When It Comes to Weight Loss, People Want a Magic Pill

I have written before about my battle with food addiction. It has been a rough couple of years, with some ups and downs, but I’m hanging there.

At 38, I’m in the best physical shape of my life, and I have more energy than in my twenties. This fact has not gone unnoticed.

People who have known me for years keep repeating the same comments:

“Oh, my God. You are so thin.”

“You have lost so much weight!”

“You look really well.”

And then, of course, comes the inevitable question:

“How did you do it?”

Ufff…it’s hard to answer that one.

They see me drink green tea and ask: “It is because of the tea, right?”

It helps, but that’s not the whole story.

“Oh, it’s because you eat kale, right?”

Kale is an important part of my diet, but that’s not it.

“I bet you do a lot of crunches.”

Actually, no. I hate crunches. But I do exercise.

People want to know what’s that one thing that magically made weight loss possible for me.

They want an easy answer…yet, to quote a famous Christopher Nolan movie, the solution is “simple, maybe, but not easy.”

You see, some people do take the time to listen, but when I tell them my secret, they shake their heads:

1. I follow the clean keto diet. No refined carbs. Lots of leafy green vegetables and fat. A moderate amount of protein. I plan my meals to make sure this happens. I do this every day.

2. I exercise, not to the point of exhaustion, but I do exercise every day.

3. I don’t snack. I stick to my two meals a day (AKA, intermittent fasting). And yeah, I also do this every day.

And that’s pretty much it.

But people don’t like this answer.

They want an easy solution…ironically, they also want it to be super expensive or overly complicated. Unattainable. This way, they can say: “if I only had _____, then I would do it.”

They also think, “ If losing weight is so simple, why can’t I do it?” And they don’t like the answer to that question.

They come to the realization that to do weight loss the right, permanent way, you have to educate yourself, and people don’t want to have time for that.

They want a magic pill.

I know this because that’s what I used to want too.

A fellow teacher recently asked me to bring her some of the food I eat.

“I’m sorry?”

“Yes, could you just bring me a sample of what you eat every day. I want to see if I can stomach it.”

“Ok.”

And I did. I prepared my usual large salad with a side of protein (by the way, it was this recipe), all made with lots of olive and avocado oil and butter.

We had agreed to meet at work, a bit earlier than usual.

I got there before her and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

You see, when she asked me to share my food with her, I imagined that she wanted more than that. I thought she wanted to know what was behind the food: why the salad, why so much fat, why this kind of fats?

I thought she wanted me to educate her.

And then she arrived. Just in the nick of time.

“Hi! Oh, that looks tasty.”

She grabbed the food, say thanks a lot…and left.

She left.

There were no questions about the food, about the process, about…anything.

I felt like an idiot. I genuinely thought she wanted to know. To actually understand what was behind the making of the food.

By the way, that was my fault, not hers. I thought she wanted to have a conversation. I allowed myself to believe she wanted to learn from me. But no. She did tell me: she just wanted a taste.

But I didn’t listen. Instead, I pictured myself as a guru, imparting my wisdom from a pulpit, sharing my knowledge to a hungry crowd.

No.

That’s not how things work.

I cannot make people change. I cannot make them want to know.

After this incident, and after many more superficial questions by my coworkers, I spent months wondering, “Ok, if people know they are engaging in unhealthy eating behavior, if now they have information available to them, then why don’t they act on it?”

Then it hit me: I had it all wrong.

When I did it, it wasn’t because the media kept telling me I had to be thin to be valuable as a human being. And it wasn’t either because people close to me bullied me into losing weight. Those two factors had the opposite effect: they depressed me even more, pushing me further into my food addiction.

When I did it, it was because I finally got it. I understood that if I didn’t do something, my life was going to pass me by. I wasn’t going to be healthy enough to do all the things I wanted to do.

Suddenly, weight loss was unimportant. This wasn’t about the way I looked. This was about the way I felt.

To change my life, I had to stop lying to myself. I had to drop my excuses. I had to take an honest look at my life and accept that for almost 30 years, I had been on a mission to destroy my body. To kill myself slowly. To stop feeling.

Changing your eating habits is not about the way you look. It’s about being healthy. About having energy. About being active.

Once you have that, everything else falls into place.

So, why do people decide not to make a change?

They are not ready for it. They don’t really want it. Their minds are not in that headspace. My unsolicited advice will do no good. Damn, even when they ask for it, it still does no good. Because it’s not just about the food and the exercise.

Above all, health is about the mind.

We all have different journeys, different goals. Some people go their entire lives with what most people would call an unhealthy weight, and yet, they are happier than I’ll ever be. They have energy, they have peace. In other words: they are healthy.

In the end, this is not about telling people to jump in the keto and intermittent fasting wagon. Yeah, it worked for me, but that was my journey.

If you want to change your life, you need to find out what works for you: you have to own your health. You need to own your life.

And that’s what wellness is really about.

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Gabriela Rosales shares her life with a husband, a son, and 9 dogs. She currently works as a high-school teacher in a Mexican border town by night, and types articles and screenplays by day. Yeap, in that order.