Not everything experts say is true

An eating disorder specialist recently said that the strongest trait needed to overcome an eating disorder is sheer determination. This is unbelievably wrong, and some of the people who hear it from her will suffer unnecessarily because of it.

Think about it. One of the strongest reasons many of us beat ourselves up is our lack of perfection: perfection in sticking to a diet, being thin, meeting others’ wishes, yadda yadda. You can’t push a rope. You will not be able to rely on determination alone to succeed. What is really needed is to recognize that, as a human being, we all fail sometimes. Failure is very often stopping an activity because it’s just not providing the results you need. Take running as an example. You decide you are going to run 3 miles a day, and you are unbelievably determined to achieve this goal. But if you are not a runner, you will fail, in spite of your determination. You cannot go from non-runner to 3 miles a day and do it perfectly for the rest of your life. That’s simply neither possible nor rational.

The real most important trait is the one in which you pick yourself up after a failure or a success, and you move forward. Perseverance. It’s not just continuing, it’s starting again, knowing what you know now. “Pick yourself up after a success?” Yes, you need to do this sometimes. Some people diet, lose a few pounds, then get complacent. It’s hard to move away from complacency.

One of the major reasons many people fail on diets is because they get tricked by the scale reading. When a reading can vary by 3 pounds or more just due to water, or TOM, or dinner, and when it’s reasonable to expect no more than 3 pounds a month loss, it’s easy to think that you spent a whole month without losing anything. But when you have the willingness to get up the next morning, and continue from where you are right now, you have the opportunity to move forward and use your new-found wisdom.