Every diet attempt that didn’t work is filed away in your brain as evidence.
Evidence that you can’t do this. Evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you. Evidence that you’re destined to struggle with your weight forever because you’ve already proven you can’t change.
This is past failure programming. And it’s one of the most powerful forces keeping you stuck.
But here’s what I want you to consider: what if those weren’t your failures? What if they were the system’s failures, and you just happened to be there when it broke?
The weight of history
You’ve tried keto. You’ve tried intermittent fasting. You’ve tried calorie counting, Weight Watchers, Whole30, low-fat, high-protein, meal replacement shakes. Some of them worked for a while. Most of them ended the same way.
Each ending got stored as proof. Proof that you lack willpower. Proof that you can’t stick with things. Proof that you’re somehow different from the people who succeed.
This accumulation of “failure” creates learned helplessness. You don’t even try as hard anymore because you already know how the story ends. You start diets with one foot out the door, waiting for the inevitable fall.
And that expectation becomes self-fulfilling. When you believe you’ll fail, you invest less effort. You quit at the first setback instead of pushing through. You sabotage yourself unconsciously because failing quickly feels better than trying hard and failing later.
The weight of your diet history becomes heavier than the weight you’re trying to lose.
Reframing the evidence
Let’s look at those past attempts differently.
When keto didn’t work long-term, what did you actually learn? Maybe you learned that extremely low-carb approaches don’t fit your lifestyle. That’s valuable information. Now you know to avoid approaches that eliminate food groups you enjoy.
When that strict diet failed, what was really happening? Maybe you learned that rigid rules trigger rebellion in you. Also valuable. Now you know you need flexibility built into any sustainable approach.
When you lost weight and regained it, what was the pattern? Maybe you learned that the method worked but the maintenance didn’t. That tells you something about what to focus on this time.
Every attempt taught you something about your body, your preferences, your patterns, and your life circumstances. The attempts weren’t failures—they were experiments that generated data. The problem is you filed them under “evidence of my inadequacy” instead of “information about what works for me.”
The thermostat problem
Here’s a concept that explains a lot of what happened: the Identity Thermostat.
Imagine your identity has a thermostat, set to a certain weight, a certain way of eating, a certain relationship with your body. Every diet is like opening windows in winter to force the temperature down.
You can get the temperature to drop for a while. But the thermostat senses something is wrong. It kicks the furnace on. Cravings spike. Motivation crashes. You “fall off the wagon.” The temperature returns to its set point.
You didn’t fail. The thermostat did its job.
This is why people can white-knuckle through a diet, lose the weight, and then regain every pound plus more. They never changed the thermostat. They just forced the temperature down temporarily through extreme effort. And when the effort became unsustainable, the setting reasserted itself.
Your past diets didn’t address the thermostat. They focused on the temperature—on the food, the exercise, the external changes. But the thermostat, the identity, stayed the same. So the temperature kept returning to its set point.
The system was wrong
Think about what those diets asked of you. Extreme restriction. Perfect compliance. Willpower as the primary tool. Elimination of entire food groups. Ignoring hunger. Ignoring social situations. Ignoring your actual life.
The diets treated you like a machine that could run on pure discipline indefinitely. They ignored psychology, biology, lifestyle, history, emotion, identity—basically everything that makes you human.
And when you couldn’t sustain what no human could sustain, you blamed yourself.
This is like blaming yourself for failing to hold your breath underwater for twenty minutes. You didn’t lack willpower. The task was impossible for a human being.
The diet industry has a perfect business model: sell approaches that don’t work, blame the customer when they fail, sell them another approach. Every failure drives you back for another purchase. They profit from your belief that you’re the problem.
You were never the problem.
Extracting the wisdom
Your history is an asset if you use it right.
Sit down and do an audit of your past attempts. For each one, answer: What worked about this approach? What didn’t work? Why did I stop? What did I learn about myself?
Look for patterns across attempts. Maybe you always quit around the six-week mark. Maybe you always fail when traveling. Maybe restriction always leads to rebellion. Maybe you do better with community and worse alone.
These patterns are gold. They tell you exactly what to do differently this time. Not through more willpower—through smarter strategy.
Now identify the skills you did develop, even in “failed” attempts. You learned what foods make you feel good. You learned how to meal prep, or discovered you hate meal prepping. You learned that morning workouts work better than evening ones, or vice versa.
None of that learning is wasted. It carries forward into whatever you do next.
The identity shift
The real change doesn’t come from trying harder. It comes from becoming different.
When you shift from “I’m someone who always fails at diets” to “I’m someone who learns from every experience,” the whole game changes. When you shift from “I lack willpower” to “I was using the wrong approach,” the self-blame dissolves.
This time isn’t about proving you can succeed where you failed before. This time is about approaching the whole thing differently—addressing the thermostat instead of just forcing the temperature, building identity instead of just burning willpower.
You’re not broken. You were running a faulty program. And programs can be rewritten.
This is part of The Weigh Out’s free Mindset Blueprint series. If you’re ready to go deeper into the psychology of lasting change, [explore what’s inside the premium community →]