Have you ever signed one of those contracts you get in some
diet books - the ones where you commit to losing weight and you tell your
spouse, friends, or relatives so they can help keep you accountable?
It doesn’t
work.
It doesn’t work because you are accountable to one person:
you.
It’s the same as buying a gym membership and telling
yourself that you’ll use it because if you don’t you have wasted money.
If you need the threat of embarrassment or loss of money to
force yourself to lose weight and shape up, you are not ready. You have to want
to lose weight and shape up; you cannot force yourself to do it.
If you start to entertain thoughts of signing a contract or forking
out for a gym membership to keep yourself honest, stop. It means that you
really aren’t ready. Better to wait until you are.
If you want to lose fat, you have to get uncomfortable.
Not the kind of message you’ll get from your celebrity fitness DVD or see on the label of your favorite fat burning supplement and for good reason: discomfort doesn’t sell supplements or DVDs. But the hard truth is you’ll get nowhere until you accept discomfort.
“You must become uncomfortable. Feeling good does not create change. Feeling uncomfortable creates change.”
Larry Winget
Diet and fitness books tell you what you want to hear; to look for ways of making exercise easier – to potter about in your garden until you work up a “light sweat”, to roll around on an over-inflated beach ball and to eat every two hours so you don’t get hungry.
Don’t want to sweat or get hungry? Poor baby!
You need to get hungry and you have to get uncomfortable. How else will you find out what true hunger feels like and how else will you send your body a strong enough signal for change when you workout?
If you want to believe that effective exercise involves a leisurely jog along a golden beach while you grin like a Cheshire cat on heat, and if you want to believe that you can buy a slimmer body over the counter of your local health food store, then be my guest. Just don’t expect to lose fat.
Discomfort is where progress starts and fatness ends.
When things start getting uncomfortable, you know you are on the right track.
I had to get really uncomfortable before I decided it was time to do something about my weight. The discomfort was very real, very personal, and very scary. Instead of running away from it, I faced it head on. I discovered it wasn’t so bad after all. For 46 years I tried to bury my discomfort with food. I fed it until it became a 320lb behemoth that I could no longer ignore.
“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
John F. Kennedy
The good news is that once you accept discomfort, it gets easier. The more willing you are to accept discomfort, the easier losing fat becomes.
Diet books and magazines want you for a repeat customer. It’s in their interests to keep you fat. That’s why they set their word processors to find words like “uncomfortable”, “hard”, and “work” and replace them with words like “enjoy”, “easy”, and “relax” - words that give you a warm glow inside but do f**k-all for losing fat.
Did that make you feel uncomfortable? Good! We’re on the right track.
One day in September 2007, an eye doctor told me if I didn’t take care of myself, I could go blind. I have diabetic retinopathy.
This news was - as my friend, Joe, says - “just the kick up
the arse” I needed. I was so scared of losing my sight, I decided on the spot
to lose weight.
Before that day, I believed that losing weight took lots of
willpower. I soon realised I was wrong. Losing weight doesn’t take willpower;
it takes “want power”.
"We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one.Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now."
-George Sheehan
That warning from my eye doctor made me want to lose weight
more than I wanted the foods that made me fat. At social gatherings when the
dessert menu came round, it didn’t take willpower to resist - I simply didn’t
want any.
People tell me I have lots of willpower. Then – usually with a
mouth full of dessert – they tell me they are “weak-willed”. They are not
weak-willed; they just want dessert more than they want to be slim.
James Gordon said it best:
"It's not that some people have willpower and some don't. It's that some
people are ready to change and others are not."
