If you have to start with “no offense,” you already know. Rewrite the sentence instead.

Those two words are an alarm you set off yourself. They appear because some part of you already ran the sentence and predicted the landing, and instead of changing the sentence you added a disclaimer to it. The disclaimer does not work. It just tells the other person to brace, and then the thing lands anyway.

When you catch the phrase forming, stop and ask what you actually want them to know. Usually there is a version that carries the same information without the sting, and it takes about fifteen seconds to find. If there is no such version, that is worth knowing before you speak.