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People get weird sometimes going on about how they DESERVE to lose weight but it hasn’t happened. It almost seems like they’re completelhy hacked off sometimes.

As in: "Hey, I only ate 3 lettuce leaves and some chicken broth but I gained half a pound yesterday! Whyyyyyyy?"

Um…what do you say to that? How do people get THAT hyper, anyway?

But back to answer that question: Why? Well, maybe because your body does not work like an accounting ledger where, if you put X in this column, then you get Y in that other column.

Yes, that’s right, Sparky: You are a biological organism. That means your body has an inherent degree of unpredictability. Don’t like it? Well, try to find somebody to transplant your brain into a robot body, then, ’cause that’s part of the human experience.

(And while we’re at it, I HATE it when somebody takes on a challenging tone with one of the “Why ain’t I losing?” quizzes. It’s like you’re being dared to find the problem…as if it’s my job to make sure you lose to prove that my eating habits work! Uh…that’s just annoying, man. Everybody is different and we all have to solve this puzzle ourselves. Get the chip off your shoulder, 'cause we're all just trying to help one another through this together.)

And hey, it’s not like you were sitting there griping and moaning the day you ate half a package of cookies and didn’t gain weight, right? So why are your whining now? Get over it already. (Which I can get by with saying, because I have done the same thing. Ha!)

Here’s the fact: It’s completely NORMAL for your weight to fluctuate up to several pounds in a single DAY. Yep. In a single day! So if you’re out there living and dying by the readout on your digital scale, you’re gonna have some unnecessary pain, man.

The scale obsession seems to go hand-in-hand with the “How many minutes is it gonna take for me to lose this 50 pounds?” Sometimes followed up with ”Because I’m going nuts here and I have my high school reunion in three hours and I’m getting married next week…”

Now, it's not like your buddy the Goddess doesn't get it. Oh boy, does she! I'll let you in on a little secret: the reason Goddess can nail your butt on all these little sneaky thought-processes is that she's SO been there, too! I know it 'cause I did it. Can't get much by me.

Really.

I’m going to say something kind of radical here: I don’t give a %$#% how quickly you lose it. And you shouldn’t either!

If you want this to WORK, if you want to keep your weight OFF forever, you will have to adjust your eating habits forever, too. Start eating like you used to, you’ll weigh what you used to.

So, can you see that it’s actually better if it goes gradually? If it’s all about speed, then it’s not about lifetime habits. Speed obsession = Counting the minutes until you lose the weight–and, by implication, can “stop the diet.” So that turns in to, really, counting the minutes until you start packing the pounds back on. Doesn’t sound so good that way, does it?

TAKE YOUR TIME. It's not how fast you do it, it's how permanently you do it!

I dunno. Almost everything in life seems to work better if you let go of the anxiety, the second-guessing, and the angst. Just let go and do your thing, man. And find your Zen.

Once you get Zen, the rest starts to come much more naturally. That's definitely worth waiting for!