Why is weight loss so hard, even when you know what to do?
I have a confession that's a little embarrassing to say out loud: when I break out, I think it's my fault.
Not "hm, hormones are weird" or "stress does that to me sometimes." My actual, immediate thought is: this is completely my fault. I have every resource in the world — I have a group chat full of naturopaths and nutritionists, I could ask a professional a question about my skin before I've even finished asking it, and I still, somehow, land on personal failure. Like there was a version of this week where I ate perfectly and slept enough and managed my stress flawlessly, and I just... didn't choose it.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is that acne is actually a chronic disease, it’s a thing some bodies do, the same way some bodies deal with arthritis, depression or anxiety — these are conditions that we don't ask people to personally take the blame for.
And one topic in our life where we should be extending the same grace is body weight.
The gap between knowing and doing
Here's a pattern I’ve seen many times: we treat knowing something as basically the same as doing it. If I know I should sleep more, and I'm not sleeping more, then not sleeping must be a choice I'm making badly.
Except knowing and doing are not the same skill. They're not even in the same family. You can know that walking after dinner would help your digestion and still not do it, not because you're lazy or undisciplined, but because there's something underneath that — a belief, a habit, a genuinely inconvenient life circumstance — that's actually running the show.
It’s not like you’re really asking for a mindset shift, but it comes disguised as “I’d really like to lose weight” when what it’s actually happeing is so much deeper than that, because it comes from a place where your body doesn’t really feel like home anymore.
And it takes a lot of detective work to really figure out what’s working and what’s not, you have to be very curious. Why do you keep saving recipes you never cook? Maybe it's not that you lack ideas. Maybe you're expecting yourself to make dinner at 5:45 when you don't walk in the door until 5:30, so really the problem isn’t really discipline, is that the math is not really mathing.
The two extremes we're stuck choosing between
At one point in our lives, we got handed exactly two options for how to relate to food and our bodies: total restriction, or total "food freedom," two full extremes and no in between. Either you're doing the elimination diet and tracking every gram, or you've thrown your hands up and decided not to think about any of it — which, as it turns out, is its own kind of relationship with food. You're still deciding how you relate to it. You've just decided the answer is don't look.
Most of us don't actually want either extreme. We want to feel good in our bodies, have energy for our kids, not think about food all day, and occasionally eat the thing we actually want without narrating it as a moral event. That's the middle ground. It's just that almost nobody online is modeling it, because the middle ground doesn't get the same reach as "I did this and lost 20 pounds."
Stop aiming for 100%
Truth is, that nothing really has to do with food, it’s almost always about culture and our relationship with food. Sitting for two and a half hours over lunch. Having the bread, the wine, the cheese, and also going for a walk the next day because you wanted to and you enjoy, not because you have to “burn the wine calories”.
We forgot about joy and whimsy when it comes to health, and then we wonder why our plans don’t stick. The goal was never supposed to be 100%. It's supposed to be sustainable, and sustainable has room in it for a bad week, a birthday cake, a season where sleep just isn't happening because your kid dropped a nap.
I think about my own over-responsibility a lot — my husband would call it my Achilles heel. If something's off, I assume I broke it. But some things aren't a fixing problem. Some things are a "be a little kinder to yourself while you figure it out" problem.
Want more of this?
I sat down with Dr. Ally Power, a naturopathic doctor who prescribes GLP-1s and sees the hormone side of weight struggles every day, and Liz Dornian, a nutritionist who built her career around the exact behaviour-change work I just described. We talked about all of it — the hormones, the medications, the biohacking eye-roll, the shame, and what it actually looks like to want something for your body without hating it first.
It's a nuanced episode, and an honest one. If you've ever whispered "I'd like to lose weight" like it was a secret, or felt ashamed for knowing exactly what you should be doing and still not doing it — I think you'll feel less alone by the end of it.
