There Is No Hack, Loosing Weight Is A Deep And Emotional Process

My first client was a man in his early 30s who had just become a father and wanted to lose weight. He always had a big smile and everyday he told me how much he wanted to loose his belly fat.

A smart guy who’d done well financially, he didn’t fully understand how fat loss worked. He believed doing daily ab exercises, following a keto diet, and doing five hours of cardio weekly would get him there.

What he didn’t realize were the deep, underlying changes required and the hidden challenges he’d face, things the internet did not warn him about.

The thing I realized is that people struggling to lose weight often look for hacks and quick fixes to get results.

But even when these work for a while, they eventually fail. Because they’re applying rational, surface-level solutions to what is ultimately a deep, emotional problem.

All or Nothing

As Morgan Housel said, “no one’s crazy,” and there is a logical explanation that can justify your behavior, even if it’s a bad one in your eyes.

After my first month of coaching, I realized that people commonly adopt an all-or-nothing mentality.

Most people, if they skip one workout, will skip the whole week. If they choose to eat takeout because they’re too tired on the way home, they’ll order delivery for the whole weekend because, “What the hell, the streak’s broken.”

This is probably the most detrimental way to operate if you’re trying to work on your health and fitness. Failing is part of the process, and if you give it all up every time you slip, you’ll start from scratch over and over again.

I had a client, a young professional who had gained weight because of long hours and stress at work. He was outgoing and expressive, and he genuinely wanted to lose weight to feel better and more comfortable. The problem was, he had a deeply embedded all-or-nothing mindset.

He’d show up to training, improve his nutrition, and start building new habits, but as soon as he overindulged or went back to his old ways, he would stop everything and skip sessions for a whole week.

When it comes to fitness, getting back in shape, or losing weight, you need to bet on two things: small changes and time, clearly it wasn’t possible for him at the time because of this mindset.

Losing weight doesn’t mean following a meal plan or doing a crash diet. Losing weight is the consequence of altering your eating habits for good.

The reason it feels impossible, the reason why your brain resists change and tries to lead you back to old patterns—is because you’ve been acting a certain way around food for decades.

You learned as a child how to engage with food, how to use it, and you’ve developed a relationship with it that’s most likely unhealthy.

If you’re struggling to lose weight, it means that, at some point in your life, food became an escape.

And remember, no one is crazy. To your primal brain, which handles emotions, it doesn’t matter if your behavior leads to harmful long-term consequences as long as it delivers comfort in the short term.

That being said, the all-or-nothing mentality means that after one mistake, you’re out. But the truth is, this mistake, this relapse into your old ways is just your default pattern so you need to expect that you will fall back into it from time to time.

You can’t condemn yourself for acting the way you’ve always been acting. You will make mistakes, you will slip back into old patterns, and that’s just part of the process.

Expecting yourself to do everything perfectly, to quit your current self and reinvent yourself overnight, is both foolish and anxiety-provoking.

By cultivating an all-or-nothing mentality, you set unrealistic expectations for yourself, where one step back causes the whole structure to collapse.

You have to let go of that mentality if you want to reshape your physique. Otherwise, you’ll never sustain the process long enough to see the true results of your efforts.

You Can’t Eat Your Emotions

Weight is just the tip of the iceberg. The behaviours you cultivate around food are merely the visible part of the equation. You have to know that there’s a whole world beneath them.

Maybe you’re aware of it, maybe you’re not—but you need to understand that overeating, stress eating, indulging, all of these habits are tied to your emotions.

Food has become a coping mechanism. It helps you feel better in the moment when you’re sad, overwhelmed, frustrated, or even celebrating.

The problem isn’t really the food. Food is just an acquired behavior, not the source of the problem. And the most important concept to grasp is this:

You can’t change for the better if you only focus on the symptoms and not the root of the problem.

I knew someone who truly relied on food to self-regulate. Every time he felt down, every time he had a rough day at work, he would start snacking. He snacked throughout the day, and when it was time to go home, he’d order takeout on the way back.

We had countless conversations about it. At first, he was convinced his problem lay elsewhere—that he wasn’t doing enough physical activity, that his job kept him from walking a lot, and so on.

It took him months to truly understand that the real issue was his relationship with food—specifically, snacking and ordering takeout as a way to cope with work-related stress.

If you view food as the problem and simply try to limit yourself, you’re likely to fail.

What you need to explore, and be willing to uncover, is what’s happening behind the scenes. You need to understand why you’re using food in a dysfunctional way.

This is why diets don’t work, why gastric bypass isn’t a solution, and why Ozempic is far from being a magic remedy.

Some interventions may help for sure, but they’ll never resolve the issue entirely because they’re not aiming at the right thing.

The only way to do that is to reconnect emotionally, locate the true problem, and then fix your relationship with food once you understand what you’re up against.

Deprivation Is The Enemy

If you’ve tried to lose weight in the past, if you’ve tried diets, you’ve probably discovered that completely overhauling your eating habits—and your habits in general—is not the way to go.

Restriction is not sustainable. It only triggers cravings and isn’t and certainly shouldn’t be something you want to use and maintain long-term.

Deprivation is the enemy. The more you make something inaccessible, the more you’ll crave it.

It’s part of human nature to chase the things we feel we can’t have, especially when we believe they’ll make us feel good. This is also why most people fail their diets and can’t stick to a meal plan.

If I gave you the perfect meal plan right now, complete with instructions on how to cook, what to eat, and how much of it, I’m 100% sure you’d lose weight. But I also know for a fact that it’s not something you will be realistically able to sustain.

In the beginning, you’d be motivated, driven by willpower, and fuelled by unrealistic expectations about how quickly you’d lose the weight.

But after two weeks, it might feel like it’s not working fast enough. Suddenly, your old eating habits look much more appealing, and in your mind, there’s no way you can last a month like this.

The problem is, if you want to get in shape and stay in shape, it’s not about following a diet for a few weeks—it’s about building habits that last a lifetime.

Deprivation isn’t the way to get there. Instead, you need to learn and understand the fundamentals of nutrition and how to use them to your advantage.

One thing is certain: you can’t rely on fleeting motivation to get started or on willpower to keep going.

Willpower is limited. It gets drained by every little decision you make during the day, which is why doing anything after a long day at work often feels impossible.

That’s why you need to build systems. You can’t constantly battle food thoughts and cravings—you need reliable structures in place so you don’t have to rely on willpower all the time.

Here’s an example: you come home from work feeling drained and overwhelmed. You won’t want to start chopping vegetables and cook the meat, you’ll want it to be easy and direct and that’s how delivery platforms make the big money.

Now imagine the same scenario, but instead of deciding what to cook, preparing the meal, and doing the dishes, you have a pre-made box in your fridge. All you have to do is microwave it. In that case, you’re (in my estimation) a thousand times more likely to stick to your healthy routine.

I haven’t met anyone who can’t microwave a Tupperware yet.

For this to work, though, you have to get organized. You need to learn how to batch cook and prep your meals in advance for the week ahead.

This is just one example of the kind of systems you need to sustain your weight loss in the long run. Don’t get too fixated on the details rather try to understand the big picture.

Self-Sabotage

If you’ve been out of shape for a long time - (years being a long time, decades being a very long time) then the main issue is that it has become part of your identity, a part of who you are.

Your brain strives to maintain a stable representation of the world around it. As a result, your current identity, aka who you see yourself as becomes deeply anchored, making it difficult to convince your brain otherwise.

A little while ago, someone I was coaching told me they’d always been “a fatty.” From early childhood until now, he described himself as the one who’d always finish everyone’s plates at restaurants, the one who’d frequently go overboard with portion sizes.

When I heard that, I realized how deeply this identity was anchored in his self-image. It wasn’t just how he saw himself now - it was how they had identified for years, since childhood.

Even though it was a negative self-image, it provided him with a stable representation of himself in the world one that guided their decisions and maintained internal coherence. To your brain that’s really the only thing that matters, coherence is more important than happiness.

If you’ve always been overweight and that’s all you know, then finding a new identity requires letting go of the old one.

You have to separate yourself from that identity, essentially losing a part of who you are, to create enough space for the formation of a new one.

This process is complex but by now, I hope it’s clear that diets and nutrition hacks alone won’t cut it because the change needs to happen on a much deeper level.

The sooner you understand that your weight and habits are linked to your identity, the better. Ignoring this connection opens the door to self-sabotage.

Think about it: when you change your eating habits, start going to the gym, or stop snacking, there’s a part of your old self that feels censored and unable to express itself as it once did.

Self-sabotage can take different forms for different people, but in my experience, it’s often tied to self-comparison, negative self-talk, and poor decision-making.

It’s the classic scenario of sticking to a diet for two weeks, start seeing positive changes, then your old patterns kick in, and you sabotage your own progress and you order and eat a whole pizze.

The bottom line is this: your own identity can be the blockage preventing you from truly changing for the better. It can lead to self-sabotage.

To overcome this, you need to let go of the old identity through a slow, gradual, and emotional process. Only then can you begin to cultivate a new identity built on healthier habits.

The First Step

Those are the main things that you need to be aware of as you try to loose weight and adopt a healthier lifestyle, those are the enemies people don’t tell you about. These are the real emotional blockage that most of the people I’ve helped loose weight have encountered.

It can sound overwhelming at first and that’s not the point. I just want you to be completely conscious of those aspects because they’re in my experience, what truly prevents people from loosing weight.

When it comes to your first step, you need not to complicate your life and think that you need to change everything at once.

What you need rather, is a clear and complete structure that takes it one step at a time.

If you don’t want to do it alone, having someone that helps you in the process someone like a mentor, a coach can be extremely valuable.

Besides the support, you also need knowledge on what to do, I created fitness autonomy for that reason but feel free to find what works for you.

And as always I hope this helps, trust the process.