What makes you go on a food binge? Have you asked yourself this? If you did, what did you come up with?

Do you go on an food binge because the weight-loss method you are using is too restrictive and too depriving? Do you binge after you have a diet cheat and because you can’t help thinking I got it wrong so what’s the sense of me being careful anymore? Perhaps you binge eat for neither of these reasons.

Maybe you get in really bad moods and your out-of-control eating is your way of staving off a bad mood. You bury yourself in eating and escape the bad mood that way, and the guilt you suffer afterwards from eating too much food isn’t anywhere near as serious as the bad mood that kicks off your binge eating. There is still another possibility. You could binge as a way of attributing your bad mood to the binge itself rather to the things that are truly causing you to be in a bad mood.

As you can see, there are lots of possible reasons for someone to binge eat. What causes you to binge eat?

If you were asked if failing at losing weight is bad, you probably would say a resounding “yes”, with no doubt in your mind whatsoever. There you would be wrong. Weight loss failure isn’t bad; it’s necessary.

Failure is an important part of all that we do, including losing your unwanted weight. Without failure there can be no success. Successful weight loss is actually built on your failures. Take, for example, not sticking to your diet for lunch one day and then at dinner the next day. These are failures. What would you say to yourself about them? You might tell yourself to look more closely at what made you go off your diet, and then do something about that. Because of your failure you start a search process for what went wrong. Then you set about correcting it. Failure in this case spurred corrective diagnosis and then corrective action.

Failure is not only good for learning to do something better. Acceptance of failures, big and little, in the weight-loss process also prevents you from having lots of negative reactions to failing. It limits your frustration, negative thinking, feelings of humiliation, fear of failure, disappointment in yourself, and quitting rather than persevering.

As contradictory as it may sound, weight-loss failure makes successful weight loss possible.

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.