My Struggle With Weight Loss and Why Losing Weight Is Harder Than People Think

The Reality of Weight Gain, Stress, and Healthy Habits

It occurred to me recently that I have made a lot of posts about diet and exercise, but I don’t talk about the reality of how hard it is to change those things. We develop our eating habits when we are children, and they continue to be shaped by the society we live in, our families, and what is most available to us. Not only do we have to fight with our learned eating habits to be healthier, but we also have to fight our own biology that has a predetermined idea of how much fat we should have and where it should be located. It is not easy to get our bodies to behave in ways they don’t want to, or to change our habits. Changing habits is difficult, and sticking with better habits might be even harder in my opinion. In this article, I want to talk about my journey to a healthier me, what types of things may impact my weight loss journey, and offer some advice from my experiences and information that I have found along the way about my struggle with weight loss.

Nobody Chooses to Become Overweight

I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to be 30 pounds overweight and look bad in all my clothes. No one does this. The “body positive movement” to me on the outside looked like people desperately trying to find reasons to love themselves in a world that blames the person who suffers for everything they suffer from.

Late for work? Your fault.

Cancer? Your fault.

Broke? Your fault.

Fat? It's definitely your fault.

... or is it?

I have had some bad experiences with doctors telling me to lose weight without offering any real advice on it. Perhaps even a referral to a nutritionist would have been more helpful than them just telling me to lose weight. I also had the same doctor tell me that yoga isn’t real exercise, to which I could only conclude that they had never done yoga.

Truthfully, the reasons for obesity, as far as I understand them, really are a double-edged sword. Some of it is the person's fault, and some of it is for reasons outside of their control. Up until recent times, starvation was a very common way that humans died. However, nowadays we have cheap food, made cheaply, and distributed widely especially to areas known as “food swamps.”

Food Swamps and Obesity

For a long time researchers attributed “food deserts” to be a major contributing factor of obesity in the USA. A food desert is a term used to describe places, usually in inner cities, where there are no grocery stores nearby where a person can get healthy food mainly in the form of fresh produce. However, a 2017 study published in the International Journal for Environment Research and Public Health found that food swamps may be more to blame for obesity. The term “food swamp” refers to an area that has a large amount of cheap, unhealthy food available from fast food restaurants, traditional dine-in restaurants, take out, and the grocery store (Cooksey-Stowers et al., 2017).

The core of the weight issue in America is that either physical distance, or prices make fresh nutritious food unobtainable. For those who cannot afford nutritious food, they are replacing nutritious food with processed fatty alternatives that may come from fast food or just less healthy inexpensive options in the grocery store, or corner store.

I want to attribute at least some of my weight loss trouble to the food swamp factor because it is nearly impossible to stick to your diet when getting food out. If I stuck strictly to a low FODMAP, anti-inflammatory diet as I try to follow, there would be a very short list of places I could eat and a short list of foods at those places that I could have without breaking my diet. If you look at the ingredients lists on items available at even places that are supposed to be healthy, you often find that the amount of saturated fat and sodium negates any kind of calorie count benefit.

However, the fight isn’t even just with the lack of nutritious foods, but also the temptation of highly available unhealthy foods. If I am starving and I go somewhere where I can have a $1 cheeseburger, or a $2 fruit cup there is no question that I will choose the cheeseburger. Why? Because the fruit cup may be more nutritious, but it is twice as expensive, and I can get two hamburgers instead of one fruit cup and actually feel full after I eat it. I know it sounds like I just said that it is my fault I can’t lose weight, but I ask that you hold your judgment for just a bit longer.

Why Biology Makes Weight Loss Difficult

As I said before, humanity for a large part only recently achieved the stability of the food supply to the point where we don’t worry about starving all of the time. Our bodies, however, have established over thousands of years of evolution that starving to death is a real possibility and has evolved in ways that prevent it. One of the ways that it evolved is by storing carbs as fat and keeping them for as long as possible. Our bodies will hang onto fat like a dog with a bone over everything else, including muscles. It only takes three days of not working out to begin to lose muscle mass and have to regain progress again.

In the case of eating unhealthy food, when we get hungry the hormone released that makes us hungry also makes us crave calorie dense foods. If our world wasn’t flooded with cheap calorie dense food we would have to seek out foods that were healthy to fill our tummies' demands. But, our world is not made that way, and most of the time we are choosing the quick cheap food instead of driving home to cook ourselves something healthy.

Chronic Stress, Cortisol, and Weight Gain

The last and final point that I want to make about why it has (probably) been so hard for me to lose weight is the chronic stress I have had over my life resulting in the constant release of cortisol (the stress hormone) and the resulting systemic inflammation (Pulde, n.d.). I, like many people, have been struggling with stability and searching for somewhere to feel safe for many decades, and my body is beginning to show wear and tear. One of the most obvious ways that it shows how stressed out I’ve been is refusing to give up its extra 30 pounds of fat.

Of course, there is a silver lining to this since obesity in itself is a load bearing exercise and useful to stave off the possibility of osteoporosis that all women face as they age due to lowering levels of estrogen (Zhou et al., 2023).

Building Healthy Habits Slowly

So what does a person do then?

I have hope for still being able to lose weight because if I am entirely honest, I eat too much junk food and I don’t keep up with exercising regularly. If anyone has been keeping up with me on Instagram, you’ll see that I have really been putting my best foot forward in these past few months to exercise more, even if it is just twenty minutes three or 4 days a week. I see my habits, and rather than trying to go full speed ahead on working out, I’m more interested in forming the habit of putting on the clothes, getting my space ready, and showing up on the mat.

I have somehow stopped eating so much junk food, mainly by not buying it and drinking more water when I feel like I need something. The signals that tell our bodies that we are hungry and thirsty often feel the same way, so when we think we are hungry, sometimes we are just dehydrated (Mineo, 2024).

Small Lifestyle Changes That Support Weight Loss

Not drinking your calories is another important tip to weight loss, and I don’t just mean alcohol. We need water to survive and be hydrated. Soda, juice, iced tea, and screwdrivers are all delicious, but they are not water, and it is not what we need. Soda and other caffeinated drinks dehydrate you, and you will only feel thirstier after drinking them. Alcohol also dehydrates you, but alcohol also shuts off our bodies' ability to burn calories, meaning that even if you have a low-calorie alcoholic beverage, it is still going to impact your weight loss goal (ScienceInsights, n.d.). Seriously, drink responsibly.

This article on Psychology Today by Alona Pulde M.D. suggests ways to create a sense of safety and reduce cortisol levels so that the body doesn’t slow the metabolism and increase fat storage (Pulde, n.d.). There are many suggestions on how to reduce stress, and regulate our nervous systems so what is right for one person may not work for another, and of course consult your healthcare provider.

Yoga, Exercise, and Accountability

My journey has led me down a path of a regular practice of yoga, usually following videos that I find on YouTube. I have tried videos from many different channels, but for learning the beginnings of yoga I have found Yoga With Adriene to be the most helpful. Research has also shown yoga may help reduce stress and PTSD symptoms (Nejadghaderi et al., 2024).

I have tried having a workout partner which many people say holds them accountable and makes them feel more normal especially if you are working out in a gym and socially anxious. However, working out with a partner can also result in relying on the partner to keep you motivated and if their motivation falls off yours does too. I love exercising with my boyfriend, but I have also decided to commit to my own weekly exercise goals and working out together when we are able to.

Why Diets Often Fail

While keeping myself to a regular exercising schedule is hard, sticking to a healthy diet consistently is even harder. When I speak about diet, I am not referring to something that you will just follow while you are trying to lose weight and then after pounds drop you start eating however you want again. The true meaning of a diet is the way that we eat, not a temporary change that is only for a specific amount of time and after that’s done you celebrate your victory by eating a whole cake.

One of the reasons people gain back the weight they lost is because of this misconception, and because our bodies are trying to ensure survival and they see the fat loss as a challenge that it readily accepts to defeat by putting the fat back.

However, it isn’t easy to follow a healthy eating diet if you frequently eat meals with others, aren’t able to prepare all of your meals, and crave foods that aren’t good for you. I know cheat days are controversial, but I can’t imagine never eating cake again or pizza or any of the other foods that I know I shouldn’t eat. Instead, I try to eat them very little, and not very often. I am not offering advice on cheat days because I don’t know if this is going to work out.

Healthy Eating Is About More Than Weight Loss

Eating healthier is also not just about the physical benefit of not looking unhealthy, but the benefits of eating healthy are felt long term and have their best impact on our health if they are permanent. Don’t eat more vegetables and fruit because you want to lose weight, eat them because they lower your chances of cancer and other chronic illnesses like diabetes (American Cancer Society, n.d.). Following a healthy diet also improves mental health, and your overall health as well.

Conclusion

In conclusion, be nice to obese people, and don’t assume that whatever caused them to be that way is entirely their fault. We live in a world that promotes the utmost convenience without the consideration of health, and the fast-paced life that makes it hard to find time to work out. Of course there will always be exceptions, but people who are already struggling do not need the judgment of strangers either.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on weight loss! Leave a comment or find me on social media!

References

American Cancer Society. (n.d.). American Cancer Society guideline for diet and physical activity for cancer prevention. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-activity/acs-guidelines-nutrition-physical-activity-cancer-prevention.html 

Cooksey-Stowers, K., Schwartz, M. B., & Brownell, K. D. (2017). Food swamps predict obesity rates better than food deserts in the United States. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(11), 1366. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5671970/ 

Mineo, L. (2024). Thirst and hunger signals can feel similar. Harvard Gazette. 

Nejadghaderi, S. A., Mousavi, S. E., Fazlollahi, A., Motlagh Asghari, K., & Garfin, D. R. (2024). Efficacy of yoga for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Psychiatry Research, 340, 116098. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2024.116098 

Pulde, A. (n.d.). Struggling to lose weight in midlife? Psychology Today. 

ScienceInsights. (n.d.). How alcohol affects weight loss and fat burning. https://scienceinsights.org/how-alcohol-affects-weight-loss-and-fat-burning/ 

Zhou, et al. (2023). The effect of overweight or obesity on osteoporosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261561423003412 

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The Diary Of A Flopping Fish and any posts or articles published on Diaryofafloppingfish.com are not reviewed by a therapist or medical or mental health professional. Resources are cited, and opinion is opinion. No advice or opinions in any articles replace professional advice from a doctor, therapist, or any other kind of health professional. The author is not a licensed professional of any kind.