The Toll the Weight Loss Struggle Can Take on Your Life

Can you put a price on your life? Yes. Everything you want in life has a price. Resources, effort, time, money, sacrifice. We pay in many ways. We don’t always want to see the price. In all things, we want a bargain. Even if we don’t acknowledge or recognize the full price of something, we want to find a way to reduce the cost. But therein lies a paradox—We experience greater stress over what we avoid or attempt to diminish than we’d experience if we accept what needs to be done and do it.

Variations on avoidance and procrastination are at the root of much of our anxiety and stress. Know how you feel when you put off an unpleasant task? It begins to weigh on your mind. Soon you can think of nothing else. Eventually you face what you know you must and as difficult as it may be, you feel an incredible sense of relief when it’s behind you. We’ve all experienced this. The scenario plays out in different ways in all areas of our lives.

Weight brings stress and anxiety into our lives on many levels. We feel the physical burden the most acutely. We experience limitations in ability and worry about developing metabolic syndrome. Even as we persist with certain daily eating behaviors, we know we should make changes. As long we don’t make them, the stress and anxiety bubbles just beneath the surface. We are driven to look for relief. This is where “bargain hunting” begins to insidiously break us down.

We are bombarded with weight loss marketing that promises high results with low effort. Chasing after the “magic bullet” over and over takes its toll. Repeated failure may ultimately hurt even more than complacency. Eventually, we may finally realize that we’ve got to accept the true cost of changing our bodies and stop hoping we’ll find some easier way.

Real change begins in our lives when we face what needs to be done and accept the full price of what we want. If you are a person who struggles with a body naturally predisposed to be larger and obstinate food-driven behaviors that have the power to keep wars raging in your head, losing weight could be the most costly investment of your life. The price is very high, in effort and sacrifice especially. Embracing this price and giving up on false hope begins to lessen the stress. Where magic bullets fail, genuine effort and work bring results and an increasing sense of relief that the right choices are at last being made—and succeeding!

Repeated weight loss attempts that end in failure create their own vicious trap. In many ways, it may damage us even more painfully than simply remaining fat.

Have you struggled to lose weight for many years? Are you coming to terms with what it’s really going to take? What do you think you could do differently that has failed you in the past?