Why do I keep self-sabotaging every time I start a diet?

On Ep. 47, Amber Brueseke explains that most coaching goes after the behavior itself: the weekend binge, the vacation slip. But behavior always comes from somewhere, and the root is your beliefs and your identity. If you only fight the binge, you won't get lasting change. She also names the cycle many women get stuck in: one off day turns into "I'm a loser, my body's broken, I'm the problem." Her approach is to uncover and remove those mental blocks, so the right actions start to feel natural instead of forced.

On Ep. 102, Mike Millner describes how this builds over years of dieting. When plan after plan ignores your own needs, personality, lifestyle and values, you keep starting over, and that creates an expectation of failure. The next time, part of you thinks, here we go again, I know how this plays out, and you sabotage before you've even started. He says this can happen even when you finally have a good, personalized plan, simply because you've been burned so many times.

How long does it take? Mike says it depends on the person. Some clients just needed permission to be human and to treat a slip as feedback. For others, with deeply ingrained patterns, it can take six months, a year or longer of small, steady progress. Either way, the message is the same: the repeated restarts trained this pattern, and it can be retrained.