When I turned 'a certain age' Facebook started sending me advertisements every day titled “how to lose those 5 kilos” or"how to remove stubborn belly fat". How did Facebook know? How did they know that I am five kilos overweight and not happy?

Now that I am 'a certain age' there might just be a light at the end of the tunnel I thought. I could lose the weight and finally be truly happy.

So, I tried the Atkins diet and I lost six kilos in two weeks, can you believe it? I was deliriously happy for an equivalent two weeks and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore. I hadn’t put the weight back on (yet) so where did my happiness go?

Many of us truly believe that if we could just be thin we would be happy but unfortunately there is no such thing as happiness. Sounds cruel I know but happiness is not a tangible thing. Happiness is a state of mind like any other feeling, sadness, anger, jealousy and the rest and it is highly susceptible to what our brain is doing which for some reason likes to be negative.

Instead of focusing on our perceived flaws it would make sense to do things that help sustain a positive, happy state of mind. We are so full of self loathing relying on things outside of ourselves to make us happy that we have no chance of achieving it. And not just losing weight. Sometimes when we do achieve our goals we then go ahead and sabotage it. Why do we do that? Low self esteem it would seem. Sometimes we are actually terrified of achieving what we think we want.

We actually like to keep beating ourselves up because we are not losing weight or not doing other things we think we should, we may even be using it as an excuse for things we don’t want to face in life. For example, if you decided that losing weight would encourage you to go out and meet more people you might sabotage your diet because deep down you are terrified of actually doing it. 

Fad diets only seem to work at first and then because we are essentially depriving ourselves of the things we like it’s inevitably going to fail. This then in turn makes us feel worse about ourselves and more depressed. It’s a roller coaster. So how to get off it?

If we can acknowledge that having a better state of mind can allow us to actually pursue goals of good health, without resorting to hating ourselves for not doing it, we can actually attain true satisfaction. By simply feeding our bodies with nutritional food, our minds with positive thoughts and being active we will start to feel good and thereby we might actually start to like ourselves.

Imagine what we could do then.

[product id="1485"]
[product id="1386"]
[product id="1478"]