When All Else Fails

In the movies there is always a red button that when pressed something big is about to happen. Something blows up or the world ends as we know it when that little button is finally pressed. We dread the red button as it represents doom and no going back. Things will be different and we will need to rebuild. Yet sometimes we do really need to press the button.

Let’s face it most of the time changes are the result of us avoiding change so much that all else has officially failed. We are left without choice so we might as well change it all. Even then though we still hesitate to press the red button that will send a shock wave of changes throughout out our life. We imagine the worse and see the difficulty and strife this will cause and we think about it some more. Surely we don’t need to be this harsh and there has to be another way to fix things and have it all right?

When we have tried everything we know to do and a few things we guessed at might work at solving something and that doesn’t work either, what do we do? That was this big question but yet I really struggled with it namely because I knew at least for me not all had failed. Deep inside I knew the answer was the one thing I just didn’t want to do. I had not made it a priority. It was hard or I wasn’t committed. Make any label you want on it the heart of why there wasn’t progress was me. All else had failed because I wasn’t ready, committed, capable, motivated, making it a priority, putting in the work, you name it.

How many of us want to lose weight? There are a lot of people every day who start a new diet or say they will start it Monday and yet we are a nation of obese and overweight people putting our health at risk for more severe situations every day. We know we need to lose weight. We realize it’s not much fun squeezing into our tight waistbands every day. We say we’re going to do it. Yet we don’t or we do it a little bit and then stop. We blame the diet, hectic schedules, stress, and more. All else failed so it must not be meant to be.

Losing weight isn’t easy. I have struggled with it myself the last few years and I know a large part of that is my own unwillingness to be disciplined and consistent about it against everything else going on in my life. The heart of the matter isn’t that we are overweight but that a lot of other changes are also required in our life to not only give us the time we need to focus on health changes but keep them going and be successful at them. So we can’t just start a diet on Monday and expect to lose a lot of weight if we also haven’t worked to apply changes to the stress we have in our life, scheduled time to work out, worked out how we’re going to keep on track at work, how we’re going to get the laundry done, lunches made for the kids, homework completed and everything else that has been in the way to this point. All else in our life is balancing on a fine silk thread as it is and we wonder why our diets are not resulting in weight loss.

See the problem isn’t that we fail at diets or that we’re are just not able to lose weight. The problem is changing that scenario requires us to change all the other dependent things around it too. All else didn’t fail, we just saw the amount of changes needed and felt deflated by it all. We thought losing weight would make everything else better instead of the other way around where we create the environment that supports the health changes we want to make. It’s a lot of change. It’s a lot of work. It’s not quick or easy sometimes.

Change has a ripple effect throughout our lives that sometimes we’re not sure we want to have happen. My goodness I just want to drop some weight