How do you rate the difficulty of dieting and losing weight on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 meaning it’s very easy for you and 10 meaning it’s really hard?

The average difficulty rating seems to be around 8. That’s an unscientific, anecdotal based estimate.

If you “failed” at diets in the past and look at your next weight loss attempt with trepidation, it’s most likely because you have a high dieting difficulty self-rating.

Unfortunately, diets, of necessity, force you to do things, eat foods, and eat in certain ways that are outside of your norm. Plus, you probably need to eat less than you’re used to and if you don’t do that right you get hungry and grouchy and hate the whole experience.

Dieting means you need to change your routines if not your habits which is always a challenge.

When you add it all up, dieting causes a lot of stress and pushes your personal difficulty rating off the charts.

The Power Of 2

One good way to help relieve a lot of the stress and move that difficulty rating from an 8 (or whatever yours is) down in the 3 to 4 range or even less, is to use the Power of 2 by finding a good dieting buddy.

Depending on your personal “how-to-diet” preferences, especially if you’re socially oriented, finding a buddy or even a group may be the very foundation of your success. Your own personal missing link to weight loss success.

And even if you’re not ordinarily the social type, at least giving the Power of 2 dieting buddy idea a try can’t hurt.

As in any good partnership, if you find a good, compatible match for your dieting buddy, you will:

• Help each other overcome your dieting weaknesses
• Support each other in maximizing your dieting strengths
• Give each other both the rational and emotional support needed for success
• Encourage and “cheer lead” each other during tough times

The Power of 2 in dieting, if done correctly, will give you exponential success.

How To Choose A Dieting Buddy

There are 5 steps to choosing an exponentially powerful dieting buddy:

1. Pay attention to how you like to do things. You’ll discover your natural, inborn, innate preferences, strengths, traits, and characteristics. See how you can use your preferred behavioral style in conjunction with and in support of your diet – regardless of the diet you choose.

 

1. Make sure your buddy knows, understands, and will support your dieting behavioral preferences.

 

1. Learn your buddy’s traits and characteristics – and his/her dieting behavioral dieting preferences, too. They may be the same as yours or may be radically different.

 

1. Make sure you know, understand, and will support your buddy’s dieting behavioral preferences.

 

1. Agree with your buddy, in advance, how you are going to help and support each other. Exactly how you do that in reality will evolve over time. It will take some testing, trial, and error. But, if you start with at least a loose agreement on how to help and support each other, it will go a long way to helping both of you reduce your dieting difficulty rating and lead quickly to easier and more successful weight loss.

Example

Let’s say you’re the type of person who does everything at a fast pace, you’re socially oriented, creative, and love fun, adventure, and being spontaneous. You don’t like structure, routine, or boredom. You’re also impatient and expect quick results.

You can see right off the bat that any sort of highly structured diet is a challenge for you. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Quite the contrary. You can be successful on a highly structured diet. If you take into account your natural traits, characteristics, and preferences, and, in a sense just plug them into the diet, you can make any legitimate diet work for you.

So let’s now assume you find a dieting buddy with the same traits and characteristics as you. The two of you can support and help each other find ways to spur each other’s creativity, make your dieting fun, and challenge each other to find ways to insert some spontaneity and flexibility without deviating too far beyond the bounds of your diet.

Or, maybe you find a dieting buddy who is quite different. Someone, let’s say, who has tremendous patience, loves routine and structure, follows rules, is detail oriented, and just likes consistency and stability.

As long as the two of you really “get” each other and respect your differences in life and in dieting styles, are willing to admit your own dieting downfalls or weaknesses, and committed to get involved in each other’s dieting efforts with openness and honesty, you’d make a great dieting buddy pair…better than someone who is just like you.

You’ll help your buddy to get motivated…to get moving with the diet…to take some risks. You’ll encourage her to stay with the diet when it’s hard for her. You’ll show her how to have a little fun with it.

In turn, she’ll help you see that yes, you can have quick results, but “quick” in terms of reality. She’ll model some patience for you. She’ll help you stick to your dieting routine when you start feeling it’s too restrictive. She’ll give you an outlet for your emotional frustration when you start having that inevitable sense of boredom with the whole thing.

Finding a random dieting buddy where you don’t know and understand each other’s traits, characteristics, and dieting behavioral preferences, however, can prove disastrous. If you don’t have a good sense of how you should go about dieting or how your buddy should go about dieting, it’s impossible to help and support each other in positive and constructive ways. It could easily raise your dieting difficulty.

But, when you choose someone and can really get in tune with each other’s best and most effective approaches to dieting and losing weight, you’ll significantly reduce your dieting difficulty rating and greatly increase the ease and success of your weight loss efforts.