The 7 Hardest Things You'll Have to Learn How To Do On Your Weight Loss Journey

[Anonymous]

There are very few people who simply wake up one morning after being seriously overweight for their entire childhoods, or for years at a time, who decide, I'm going to lose weight, and they just do it without any problems along the way. Serious weight loss is about changing some massive and perhaps lifelong habits you've had that have prevented you from living a healthy lifestyle. If weight loss were so incredibly easy, more people would do it and we wouldn't have such a big obesity problem in this country. So in order to find success on your weight loss journey and turn sometimes healthy habits into permanent ones, there are a few things that most people struggle with understanding.

1. Learn not to live and die by what your scale says

Scales are ONE tool used to measure health and they don't necessarily do it accurately and while we're at it, neither do BMI measurements which often report that people like bodybuilders are overweight and unhealthy, when to look at and analyze them is to see quite a different picture. Too many people think that if they don't see the dial change on the scale they are failing. They either don't know or refuse to believe that muscle weighs more than fat. They ignore the fact that other things can affect weight like bloating, eating a big meal, or simple normal body fluctuations that can happen throughout the day allowing the numbers to on the scale to go up and down. Try to only sparingly use a scale as a measuring tool of your progress. Rely on what you can see in the mirror or body progress photos or through actual body analysis which breaks down how much muscle, bone, fat you have and gives a clearer picture as to what you're actually carrying around and need to work on.

2. Learn not to fall for sabotage

There are people in your life who are haters and/or enablers that will litter your path with cookies and cake and self-doubt as you try to improve your personal health. Some people will intentionally try and discourage you and keep you where you are for their own selfish reasons. When you are doing something good and positive for yourself, they can't stand it or feel like if you do well, that will reflect a mirror back onto their lives and what's going wrong there. Don't fall that. You aren't in this to live for them, you're in this to live for yourself and be healthy for you. If someone doesn't get that, remove them from your life or distance yourself from them so you can do what you need to do by yourself or with others who only seek to love and support you.

3. Get rid of your addictions

If you cannot control yourself around a bag of chips or a tub of ice cream and you're just known to gorge, keeping it around in your house or in your bag or at work is not going to help you. Those food stuffs are what got you into part of the mess you're in now with your health. Think of them like alcohol to an alcoholic--no one would recommend that they keep alcohol in the house because the temptation will always be there to slide back to old habits, and getting healthy is about figuring out things that are good for your body and that will help your diet and exercise plans.

4. Give up on quick fix plans

Gimmicks, 30 day promises, celebrity weight loss plans--they all will offer you the same huge promises of weight loss glory, but will land you right back to where you started in the first place or worse becuase they tend not to focus on the long term. Don't start and have to re-start and re-start a fitness and diet plan. If that's your track record, you need to pare down to something that is actually rooted in sound health and medical advice so you can sustain your program 2 months, 9 months, 4 years from now. If your plans have expiration dates on them like 90 day fitness or 30 day diet fix, ditch them. Your life doesn't end when these plans do.

5. Recognize that failure is an option

I said in the beginning, weight loss is hard, and above, that there are no quick fixes. Along with that failure is an option that you should learn to recognize and then move beyond. How many tests have you failed in your life in school. Did you just drop out with one failure? No, you kept going until you finished. We fail all the time in life at everything, but it's getting back up and pushing forward which separates the quitters from the winners. Start training your brain to recognize that, yes you may have cheated on your whole foods diet and ate a burger and fries two lunches in a row but you can still go to your workout in the afternoon, and still eat a healthy dinner, and still start again fresh tomorrow. You will fail. This crap is hard to do, but keep it moving, keep going, get back to it as soon as you can and don't stay in a mindset where you beat yourself up and quit.

6. Exercise when you don't want to

So It's Monday, and it's raining, so you don't workout outside like you usually do. Then Tuesday, you're sleepy so you hit the alarm and go back to sleep. Wednesday, you can't find your shoe. Thursday....you see the pattern. You can always find an excuse not to work out, but the hardest, but ultimately most rewarding thing, is to get into the mindset that exercise along with a healthy whole foods diet, are absolutely essential to your new way of thinking and living. That means, you spend that extra minute finding that shoe so you can workout, you don't ignore the alarm, you exercise inside when it rains, and you make time to put effort into your health.

7. Celebrate your success and manage your goals

Five pounds down is great, but overall health and well being doesn't just come from seeing a new lower number on the scale. Really focus on smaller goals and successes along the way. This week I can finally touch my toes. This week, sitting in the office chair wasn't uncomfortable. This week, I drank water every single day and got 8 hours of sleep each night. Weight loss should not be this never ending slog fest where you berate yourself over every little thing all the time and intentionally make yourself feel bad. Learn to be positive about your successes and then build on them. This week you jogged 2 miles, next week's goal 2.2 miles. Yes, your end goal is to lose 75 lbs, but focusing on just that can be discouraging if you're only on pound one. Bring your goals closer to you with things you can hope to accomplish right now. Buy a dress one size smaller and work towards that vs. getting one 6 sizes smaller and always feeling like you're chasing the impossible.

[snowangle]

I recently went on a weight loss journey (25lbs in 5 months)! Here's my experience in relation to your points.

1: YES!! I remember not seeing the scale change at all for around a month after I started. I would have been really discouraged if it had not been for one thing.. I could visibly see changes in my body. My thighs lost their extra fat almost immediately, my face slimmed down, and I generally felt more energetic and healthy. So I reasoned that the numbers on the scale would change eventually.

2: I was pretty lucky; all of the people closest to me at the time were also pretty active and healthy. Temptation did come, but not from them haha.

3: See, I knew when I started that if I completely cut out my comfort foods, I would never stick with this lifestyle. So I just kept track of how often I had them. If I splurged on junk food, I just made sure that I "earned" it first by burning calories, and ate well for the rest of the day. Truth be told, I had ice cream almost every night while I went through this journey.

4: Yeah, thankfully I already knew that wouldn't work. I've been on so many yo-yo diets in my life that I knew that whatever I did this time would likely yield slow results, but it would be lasting. So I actually started this journey without the goal of weight loss; I started with the goal of getting stronger and more fit. I wanted to be able to run 5 minutes without gasping for air. I wanted to do more than one push-up. And if I happened to lose weight along the way, even better!

5: This was difficult to do; I have a habit of taking my failures super hard. What kept me moving was the mindset of "one healthy day after years of eating junk wouldn't make a difference, so the same is true the other way around. I meet my exercise and calorie goal almost every day, so one bad day shouldn't undo all of that."

6: Yep, I dragged myself on the running trail or to the gym many times when I didn't feel like it. I figured that even if I only put in like 50% effort into exercise today, it still beats sitting at home on my butt.

7: I went from 153lbs to 128! Size 12 to size 8. I went from being able to run 30 seconds before coughing and wheezing, to running a full 5k with minimal walking breaks. This year I hope to get up to 10k!

Thanks for the take!

[myTake Owner]

If I could give you a high five, I would. Everything you describe shows that you have managed to work through and perhaps continue to work through the list in your health journey. What I liked most is your number 4 and 7, especially the parts about not focusing so much on 2 or 3 pounds, but wanting to be able to do more than you physically could before. Being healthy is not just about the outside, but the inside too. It's how you manage failures and turn them into long term success, how to find your own personal motivations to keep going when the going gets tough, and truly learning to love your body and what it can do. I wish you the very best of luck on your 10K.

[wolfie12]

To me the hardest thing was realizing that things dont always go as planned. You spend month working out, eating very little and scale doesn't move, you hit plateau. It takes strenght to not just give up during those times.

[myTake Owner]

Absolutely. I've been there. This is why it's so important to figure out ways to motivate yourself other than a scale and to find support, because otherwise it's very easy to say, well, I did all this and what was it for if nothing has changed.

[wolfie12]

Well yes, but in my opinion scale is a good measure of fat loss, one just has to take it with grain of salt.

There were instances where I couldnt lose half a kilo for a month, then I stuffed myself with pizza so hard that the next day I had 3 kilos more. Well it turned back to normal the day later and over next month I lost additional 2 kilos. It's just hard to go through those days without giving up.

[myTake Owner]

That's more to the point why a scale is not really the greatest source of information on your weight loss. Taking things like progress pictures, and body measurements are more accurate, as well as full body scans because they do let you see the progress even if the scale stays exactly the same or jumps a bit b/c you've gained muscle. Also you cannot expect a weight loss program you started 6 months ago to continuously yield results if you never change things up such as slowly lowering your calorie intake, or upping your weight resistance, or distances run, because your body IS changing which is the whole irony of it, and what worked then won't work now or as well now if you've been losing weight or getting stronger.

[Sephora_Addict]

Everything you've said is very true, I actually didn't eat crap when I stared my "journey". But then again I wasn't obese, just 35 pounds overweight and hated the way I looked. I ate like the typical healthy person but at the end of every meal I HAD to have a chocolate with my cup of tea - which made me overweight. So I guess not so healthy. But your article is written very good, a person can't make a change if they aren't willing to change their habits. It's mind over matter and many people have no willpower.

[goaded]

Agree about the BMI thing. My daughter is the fittest person I know, made of muscle and bone. She went for a routine check-up and the doctor said she was borderline obese (according to BMI), she's been worried about her weight ever since. Idiot.

[myTake Owner]

The worse thing is schools often use this measurement over that of a scale thinking the one more accurate or better than the other, but both have flaws, especially in regards to the athlete. Unfortunately, like your daughter, simply dismissing someone as obese, without accounting for other factors, can have dire consequences.

[goaded]

Exactly, she's a gymnast, any fool can see she's not fat (I was going to say overweight, but for her height, supposedly she is).

[oddwaffle]

I personally think there is only one hurdle you need to pass: Stick to your plan. Keep sticking to the plan.

If you fail that then nothing else matters anymore.

(Okay, technically, you can revise your plan until it's no longer resemble any proper plan.)

[art84]

I think the hardest thing is just watching what you put into your mouth and just exercising to stay healthy.

[John_Doesnt]

Weight loss is easy for people who don't fall for fads or superstitions.

[Anonymous]

totally agree