I struggle tremendously with my eating/weight, and the ONLY thing keeping me in the struggle, is knowing that the odds are AGAINST me.
Most of my life, I've thought and been told I was fat because I was lazy, crazy, stupid, or selfish.
I'm not afraid of hard work, or of trying very, very difficult things, but when you tell me something I find difficult "should be easy," I feel like an idiot that it doesn't come easy to me.
For decades I was led to believe that weight loss was or could be easy, and I WAS the idiot (or worse) for struggling.
Now that I know the lousy odds, I understand why I don't find weight loss easy - because darn it! Weight loss IS difficult.
Just refusing to feel crazy, lazy, stupid, selfish or bad about my weight and weight struggles is keeping me on the journey.
Knowing the lousy odds helps me feel like less of a freak for having to work SO hard just to make slow progress.
I would have given up long ago (if fact, I had given up, not all that long ago) if I still thought that weight loss success wasn't supposed to be this hard.
It IS hard, so even small successes need to be celebrated like the HUGE achievements that they really are.
Not gaining is a huge success, but we're generally taught to label anything less than losing at least a pound per week as failure and as a result, most of us feel like failures when we're actually succeeding.
I firmly believe that unrealistic expectations tend to be a much bigger obstacle to weight loss than awareness of the failure rate.
At the very least, it helps to realize that "everyone else" isn't having more success and an easier time of it than we are.
Last edited by kaplods; 09-27-2014 at 04:02 PM.
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