It's supposed to be hard.

This is something I really struggled with but I think it's something that may help some of you.

In 2015 I lost a bunch of weight. I got down to 165 and I felt great about myself. I was shocked at how little effort it took. There weren't that many times when I was legitimately hungry during the process.

I fucked it up after taking a trip to New York with a friend and losing mental strength that had made me lose that weight.

I built up that mental strength out of an expectation that it would be very hard to lose weight (I was 202 and 5'10" starting out so not fat, which I thought would make it harder) so when I slipped, each and every time I've tried to come back I've been expecting that same easy experience as when I was 24.

But here's the thing: so much of this sub and subs like it are focused on feeding our need for comfort. And I actually think it's pretty detrimental. We develop tricks to make it easier to lose without noticing the effort and we tell each other when we start out that CICO is easy and I think that sets up the wrong expectations.

For example, I've been trying and failing to get started for a year now and I finally had an epiphany today that, actually, that feeling at the end of the day when you just want one more thing to eat...giving in to that feeling is the difference between losing and maintaining or gaining. Rather than avoiding that feeling we should be welcoming it. That's the feeling of your body saying "hey, we might have eaten at a little bit of a deficit here...maybe just one more bowl of cereal." And we've (at least from my perspective) set ourselves up to avoid the pain and hardness of weight loss so much that it's actually an alien feeling to actual have a feeling of emptiness or light hunger. But that's a natural part of eating less than you expend. Your body is going to notice, one way or another and you should learn to accept and embrace that.

My whole point here in this rant is that we already spend so much of our lives avoiding things that are hard. Sometimes something being hard actually means that it's worth the effort. We do it because it's hard and because it trains our minds not to be so weak and used to things being easy all the time.

So I gotta say, after that realisation I'm finally feeling what's been missing that past few years. I'm realising what it'll take.

Remember: when you hit resistance, that's not your signal to give up. It's your signal to push harder so you beat the resistance.

submitted by /u/stoicgoblin
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