Keep Moving Forward: It's All So Frustrating

How to beat frustration on your weight loss journey and learn patience in a world that is moving faster and faster.

Transcript

  📍 Welcome back to the Keep Moving Forward podcast, where we talk about weight loss, personal transformation, and accountability. I'm your host, Eric, AKA, the used two guy, and if you're on a journey to become a healthier, stronger version of yourself, then you're in the right place. On today's episode, I want to dive into something that I think we've all experienced frustration for most of us just thinking about starting a diet or exercising almost immediately brings to mind getting frustrated.

You know how it goes. You're doing everything right, but the results just aren't happening. Or at least not as fast as you'd like. I know I've been there. You're tracking your food, showing up for workouts, drinking water, doing all the things you should be doing, and yet the scale just doesn't move, or worse, it goes the wrong direction.

Those genes you're trying to squeeze into don't seem to fit any different, and you're hungry and grumpy all the time, and that little voice in your head starts whispering. What's the point of all this? If you've ever felt this way, if you're feeling this way right now, this episode is for you. We're gonna talk about why these moments happen, how to reframe your mindset when they do, and most importantly, how to keep pushing on when it feels like nothing's working.

So let's get into it. I think one of the biggest reasons we struggle with frustration is because we live in a culture of instant gratification. We've become used to getting what we want immediately. Almost anything we want, we can order on Amazon and it shows up in a day. Heck, sometimes the same day, and you never had to leave your couch, want something to eat.

You don't even have to talk to a person anymore. You just tap a few buttons on your phone and it's delivered right to your door. Need entertainment, it's streaming 24 7. No need to go to a movie theater or gasp a video store. By the way, for any listeners in their twenties, a video store was a place you went to rent videotapes or DVDs.

You got to keep them for a few days and then you had to return them. And in the days of VHS tapes, you had to return them rewound or they charged you more. Fridays were all about trying to get a copy of the newest release before they were all rented, or if they were hanging around in the store in the hopes that a copy was returned.

I know I'm a dinosaur, but thinking back, that was kind of cool and what made it cool was the anticipation of knowing you were going to rent some movies and not knowing what you would get. But our current world is working hard to rewire our brains to move ever faster. The phone or computer on which you're likely listening to this podcast has almost 100,000 times more processing power than the computer is used to launch Apollo 11.

That's the rocket that landed the first minute on the moon. But think about how frustrated you can become with that phone when you expect Facebook to load and it just doesn't load fast enough. All your text message just won't send. Expecting everything to happen in an instant is an ever increasing expectation of everything in our lives.

But here's the thing, weight loss, and honestly, most things requiring a large amount of commitment and effort don't work like that. Real lasting change doesn't happen overnight. It happens over weeks, months, even years. It's easy to forget that because we see so many of those then and now photos that make the process feel instantaneous.

But what those pictures don't show are the days of commitment. See, while our world wants to move faster and faster, our minds and bodies move at a much slower pace. For me, I know impulse control isn't a great strength of mine, and overeating is certainly something that comes along with that territory.

Just that little thought, I really want a chip or cookie or whatever can turn into this kind of itch. That my brain just wants to scratch. Problem is it isn't just one cookie or just a couple of chips for me, that impulse quickly escalates. Heck, why not have five cookies and half a bag of chips? Notice I didn't say, geez, I'm really hungry.

As I've said before, I don't think I really knew what being hungry was, and my overeating had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with emotion and impulse. The accountability process I've put in place in my life certainly has helped me by providing barriers to curb my desires, to just grab a cookie or stop at a drive through or a snack cabinet when I walk through the kitchen and just to eat a whole tube of Pringles.

Um, but really that requires resetting mental expectations. It took time for those cravings to die down in me and to get a bit quieter, but eventually they did. And when those impulses rear their head, I remind myself that I'm gonna have to record what I ate. And often that simple act of thinking about being accountable shuts it down.

I will fully admit that getting comfortable in this practice took time and a lot of repetition. In the first year of my weight loss journey, I lost a hundred pounds, which sounds impressive, right? But then it took me almost another year to lose the next 25. That second year was a completely different challenge.

There was just less weight to lose. I had added in running, which built some muscle so my weight actually went up, which didn't sit well at first. There were weeks where very little seemed to change, and I can understand how that could become frustrating. But looking back now, I know those weeks were just as important as the ones where I saw big results.

Because this journey isn't about just the weight or the numbers on the scale. It's about changing deeply ingrained behaviors, both mental and physical. And those changes take time. It's pretty simple. Our minds and bodies aren't meant to respond to change at the same pace as the world around us. Making those lasting changes requires a different perspective.

Here are two tips. Point one, there's no shot clock on weight loss. I was gonna use a baseball analogy here, but since they added the pitch clock, it doesn't really hold up except to say that our modern world wants everything to move, move, move. So much that even sports going back to 1876 have changed their rules to speed things up.

By slowing things down and focusing on small, repeatable steps, you can avoid that frustration mindset that sabotages the efforts of so many. Point two, our bodies and minds take time to adapt. Most diet plans, promise quick wins, and their commercials certainly make it seem possible. I'm sure there are programs that can get you to drop silly amounts of weight in short amounts of time.

But here's the thing, I doubt very much that anyone who happens to succeed on those plans sustains that weight loss for any meaningful amount of time. Why? Because real change requires us to adapt to a new way of being, and that adaptation requires three things, repetition, time, and patience. Early on in my journey.

It was pretty easy for me to define success. Each week I weighed in and if the scale went down, yay. And if not, boo. I think I was lucky in those early days because I had so much weight to lose that the scale was really friendly to me for quite a while. But like everything, eventually the weight loss began to slow down, and with that, I had to find new ways to define progress and success.

I've had weeks where I've done everything perfectly, but the scale didn't move. I'm sure you've had those as well, and it can be disheartening. A week of work for what? I get it. That sucks. But instead of feeling defeated, I encourage you to broaden your definition of what success can look like. Think about all the other ways progress shows up.

You're getting stronger. Maybe you can lift heavier weights or run a little farther without stopping your clothes fit better, even if the number on the scale hasn't changed, your body has you have more energy. You're waking up feeling more refreshed, getting through the day with more focus. Your habits are becoming second nature.

What once felt hard, like tracking your food every day or going to the gym or going out for that run or bike ride is now just part of your routine, and sometimes progress shows up in ways you can't see at all. Maybe your body's adjusting, rebuilding muscle or recovering from stress. The point is progress is still happening even when you can't measure it in the numbers.

Now let's talk about setbacks, because let's be honest, they're gonna happen. Maybe it's a weekend where you completely go off track. Maybe it's an injury that forces you to take a break. Or maybe like we talked earlier, it's just one of those times where nothing seems to be working and you start questioning everything.

When these moments happen, we usually have three options. One quit, just give up. Go back to the old habits. Just tell yourself it wasn't meant to be. Two, double down. Go all in On extreme measures, cutting calories way down over exercising, trying to force results in business. This is called escalation of commitment.

It's effectively throwing good money after bad in the hopes that by just spending a bit more or trying a bit harder will yield some sort of successful result. What really happens though is that the small failure. Becomes a much larger, more spectacular failure. Three, we can step back, look at the bigger picture, and figure out what's working and what's not, and make small adjustments in our approach.

Now, option three is obviously the right one, but it's also the hardest because it requires us to set aside our frustrated emotional response in favor of a measured rational response. We need to first be honest with ourselves and open the change. One thing that's helped me is asking myself some questions.

Question one, what's really causing this frustration? Maybe there are other areas of my life that are adding to my stress and, and causing that frustration. Life is difficult and adding and taking on a major challenge like losing weight can compound those stressors. If you don't balance things, I know it's easier said than done.

Question two. Am I expecting results faster than they can realistically happen? Sometimes when we take on a large task, we're pumped up with motivation and focus. This can lead to setting unrealistic, realistic expectations for how the whole journey will go. For example, I lost a lot of weight in my first two months.

I mean, in hindsight, it's obvious because I was really changing what and how much I ate, and my body just really had no choice but to shed that weight. But I couldn't keep those expectations. I had to adjust them as the weight loss slowed down. Question three, am I really being honest with myself about my habits and what adjustments I can make without going to extremes?

You have to really set those boundaries and honor them if you find yourself cheating, cutting corners. Those little cuts, they'll actually sabotage your entire plan. So I encourage you, be honest, you're only cheating yourself. Frustration is normal, but how you respond to it is what determines whether you keep moving forward or fall back in the old patterns.

Here's one thing I wish I had learned sooner. You can't hate yourself to success. In past attempts of weight loss, I thought I had to get angry with who I was, and that if I disliked that version of me enough, he would be gone. I know this sounds kind of ridiculous, but I don't think I was ready to accept all versions of me, so I thought I had to be hard on myself to stay motivated, that if I slipped up, I had to punish myself.

That if I wasn't seeing results, it was because I wasn't trying hard enough. But here's the thing, that kind of self-destruction isn't sustainable. Unless you wanna be thin and miserable all the time, and even then you'll probably be all alone because nobody will be able to stand you. So what does work?

Forgiveness. Letting go of guilt after a slip up and focusing on the next step forward. Consistency over perfection. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to show up over and over again, as I say, in every session, good enough is good enough.

Perspective. This is an ultra marathon, not a sprint. One bad meal, one bad week, or even one bad month doesn't erase all of your progress. At the end of the day, the people who succeed in their weight loss journeys or anything aren't the ones who never struggle. They're the ones who struggle, fall down, get frustrated, and still keep going.

Here are some closing thoughts. Weight loss isn't instantaneous real. Sustainable change takes time. Please remember that the scale is not the only measure of your success. Celebrate those wins you can't see. Also, remember that setbacks are inevitable, but they don't define you. How you respond to them is what defines you.

In the long run, self-compassion absolutely matters. You can't hate yourself into a better version of you. And most importantly, remember that frustration is part of the process. It's not a sign that you're failing, it's a sign that you're still in the game.  📍 Thanks for tuning into the Keep Moving Forward podcast.

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