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Be alerted, gentle readers. This post contains an inconvenient and painful truth.  (It’s painful to me too.)

As my posts under the category of “philosophy of weight loss” will attest, I am interested in the personal philosophies and psychological aspects of weight loss. But I have been dancing around a fundamental point. I found a blog post from a motivational speaker in Australia, Craig Harper, who put it right out there.

One of Craig’s readers, Mandi, writes [condensed here]:

Please, please, please, please help me….I currently weigh 104 kilos and often cry when I look in the mirror. As you always say “I know what to do but I don’t do what I know.” I am so sick of myself and the way I constantly shoot myself in the foot that I don’t know what to do any more….Why do I continue to self-sabotage when I hate the way I look and feel?…

Mandi’s lament sounds familiar to me–painfully familiar. She describes a vulnerable, stuck place that makes me ache.

Craig gives a long and thoughtful response. The full post is here. But this excerpt cuts to the painful truth:

…you need to want it enough. You might think you want it enough now but I can tell you, you don’t. When you associate more pain with staying in your current condition than you do with throwing that chocolate in the bin (or feeding it to the dog), then you’ll get the job done and find your way to your best body. As with any change process, you will always be the problem and the solution. [emphasis mine]

Wow. Craig’s reply sums up the answer to my question, “Why?” It’s about priorities: wanting it enough.

Perhaps you have read The Secret. The “energy frequency” premise is, for me, too far-fetched to be useful (for the short version, skip to 5:50 in this video), but an inversion of The Secret makes sense to me:

When I want to reach a goal, and I make it a priority over other goals, then my real-life actions and decisions automatically take me there.

The angst, like Mandi’s, simply vanishes. My behavior leads me in the right direction. Things fall into place.

This truth applies to all my goals. As an unmarried middle-aged suburb dweller* who is 15 pounds above goal weight, I wrestle with painful truths. But if I want to make progress on all my goals, I am only dancing around until I ask myself honestly, “Do I want it enough?”

When the answer is “no,” I always have strong arguments to defend the reasons–sometimes outdated and laced with shame, but strong nonetheless. So then, the real work of weight loss, or achieving any goal, is not to collect healthy recipes, join a gym, or join Weight Watchers. All that will come in its time and place. We know that stuff already. As Craig says, we are the problem and the solution.

Instead, the real work is breaking down the arguments that defend that vulnerable, stuck place.

Ouch.

*David Byrne sings, “How did I get here?” The whole song is so awesome.

I am ashamed, but the open life of a blogger compels me to admit, that I broke my Attitude Adjustment Diet with pizza and beer on Friday night.

Of course the fundamental question is: Why?

I knew better, I just didn’t choose to act better. Why not?

I craved pleasure. I was unhappy. I wanted pizza and beer to help me feel happy.
(No excuse but an interesting side-note: the beer itself weakened my rational thinking.)

Did the pizza and beer make me happy? Yes, for a little while last evening.  No, today.
And the unhappiness today outweighs the happiness of last evening. It always does.
This is an old lesson that I keep forgetting. It is not a lesson that is hard-wired into my brain.
The old thinking keeps coming back, and what happens? Pizza and beer happen.
The rational thinking gets conveniently forgotten.

Three years ago, though, the rational thinking was easy.  Back then, I made the right decisions in the moment, and I got very healthy.
Why?

My motivations were different then. How?