successful. I think, it's about time I got it right. Why did I wait so long? I could have avoided all this pain, if I had only figured it out a long time ago. I must be a really slow learner. Or I think, "whew, I made it one more day. I wonder how long this little winning streak will last until I screw up or the world conspires against me". But oh dear, when I fail!!!! Then I can dwell on that failure for days. Not to insure it won't happen again, Oh no!! I dwell on it by getting angry with myself for being weak or failing. I punish myself for being bad by telling myself a lot of negative things about myself and then I try to stuggle on feeling like I have even less of a prayer of success because of course, look at my history so far, right? Not a good pattern, I think. By punishing myself for being bad, I am reinforcing being a weak, failure of a person and that doesn't help me improve. Also, when I make excuses for failing, it means there was an understandable reason to fail and when that situation arises again, it will be a built in failsafe reason to cave in again. So diets haven't really failed me so much as my approach to them has failed.

Based on the faithful posting of successes and failures entered by all the good people who post here, I think I like the pattern I am starting to internalize.
1) I want to start by commiting to this always and forever.
No back door escape routes like: if this doesn't work, there is always the next diet, pill, whatever. This is the place for me and I can and will do this.
2) I will internalize the good feelings I get off every successful day. I will learn from it and make a physical or mental list of the reasons why this day worked and how I overcame temptations on this ot that particular day.
3) I will accept serenely the inevitable failures that will come along and treat them like lessons to learn from. I will make a physical or mental list of what tripped me up so I can find a way to hopefully avoid that problem in the future. If the new plan doesn't work either, I will find a 3rd and 4th plan if necessary. I will try to do this in as short a period as possible to avoid obessive thinking and to avoid it becoming demoralizing.
4) I will try not to use failure as an excuse to fail again but I will try to use history of success to build the belief that success can be a pattern as well.
5) I will accept the fact that I obsess about food and eating and I will commit to finding ways to get off the gerbil wheel of this obsession. Everytime, I am focused on food and eating, I will look for some other distracting diversionary activity.
6) This one is the most important. Life is messy. There will be lots and lots of challenges in life and I can no longer try to fix them or overcome them with food bandages. Food and emotions are not compatible. Food is a physical thing. It is used for fueling the bodyand keeping it alive and healthy. It is a necessary thing like breathing and it can be enjoyable as well. Emotions, good and bad are ethereal. Dealing with them is also necessary but eating food isn't dealing. I can only change my emotional state with physical action or a change of mental attitude. I accept that a cookie won't find me friends, a bag of cheetos won't make me young again and a piece of cake won't get me a better job or improve my relationship with a coworker/friend/mate/child/my financial situation,etc. It won't make me feel better when I am sad, depressed, scared or bored. Each time I am faced with emotional termoil and I am reaching for that "whatever" to eat, I must make it habit to ask "how will this item of food help this situation? Is it a magic potion? Because if it can't help me emotionally, and it can't help more than momentarily, I must then try to seek a non food method of dealing that might actually help. In fact that search may keep me busy and actually work to keep my mind off food.

I can't wait to move on armed with this knowledge and become my own best friend in this endeavor.

After reading your post I realized how kindred we truly are! Ohmigosh, I've felt and said and written so many similar things. From what I read I think you really are grappling with this--and gaining insight and understanding--not only in what works for others, but what (so far) isn't working for you. I believe you should give yourself an enormous amount of credit for this--it takes a lot of courage to persist when it would be so much easier on so many levels to simply quit.

When I read the part about how you're starting over for the last time, and how discouraged and angry you are at yourself for HAVING to keep starting over again and again, I was reminded of something a wise person told me. I was lamenting to her about much the same thing--how I can go along okay for a time and then I screw up and find myself doing stuff that makes it seem like I didn't learn a dang thing--I'm right back where I started. She said, "Have you ever been on a long road trip and taken a wrong turn--the sort where you might drive miles and miles out of your way before you realize you're going in the wrong direction?" I told her I had. "Well, this is sort of like that--you have to turn around and go back the miles you went out of the way, but you don't have to go all the way back to your original starting point. And while it's frustrating, it's just part of your journey--and who knows, you might have learned something or seen something you never would have otherwise." Those words allowed me to make a mental shift from: "Oh crud, I'm back to square one!" to "Hmmm, I've made a wrong turn, but it's not the end of the world because I can turn back around and CONTINUE my journey."

If I could give you any gift in the world right now, Sue, I would give you the ability to cut yourself some major slack. I once ordered a pewter pin from a catalog that had the words: AS IS etched into it. It was a statement to the world that I was fully aware of the situation (mostly as it related to my particular size of the day), and I had chosen to accept it with grace. And it was a reminder to myself that it was far kinder to practice self-acceptance (I couldn't even approach self-love...) than it was to constantly berate myself.

I know the thought patterns as well as the way you automatically respond to food are burned into your brain--they are what is familiar to you. And there's no two ways about it--changing them takes an ENORMOUS effort on your part. You can't begin to change your behavior consistently without your gerbil mind getting in an uproar and doing everything in its power to keep things the same as they've always been. I've found it helps to just inundate my inner squirrel (who is a distant cousin to your gerbil...) with affirmations--it doesn't matter whether or not I even believe the statements I repeat over and over and over again are true yet--it's what I want my brain to accept as truth. And you are also right about how it helps to acknowledge and praise yourself for every single right thing you do.

I don't know if this is correct, but I have an idea you're a person who is afraid to really FEEL whatever it is you're feeling--especially if that feeling is in the category of anger, sadness, lonliness, etc. Here is something my therapist has told me many times that might be helpful to you: "Your feelings aren't good or bad, right or wrong, they are simply messengers bringing you valuable information." This helped me begin to not get overly anxious whenever I felt one of those random, uncomfortable feelings come up in me. I started to notice my feelings came and went of their own accord--they often had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in my life at the time. I learned at times they ebbed and flowed like the tide and other times they came crashing over me like a huge wave...but whatever the case--they were temporary. Actually feeling the feelings did not harm me in any way.

You matter. And I want you to know I am on the sidelines cheering you on.

Hi Sue,

Sorry I didn't see this post til now.

I'm sorry you're having so much trouble getting No-s to stick. It sounds like you've got a good mental grasp of the issues. But that isn't everything, of course.

I know it's frustrating... but instead of assuming that something is fundamentally wrong (or that you yourself are fundamentally deficient), maybe just tweak the strategy a little bit. You've gotten very close to making this a habit -- you pulled off the 21 days no sweat. It might take some little practical, structural change rather than a whole new mindset -- because your mindset sounds pretty good.

Here's an idea:

Keep the daily rules in place as is. But starting in January, maybe, try the combination of monthly resolution and personal Olympics for success tracking that I podcasted about recently. That way you can roll with a failure or two without feeling utterly defeated, but you still have a grasp on the situation. The medal points could be 0 failures a month: gold, 1 failure: silver, 2 failures: bronze. Or something else. If you don't medal high enough in January, or if even if you do but feel the structure is helpful, re-resolve in February and see how you do. Personal olympics don't have to wait 4 years to reconvene.

There's one bit about your mindset that isn't quite optimal... this "last time around" bit. Because failure of some kind is inevitable, even if you're a champion of no-s. Even I fail occasionally, years into no-s, founders zeal and all. Failure shouldn't be catastrophic. A system like what I described above builds in a little tolerance for failure (I get a similar benefit from my "negative tracking" in my check in thread).

Just a suggestion. Best wishes to you this time around!

Reinhard