Cultivating The "Try, Try Again" Attitude

Have you ever eaten a few pieces of candy (a bag of chips, a few cookies, insert your food here) and figured that since you'd already been "bad," you could eat whatever you wanted for the rest of the day?  Do you give up as soon as you've made one mistake? If so, it is important to nuture a "try, try again" attitude.

Think about it: Great sports stars and artists make literally thousands of mistakes on the way to perfecting their sport or art. Would a ballerina give up dancing because she fell while learning a new ballet? Certainly not! She would get up and try again immediately -- fully confident in her ability to learn the dance eventually.

Similarly, making a few choices that are not healthy for your body doesn't mean you will never lose weight. Making mistakes is part of learning a new habit, which includes learning new eating habits. The proper resonse to backsliding is to first learn from the experience, and second to try again. This new response takes a change in attitude from "All or nothing" to "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!"

The truth is, if you want your behavior to change, your attitude must come first. All of us are born with the "try, try again" attitude. Just think of the number of times we fell while learning to walk, or the hours of funny sounds we made as we struggled to acquire language... or even later in life, consider the perserverance we showed when learning to ride a bike. We learned these skill and perform them effortlessly now because they have become a habit. If you want to make healthy eating a habit, remember to try, try again.