FastDay User Blogs

How many times have you heard it, from friends, from loved ones, parents, sisters, strangers in the queue at the supermarket, whispered behind you on the bus, on the way home from work.

"All you need is WILLPOWER to lose weight". As if it is a major deficiency of mental ability, a social stigma that is the equivalent of having leprosy. "You don't have will power, you weakling!"

For half my life I believed I lacked 'will power', that I had this mental illness that shoved me down the social acceptability scales by many points. All because of one aspect in my life, just one. The inability to lose weight. The worst offender was my mother. She had an overactive thyroid all her life, she couldn't have put on weight if she had tried. But she was the most hurtful critic, I just didn't come up to standards she set, even knowing she had an unfair advantage. The numbers of times she managed to sabotage my weight loss with little snippets of barbed comments along the lines of "if she had more willpower she would do better" are uncountable. As if starving myself wasn't enough willpower.

But, what have you done in your life that required willpower? (I should be saying this to my mother, not you). I applaud all those who worked their way through University, I couldn't have done it, that required willpower of a kind I don't have. It required tenacity of a kind I didn't think I had.
Are you a single Mum, a carer? Have you stayed in a difficult marriage because the children would miss their Dad? Have you left a marriage and the home you had, because you or the children were in danger or lacked love? Did those acts or activities not take great willpower?
Are you in pain, suffering from a medical condition, fighting cancer, fighting for your disabled children. Dealing with drug side effects that make you shake, make a zombie of you, with pain so severe drugs can't control it? Have you sat in a corner at night sobbing your heart out for your child, yet the next morning been as happy as a lark, just for them? Does this also not require WILLPOWER? Willpower of a kind so deep even you yourself didn't know you had, till it was your time to suffer and hold on and not give up.

Have you tried diet after diet, time and time again. To fail, time and time again? Yet did you not get up, dust off and start another and another, knowing that you could well fail yet again, but this little twinkle of hope kept you trying again and again? Is this not willpower?

Yes! its all willpower! You, everyone of you have willpower, in bucket fulls. Yet you are judged on one little, tiny, negative aspect of your life, how heavy you are. How vain is society, the same society that judges everyone who is overweight to be a glutton, lazy, selfish all because we supposedly lack willpower.

Its not willpower we lack, its an eating regime that works for us, for each of us, that keeps on working for us long term. That gets our weight down and keeps it off long term. I think I have found that in 5:2, I hope so, my little spark of hope is a raging inferno at the moment. (Crikey I sound like an advert for 5:2)

If it doesn't work for you, if 5:2 isn't for you, never forget one thing.
It isn't WILLPOWER you lack, its a regime that works for you, that hasn't been tried or even invented yet that you need.

Go on with life knowing that YOU are a willpower powerhouse.