Why is weight loss so hard?

Your understanding of weight gain is incorrect and it’s trapping you in an endless struggle.

The way we understand weight is informed by diet culture.
I spend a considerable amount of time trying to communicate how wrong our societal ideas about weight gain are. The problem is that I’m up against an avalanche of marketing convincing people of things that are in direct opposition to what I teach.

I’ll be honest, some days the task feels too daunting. Then I remember what I was able to accomplish for myself and what it has meant to my personal happiness to finally get this issue resolved.

Contrary to what we’re told about weight, it’s possible to lose it for good.

The vast majority of weight gain is directly attributable to processed foods and sedentary lives, not faulty bodies. Yes, some people gain weight more easily than others (me, for instance). That’s still not a problem, it’s a thing to acknowledge and work with.

Big food feeds you things that can only result in obesity, and diet companies create the illusion the problem can be addressed by putting pressure on yourself to eat less.

That’s the cycle making everyone crazy and desperate.

Diets have no interest in talking to you about your life because it’s complex and therefore, less profitable.

Here’s where things get really, really sticky.
This is why so many people feel trapped in chronic weight gain: you aren’t designed to live a life full of temptations, and that’s exactly what modern life is.

Your environment (whether you know it or not) is entirely set up to make you fat. Decisions you’ve made, the people you spend time with, and the difficult feelings you push down with food all have much more to do with weight struggles than what’s lacking in you.

I built this diagram to help explain how people view their weight gain (you) and what’s actually undermining your healthy weight (your life).

Focusing on what’s wrong with your body disempowers you to create real change.

Modern life is a cesspool of consumption and non-solutions. Every uncomfortable emotion has an indulgence and god-forbid you admit having anything less than perfect willpower.

I admit it, readily.

Highly processed, obesogenic food and bad ideas about weight are everywhere. It’s the operating system for most people.

Your weight is an outcome of your life and thinking (not some supposed deficiency of your body).
Bad ideas about weight control are the norm. The default understanding is that some people take their health seriously and others don’t. What I’ve come to understand is that some people engineer their lives to have a successful outcome.

I’ll never have a ton of willpower or motivation, but I’ve figured out how to move and nourish myself with extreme regularity to keep a healthy weight in midlife (and through menopause).

Why? Because there’s nothing wrong with being a sugar-sensitive, middle-aged woman who’ll eat all the sweets in the house (if there were any).

What if there’s nothing wrong with your body?
I’m not being nice, this is an important point.

Maybe you’ve gained and lost so much weight over your lifetime that you’ve lost count? Or you feel so powerless over certain foods you’ve lost trust in yourself. It could be you’ve never succeeded on any diet and feel depressed just thinking about doing another one.

None of that means you’re doomed to live with excess weight, nor is it the mark of a faulty body. It does mean you have a lot to understand about how you function best and what you need to keep a stable, healthy weight.

That’s a series of skills very different from dieting.

You live in a world designed to make you fat. Even inside your home.
Modern life is a cesspool of consumption and non-solutions. Every uncomfortable emotion has an indulgence and god-forbid you admit having anything less than perfect willpower.

I admit it, readily.

Highly processed, obesogenic food and bad ideas about weight are the norms. Sorting through it all is work but the result is freedom.

This is me at 50. Happy, not battling with my body, not worried about everything I eat. Just enjoying my low-trigger, active, well-nourished, under-committed life.

Something better is possible but it's–not another diet.