An entire industry is built around the idea that repeatedly failing is necessary for building resilience and habitual doggedness to eventually succeed.
It’s an idea that often feeds on itself.
When a self-help book puffs you up and lets you down, there’s always another book waiting to puff you up again.
On the other hand, the heroic language of one becoming stronger through failure is simply a polite way of saying ‘keep at it’.
Which is cool
Questions arise: What are you going to do with those failures?
Examine them? Learn from them? Or write them off as a downer?
And is the idea of a perfect end-goal – ‘I’ve done it, made it to the top’ – as useful as we’re led to believe?
Look at weight loss. Keen to lose five kilos? Great. No cakes for two months, the chardonnay watered down, a brief, dirty affair with salads, an extra lap around the block with the dog and … you’ve done it.
Then the weight creeps back.
So you reach for yet another diet book, one of the great achievers in self-help.
This gets back to the notion of failure as being a necessary hurdle to success.
It’s not enough. The failures have to be examined – not brushed under the rug.
‘Necessary steps’
Researchers from York University’s Faculty of Health make this point in a new study that looks at the history of people who had some success losing weight, but eventually regained the fat.
These regressions, the researchers claim, might be “necessary steps toward sustained weight loss and improved overall health”.
In this instance, it’s not just a throwaway line. The study involved 9348 patients from the Wharton Medical Clinic, a weight-loss and diabetes clinic in Burlington, Ontario (this York being a Canadian university, not the British one).
These participants were patients, having another crack.
So what happened?
Their weight loss histories were collected through an enrolment questionnaire and they were then weighed over the course of the research period.
The majority of patients reported becoming overweight before the age of 40 and losing 4.5 kilograms minimum, at least once.
For women, but not men, “an earlier onset of overweight status and a more cumulative weight loss overall were associated with modestly greater weight loss at the clinic”.
And, for both women and men, “a greater frequency of past weight loss was associated with greater weight loss at the clinic”.
In other words, the more the participants tried and failed in the past, the greater their success at losing weight under clinical conditions.
“Our results suggest repeated bouts of weight loss and regain should not be viewed as failures, but as practice,” said Dr Jennifer Kuk, a professor in York University’s School of Kinesiology and Health Science and the study’s lead author.
Practice? What does that mean?
The researchers found that “achieving long-term success tends to require multiple attempts using different approaches”.
And at every stage, “relapse and weight regain is to be expected as a necessary component of weight management and the process of optimising health”.
Co-author Dr Sean Wharton, director of the Wharton Medical Clinic, said: “This data is reassuring that previous failed attempts did not put patients at a disadvantage from being successful.
“One should continue to make attempts at weight management, and it is likely that an appropriate approach – especially with proven effective interventions such as medication or psychological intervention – will eventually be effective.”
He said that for any lifestyle or behavioural change, “individualising the approach – that is, practising and refining strategies that work for that individual over time – is a key concept, and long-term weight management should be no different”.
This is all reasonable stuff, but it also pays to keep in mind that frequent, sudden fluctuations of weight are bad for you.
See here about the ways yo-yo dieting can damage your health.
