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When I first came up with the idea for my Spud Fit Academy I found it very intimidating. I had tried every diet under the sun and never succeeded with any of them in my life, in fact I’d only succeeded at doing the opposite! I was scared of The Spud Fit Academy and everything that came with it.

Making any dietary change for an entire year seemed like an extremely difficult task, let alone the idea of eating nothing but potatoes! I was worried about how I’d survive without all the food I loved. I was worried about how I’d handle social situations. I was worried about people thinking I was some kind of crazy weirdo. I was worried about this plan not working in the way I hoped it would. I was worried about boredom. My list of worries was endless.

My biggest worry of all was ‘what if I fail?’. I’d failed on every single other diet this world has to offer so I was pretty sure I would also fail on this ridiculous challenge. This was different though, it felt like it was my last chance, I didn’t know what else I could do if this didn’t work and so that magnified the worry about failing.

A couple of day before I started, I decided to really examine the idea of failure, what actually would happen if I failed? It turned out that I already knew what would happen if I failed – not much at all really! If I failed I’d simply go back to living the life the way I already was. I’d go back to eating the same foods and I’d continue right along on my path of depression, anxiety and weight gain – all things I was very familiar with at that point in time.

Then came the biggest moment of the entire Spud Fit Academy, and it hadn’t even started yet. Once I finished thinking about what happens if I fail, I decided to switch my thoughts and focus on what happens if I succeed? All sorts of amazing thoughts went through my head! I thought about being fit and healthy, maybe even becoming an athlete again. I thought about going shopping in normal shops instead of the fat bloke shops. I Imagined going running again, maybe one day finishing a marathon. I dreamed of going for a paddle in my racing kayak that was way to small for me to even sit in. In short, I dreamed of a different life.

The truth was that I had no idea what would happen if I was successful in my Spud Fit Academy. Nobody had ever done this before so I really had no idea if it would all work the way I hoped. What I did know was that success would change my life. I didn’t know exactly how or why and I didn’t have any evidence to back it up but I had deep belief that if I could stick with my Spud Fit Academy for a year then my life would be different. At that point in time I was living in the deep, dark hole of depression so I liked the idea of different. Different would surely be better than my current life. Different was inspiring, different was something I wanted to chase.

We can waste a lot of thinking about ‘what if I fail?’ and ‘what if it doesn’t work’ but in the end we already know the answers to these questions. ‘What if I succeed?’ is a question far more worth contemplating. Indeed, it is the question that changed everything for me.

Download the exercise by clicking the button below and start turning your negative thoughts into positive actions now!

Spud up!

Andrew