What's difficult is keeping with it.

My weight has fluctuated from a low of 180lbs to a high of 450lbs throughout my entire adult life.

I know what to do. I know it's easy to do it.

The hard part is knowing that the second I stop counting, it all comes piling back on.

It's incredibly discouraging to know that most people can just...live. They eat when they're hungry. They don't constantly have a voice in their head telling them to eat when they aren't. They don't use sweets for emotional support or stress relief. They can leave food on a plate when they're full. And they feel full with reasonable portions of food.

Moreso, they aren't riddled with anxiety whenever their fat ass is on display out in public doing exercise.

I had an elderly woman at physical therapy tell me I'm the biggest man she's ever seen. You know how upsetting that is? Like, no shit, I know I'm fat. And sure she likely has no filter because of dementia but man it still burns.

It's an entire lifetime of learned experiences, eating habits, and psychological trauma. That elderly woman may as well have been one of the bullies in grade school or a douche in a pickup jeering at me on a walk. That's the hard part.

It's one thing to cut calories for a few months and lose weight. It's another to look at the entire rest of your life and know, from experience, that as soon as you fall off the wagon, it's back to square one. That you now have to change what's essentially been hard-coding itself into your brain since some of your earliest thoughts. That you will, forever, have to continue counting calories and tracking food.

That's the daily struggle. Resisting what you've known your entire life. And worse, needing it. Because you still have to eat, right? So you've got to eat, but you have to control it.

You have to control what, and how much, you eat while the food industry keeps on shoveling chemically-addictive foods in front of your face everywhere you go. Piping delicious smells out their exhaust vents as you drive by.

I don't expect you to understand. People who never struggled with weight really don't get it. Good for you.

On paper it's easy. But our brains and bodies aren't made of paper.

Imagine telling an alcoholic they need exactly one beer a day for the rest of their life. I would wager that's harder than completely quitting alcohol, or even developing a healthier relationship with it. It has to be in the house. Eventually they have to go to the bar or the liquor store. And every day, for the rest of their life, they have to maintain that restraint.

That's what obesity is like.