do you really want it?

Have you ever really sat down and thought about why you want to lose weight? Like really get to the bottom of it?

I mean yes I get it, all of us that are overweight or have some weight to lose obviously have some desire to lose weight, but have you really dug in-depth to the why?

If you want to look good, who do you want to look good for? What’s the definition of looking good? For those bodies that you look up to do you understand what their lifestyle is like to achieve it? Is it worth it? Does looking good make you feel happy, or does looking good make you think it will make others like you more and that makes you happy? Does how you look to others really matter to you? What happens if you lose weight and to yourself you look great, but others don’t really notice, will that be worth the journey? 

Whatever your honest answer is to those questions is the right answer. There’s no right or wrong, but answering those harder questions helps you have a better understanding on how to pursue your weight loss journey.

If in the end you ask yourself all the hard questions and you realize you don’t really want to lose weight, you just feel the pressure of others to do so, and perhaps currently is not the best time to pursue it, that’s totally ok.

That’s much better than constantly getting frustrated cos you’re struggling on a journey which you don’t even really want yourself.

I gotta admit for the majority of my life I was obese and all the time I was on some kind of diet trying to lose weight, but none of those times I truly wanted to lose weight. I mean sure I wanted to look better to impress/attract others, I thought losing weight was the answer to that. I wanted to stop getting bullied cos of my weight, I wanted to stop the constant nagging I had to go through about my weight.

But if there was no nagging, no bullying, and people were already impressed/attracted to me I would have been happy being obese. For myself I really could care less about how I looked or how much I weighed.

I had no goal to be on the cover of GQ magazine.

What changed for me was in 2015 when I really sat down and asked myself the hard questions. I was frustrated in December of 2014 where I was making new year resolutions for 2015. Every year prior to that I had made resolutions to lose weight, but always ended up failing. I found it ultra frustrating that years later I’m at the same spot making the same resolution.

So I asked myself: do I really want it?

I allowed myself to say yes or no, but I promised myself to stick to the answer. I told myself it’s ok to not want to lose weight, cos if that’s how I really feel then I should just do it and stop letting people around me or society decide what my goals should be and live my life on my own terms.

But, if I truly wanted to lose weight I had to do it for myself and nobody else. I had to stop letting others get to me, and promise myself to get the job done no matter what.

I decided that I truly wanted to lose weight.

Mainly because I completely understood that at 123kg, that’s in the category of morbid obesity and as I didn’t have any major health complications back then, I knew there were a lot of potential risks. My 1st kiddo was just a year old, and I asked myself if I wanted to be there on her wedding day.

I did, I really did.

Then I thought to myself if I truly wanted to live longer, the first step is to lose weight into a normal BMI. So 2015 I took my first step towards this goal, and never turned back.

This was the one and only time I went on a diet successfully (I was 72kg at the end of 2016). I truly believe it’s cos I figured out my why. Understanding my why made it easier to push forward when things got hard. It was easier to be discipline cos the north star was clearly in sight.

I don’t think I ever had a north star before that, I just would go on diets constantly cos others and society made me believe that’s what I should be doing. It kept failing cos it always came a time where I’d say “well fk this, this isn’t worth it.”

Spend some time asking yourself the hard questions, being truly honest with yourself. When you are pursuing a goal that you truly want, the hardships along the journey get a little easier to deal with and giving up becomes near impossible.

And that’s the thing with this weight loss journey:

if you don’t give up, it’s just a matter of time before you reach your goals. 

—Po