Overweight people often claim to have no time for weight loss, yet if you look at their actual behavior, they have plenty of time — they just put so many other things first. They somehow manage to keep up with their favorite TV shows. They go to work. They spend time with family and friends. If I was 50-60 kg overweight, goodness — I wouldn’t watch TV at all. I wouldn’t read any books except for those on the subjects of diet and exercise. I would put my career and family and social life on the back burner and exercise at least 2-3 hours per day to get the weight off. I would negotiate agreements with anyone that would be affected by this. Being 50+ KG overweight is just too serious; that would mean my very life is being threatened. That’s not something that can be put on the back burner even to income. If someone is holding a gun to your head and threatening to kill you, you don’t say, “Hang on, I have to finish this project first,” or “Sorry, I’m on the way to a family celebration.”

But of course, obese people don’t take health this seriously. Their standards are so low that being obese is acceptable, perhaps just mildly annoying. That’s why they’re obese. I’ve seen some obese people who’ve lost a lot of weight; in every case I can recall, at some point they made health their absolute priority, and they acted on it. It became more important than work, school, family, friends, etc. Many people think this kind of behavior is selfish … yet another limiting belief that keeps people overweight. It’s not selfish to preserve your body such that you have much more energy to give to other people.

Thank you for a truly excellent article. I shall certainly use information from it for my new year’s resolution. In fact, I think it’s one of the best articles you written.

I have myself experienced several quantum leaps. The secret to experiencing them is to work very hard in one direction.

However the weigth loss ideas in the article are not very appropriate.

For people who are not very overweight (for example one has 5 KGs he wants to shed) they are true. Just make the effort, shed the 5 KG, and then maintain your weight.

However, for someone who is very overweight, it’s very hard to lose the required amount of weight. For example I have to lose over 50-60 KG (I think that in pounds that’s about 100 pounds).

The first 5 KG are easy. The next 5 KG is harder, and maintainance is also harder. Losing 15 KG is extremely hard, and losing 25 KG requires super-hero like will to achieve and maintain.

The problem with weight loss is that in very overweight people, maintainance after a large weight loss is extremely difficult.

The more you slim, the more maintainance effort is necessary to maintain the new weight afterwards.

If the only task I have to do is getting thin, then I would succeed. But I also have to work, etc.. and this takes away a part of my will, so less remains for maintainance, and I leap back.

Also the more diet attempts a fat person has made, the harder it is to diet and the harder it is to maintain the new low weight after a diet.

I’m telling you this in order for you to see that the weight loss example is not really a good example.

Why is this text area so small? Please enlarge it. It’s very hard to edit text in a text area that only holds 4 lines!

Unfortunately, an idea or fixation doesn’t have to be “good” or valid in order to become the main item on our radar. When someone says “she’s a witch!” people suddenly become alert to anything that looks or sounds like “witchcraft.” We saw the same thing in the mid-80’s with satanic-kidnapping-rituals, recovered memories of childhood abuse, etc.

The challenge for those interested in personal growth is, I think, to pick the things to focus on, and sustain that focus for long enough to achieve escape velocity.

I also find interesting your recent thinking about choosing the people with whom we associate. As a parent, I’m absolutely convinced that you act like those that you hang out with. (And I vaguely recall certain conversations with my own parents . . .) I agree with you that as adults we almost never conciously choose our associations, but that we would benefit from doing so. I found at one point in my life that, while I was very focused on personal growth, my friends and associates were pretty scornful of anything that smelled like “self improvement.” Heaven forbid that they should catch me reading “7 Habits” etc.

Is that one of the things you are currently experiencing with your shift in business and personal focus?

I don’t really have a religion that could be named. Do I believe in a higher power? Yes, because I’ve seen evidence of some kind of force at work that appears to be beyond the physical world as I understand it. Is it a conscious God though or is it something more like “the force” from Star Wars (i.e. an invisible ether of consciousness that humans can tap into, but don’t quite know how very well yet)? That I don’t know. Dr. Wayne Dyer often refers to this higher power as “the source,” which seems a lot like “the force.”

I really liked objectivism (i.e. Ayn Rand’s philosophy) when I first encountered it. Atlas Shrugged is one of my all-time favorite fiction books, and The Fountainhead wasn’t bad either. But I dropped this belief system quickly when I realized that if everyone was an objectivist, this planet would be utterly doomed. Objectivism is essentially a death sentence for humanity if you think about it. Ayn Rand makes some good points, but they were heavily influenced by her encounters with communism, and in her time the philosophy of objectivism would have seemed a lot more logical than it does today. I think objectivism is too much of a reactive philosophy (against communism) instead of a proactive one. Environmentally the planet is in much worse shape today than it was during Rand’s time; if she were alive today, I think even she would have a hard time maintaining her original philosophy.

Reinout