Weight Loss Excuse #1 : It is too Difficult!

After years of discussing weight loss, depression, anxiety, and addictive patterns with patients I have noticed that we are all full of excuses when it comes to making changes in our lives. When I have contemplated changing things in my own life the first thing that often comes into my mind is some sort of excuse. We all have created many internal excuses for why we cannot improve our lives. These excuses are designed to discourage us from tackling the unknown. We feel powerless.

If you are honest with yourself about the difficulties you are having with some aspect of your life you will realize that you are holding onto a lot of useless suffering. So why not opt for some useful suffering? There is also no absolute evidence that what you will do will be in fact difficult. It is just as likely to be easy as it is to be difficult. 

That brings me to the most common excuse that I hear from others. This excuse is simply that change will be too difficult or hard. When it comes to weight loss, people often say that it will be too difficult because of how much they have to lose, or because their wife only makes certain kinds of foods, or because they have too many sugar cravings. The list of reasons why it will be too difficult for them to make the changes are dizzying and endless. The funny thing is that they know that they are just making excuses and I think that they know that I know that they are just making excuses. 

So is it really harder to change a habit? A little perspective can help. 

Start by just thinking about all the things that you have to do to maintain the habit that you would like to change. A smoker, for example, has to have packs of cigarettes with them, dispose of ashes, earn extra money to support the habit, go to the store to buy them, have access to an ash tray, have a lighter, stand outside, worry about others getting exposed, the smell, social connotations, stained teeth, chronic cough, and an endless list of physical ailments.  On the other hand, the useful suffering that is needed to change this habit is to simply choose in the moment not to smoke. Now, I ask which choice is actually harder in the long run!

The same holds true for weight loss. All it takes is to obtain correct dietary information from someone who has expertise in the area (such as myself) followed by making the daily choices to follow the process. The alternative often entails poor sleep, heartburn, joint pain, poor energy, deconditioning, feeling terrible, social stigma, poor self-confidence, earning extra money to support the extra food, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, buying medications, and much more. 

The key is to love yourself enough to make every decision in your life consciously and then count the benefits and the cost. Over the long run we suffer much more and encounter many more difficulties by maintaining a habit than by changing one.

You can decide today to cast out all the mountains of useless suffering you are experiencing and substitute a little useful suffering.

For those that need support through this process I am happy to help.