How aware are you of what contributed to your weight gain? Of course, it was eating too much food or too many calorie-rich foods. We all know that. What, though, besides your pattern of eating caused you to gain all that weight?

Was it your husband? Your children? Your mother? Your father? Was it your lifestyle? What was it?

One way to find out is to write your story. Tell it like it is. Start with when you started to gain weight. Or better still, if you remember things that might have led up to you starting to gain unwanted weight, start there. Include situations, events, your feelings, your thoughts, your relationships.

Whatever contributed to your weight gain is probably still there, firmly fixed or lurking just out of sight but still a part of you that you will definitely have to contend with if you want to achieve successful weight loss, and if you want to realize permanent weight loss as well.

It’s a tall order, but it’s best if you can apply many of the following thinking skills to the process of weight loss.

It helps, for instance, if you know the assumptions you are making about yourself and losing your unwanted weight. If you don’t know the assumptions you are making going in, you should have ways of discovering them as you proceed. How are you at making inferences? You knew what you were supposed to do yesterday to stick to a diet, let’s say, but you didn’t do it. Can you infer from the information you have what made you go back to an old pattern of eating? Could you have predicted this lapse? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, can you formulate some hypotheses, and test them out? And what if all this straight up thinking isn’t working, can you get creative and generate some new and original ideas?

It’s a tall order, but you not only have to think things out ahead of time to make the weight-loss process a go, you have to also think on your feet from moment to moment, and think in retrospect as well about what happened and what to do about it.

Weight loss isn’t just about the food. So put your thinking cap on too.

Where do you stand in relation to other women? Are they thinner than you? Are they prettier, smarter, better situated, more in control? How often do you compare yourself with other women? Do these other woman who you compare yourself with have to be real, or can they be imagined? Do you compare favorably or unfavorably?

If you set standards for yourself primarily by looking outward like this, your assessment of yourself could reflect the fact that you are unsure of yourself, have reduced self-esteem, are socially anxious, self-conscious, and perhaps even oversensitive to other people’s behavior.

Taking a strong tendency to compare yourself with others into the weight-loss process is a recipe for disaster. Losing a lot of weight always requires looking inward and marching to the beat of your own drum. It’s your weight and your diet and your motivation and your perseverance that are called for, and not some other woman’s. You might pick up a pointer or two from other women, but that is different than flat out comparing yourself.

As the weight-loss process unfolds, it is not only what you can do that counts, it is also what you expect will happen that counts as well.

There is, of course, that one big expectation you have for the end of the weight-loss process: weighing so many pounds less than when you started. But you probably have other outcomes in mind as well: looking good, feeling good, fitting into some of your favorite old clothes, getting rid of being labeled as fat, regaining your self-esteem.

What you expect will happen is also part and parcel of each and every weight-loss step you will take. Way before you near the endpoint, you will have expectations that influence your choice of weight-loss strategies and your choice of behaviors. For example, “if you want such and such to happen, you will do such and such.” “If I want to remain true to my diet, I will have to skip the dinner party Saturday night.” Implicit here is the expectation that you will eat off your diet if you go to the dinner party.

Focusing on your expectations can redirect your attention to the fact that you are guiding your daily weight-loss routine according to the outcomes you are aiming for. For instance, feeling satisfied with yourself may be one of your expectations. You may go into each day with the guiding expectation that despite the fact that you are dieting, you still wish to feel satisfied. At first, your expectation is to feel satisfied in having enough to eat so you don’t, as a result of the diet, feel empty. But as you go along, you find that you are feeling emptier than you like, and you believe feeling this way can’t be helped if you want to lose a sufficient amount of weight. So you modify your expectation of feeling full to feeling satisfied in ways other than through what you eat, like being more attuned to one of your children, or keeping up your disposition, or being on top of all your responsibilities.

Your expectation on each and every weight-loss step is what guides you through the weight-loss process. It pays to be aware of these expectations and the impact they are having on your weight-loss behavior.