stop looking for easy

Y’know back in my 123kg days I went on and off all kinds of diets cos it always ended up feeling too hard cos at the back of my mind I thought there was some super easy method out there that I just haven’t discovered yet. I thought losing weight was suppose to be effortless, just like how all the advertisements out there say. It’s always:

“Drink this, and eat all you want to lose weight”

“Do this easy thing 10min a day and guarantee abs in 6 weeks.”

I fell for it. Every single time.

I used to think that if my diet was starting to feel hard that it meant it wasn’t working and I was doing something wrong. Whenever it felt hard I’d remember all those articles and ads that promised how easy losing weight is so feeling the suffering felt wrong and so I’d quit and look for a new diet method to hopefully find that “easy thing”.

That was more or less the way all my diets looked before. Now that I’ve actually been through the journey and lost over 50kg, hit my goals, studied more about how losing weight actually works, I’m gonna share the mini secret with you:

There is no easy method.

There is no such thing as an easy diet where from start to finish it’s all fine & dandy, super effortless, just like watching Netflix and eating cookies all day at home. No such thing.

Dieting is hard.

Sure there are methods out there that you might feel more comfortable with than others but the journey itself, it’s hard. There will be some form of suffering. Now I’m not saying that to scare you or anything, but it’s the truth to the journey. Every journey that is meaningful and takes time will include some hardships and sufferings that you will have to work through. It’s true in school, true in relationships, true in careers, true in life, and absolutely true in the whole journey of losing weight.

Stop quitting your diet when it gets hard.

Work through it. Find a way to get past the hump. Stop thinking that there’s an easier path somewhere else that you gotta look for, that path doesn’t exist. When you quit cos the going gets hard, every diet is gonna basically feel the same. It’s always gonna get hard at some point.

Here’s the good news though.

Hard is normal, and hard isn’t impossible. Yes there may be sweat, tears, and frustrations, but that’s all part of it. As long as you don’t quit, it’s not a failure. It’s growth. It’s learning what works for you, what doesn’t, what tweaks you gotta make, it’s also a long journey of learning about your own habits and preferences.

Losing weight isn’t a straight path. There’s all kinds of twist and turns. As long as you’re going in the right general direction, you’ll be making progress over time.

Remember this journey it’s a long long one. Hitting your weight goal isn’t the end of the journey either, that’s just the end of chapter 1. Planning and mindset looks very different when you’re looking at this is a summer ordeal versus a 1-3yr plan.

I hope that by sharing all these nitty gritty details of how the journey actually looks like it helps you build your mindset and expectations on what it’s gonna take to lose weight sustainably. I think over here in these weekly letters I’ll start to go more in-depth about the mindset and mental side of things, since I’ve basically covered all the more fundamental stuff in some shape or form in previous letters, posts, videos and Q&As.

Any particular topics you want me to talk about first, reply and let me know!

— Po