I was recording a podcast Friday and had to interrupt my host when he mentioned my “15 years of permanent weight loss” with an update.

As of tomorrow, that number will be 16!!!

After losing 74 lbs, I began the process of cementing my success in place.

 

It was March 13, 2000.

I new diets didn’t work. I had left them in the dust.

Focusing on the new healthier habits, I vowed to never go back. I didn’t quite understand, but I was learning how to create a new lifestyle.

A new lifestyle isn’t something that happens in a vacuum, or overnight. It develops.

I wasn’t looking for more weight loss necessarily, but I lost another 18 lbs along the way.

That’s sweet too!

When weight loss comes second to changing behavior, it’s easy. Staying focused on the habits and behavior is a bit of work, but it’s something you can master over time. It gets MUCH easier!

After all, habits are merely behaviors repeated over time.

You can repeatedly diet, rocking and rolling into and out of healthy and unhealthy behaviors, or you can be in constant movement towards the positive, affirming habits that take good care of your body.

Same work, different outcome!

Now, I will acknowledge there are pressures in our world to go back to dieting, or to go back to binging and overeating. And the pressures are heavy, especially with every billboard and magazine leering at you, promising a quick reduction in your current dissatisfaction with a bite of this or a plate of that. Not many heroin addicts see billboards and magazines advertising their drug 150 times a day.

Family, friends and socializing can lure too. Not many pill addicts go to a family dinner and have to endure people passing plates of amphetamines or opioids around the table.

Stress will always be there. It’s part of life. But there are ways to minimize it, without downing half the candy dish at work. Come to think of it, not many alcoholics have to pass glasses of beer or wine fifty times a day at work.

Yes! Food addiction is different. I get it. It’s the only drug other people, some you know and some you’ll never meet unless you go to their Madison Avenue advertising firm, will push on you (legally too!).

The Fight is Worth It

But, I want you to know, my readers, it’s worth it. Because letting food (or any substance or behavior) control you means one thing: you are not free.

And we are all meant to be free. Free will is a natural yearning of all humans.

When we master our behaviors, we master ourselves, and, at that point, no person or thing has power over you.

You are free.