Do you want to increase your likelihood to succeed in losing weight?

What kind of question that is. Of course, you do.

Experts¹ say that the more confident you are about your ability to lose weight, the more likely you will succeed.

Yes, it’s the same with many things in life. From babies learning to walk to adults trying to master a foreign language. Confidence breeds success.

So how to increase our confidence?

By having a good strategy. Or make it 5.

1. Choose Your Timing to Start a Diet Carefully

We want to have an excellent start, because then the diet journey ahead will look easier and brighter. To have that, we need a PERFECT timing. The first part of these article series How Successful-Weight-Losers Start Dieting discusses this in more detail.

2. Match Your Strategy to Your Energy Levels

Do you notice that your energy level and motivation are going up and down every day? Sometimes you are filled with drive and energy. You feel that you can achieve a lot of things. Other times your energy and motivation are low and you are reluctant to do much.

It’s a fact of life. Nobody can sustain a high level of drive and motivation all the time.

So, no, we are not trying to keep our energy and desire high at all times.

Instead, we accept it as it is and use it for our advantage.

• At high moments, go with big breakthrough actions: Some actions in our weight loss plan are more difficult than others. Make a list of these. The following are some examples to help get you started:
  • Search and choose which weight loss program to join.
  • Check pantry for unhealthy foods and shop for healthier alternatives.
  • Start journaling food intake and physical activity.
  • Read web sites or books to learn more.
  • Look for and collect healthy recipes.
  • Sign up for a gym membership.
• At low times, go with small incremental actions: Do something easy. Follow the plan that you have created during the breakthrough period. Fill in that food diary that you have started. Cook with the recipes that you collected. Apply what you have learned. Or simply try to maintain things.

This strategy can be pictured like this:

3. Match Your Strategy to Your Eating Personality

In a battle, knowing the enemy better will increase your chance of winning.

In a weight loss ‘battle’, we could say that the enemy is ourselves. Or to be precise, it is our bad habit relating to food and exercise.

• Do you have an emotional eating problem? Note down what kind of emotion cause you to eat even when you are not hungry. Make plan to anticipate it. For example, may be you feel stressful every time you come home from work. Then you can plan to take a long hot shower or bubble bath after work to soothe you, instead of eating.
• Do you eat automatically out of habit? Do you always grab a pack of chips whenever you read a book? Now you can choose to go out and read in the park where the snacks are not available.
• Do you prefer buying larger packages of snack because they are more economical, yet you “can’t stop once you pop” - like the manufacturer wishes? You may want to divide up the large bags into smaller portion-size containers.

4. Don’t Repeat Past Dieting Mistakes

If you are like most people, it’s likely that this is not the first time that you start dieting. Spend some time to list down what didn’t work in the past. If for instance you have dieted by weighing and measuring food, and you hate it, don’t do it now. Find other way to control your food intake.

5. Follow the 80:20 Diet Battle Rule

Don’t overwhelm yourself with hundreds of ‘to do’ items. If things seem too much and too difficult to achieve, we WILL lose the motivation to reach them. It’s just our nature as human.

Follow the 80:20 rule.

The 80:20 rule, which is also called Pareto Law, says that if there are 100 things that we can do to produce result, it’s likely that 20 of those will produce 80% of the result. The remaining 80 things will ‘only’ add 20% to the result. In other words, there is a small number of things that produce much more significant impact than the others.

Think hard about these and make them your priority.

To read the rest of How to Start a Diet Article Series, check it here:

1. How successful-weight-losers start dieting.
2. Why 67% of people fail to reach their target body weight.
3. 5 Smart strategies to start winning diet battles.
4. How to choose the best weight loss program for YOU.
5. The no. 1 reason why successful-weight-losers make it to the finish line.

1. Christopher J. Armitage and Mark Conner. Efficacy of the Theory of Planned Behaviour: a Meta-Analytic Review. British Journal of Social Psychology. [↩]