Hot Take: Weight Loss Is NOT About Willpower

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]It was never about willpower. Being on a JLP1 has taught me that because if it was, everything I tried before would have worked.

[00:00:07]>> It was 100% about willpower. But let me finish because I promise this video is not going to be what you think it is.

[00:00:13]Willpower working is essentially a calculus of does your willpower outpace the discomfort? And discomfort is kind of a soft term, but some things can be very uncomfortable. Getting stung by a bee is uncomfortable. It sucks. Being hungry all the time sucks. And different people have different degrees of that.

[00:00:33]Oh, look. My friend lost 25 pounds and now they have abs for the summer. Cool.

[00:00:37]Does your friend think about food 600,000 times a day? Oh, it is willpower. It is 100% willpower.

[00:00:46]But different people not only have different amounts of willpower, different people are using up that resource at different levels. So, he's he's making a good point here, and I give him kudos for that, but it's not about willpower. See, when your body is broken and you're doing all the right things, it it doesn't matter because your body will actively be fighting against you.

[00:01:16]And this is the part that I need the fitness community to wrap their head around. This is the part that I need the thin splaining people who have never been overweight a day in their lives to understand.

[00:01:34]I went high carb, lowfat, raw vegan for 6 months and I lost 11 lbs, which for anybody who knows anything about a weight loss journey, that's pretty consistent with losing water weight and potentially a little bit of inflammation from cutting out meat. So, it's it's not about willpower because you see that time frame should have been enough for me at a 285 lb weight to be able to lose a significant amount of weight and I couldn't. And it wasn't a lack of willpower. I was eating on a very strict schedule. I was under the care of a doctor. My supplementation was minimal and on point, right? Mostly just a multivitamin and making sure I was getting B12 per my doctor. And I lost 11 lbs in 6 months. Now, some people would say that's a healthy amount of weight loss. Others would become incredibly frustrated, which I did, having to work out three times a week, cardio four days a week, and then to be working that hard and be that restrictive in a diet to to have minimal results at best. And for those of you who don't know me, I've lost 130 lbs while taking a GLP1 because as it turns out, my body is broken. And when I have a medication that treats the disorder and disease that I have, guess what it does?

[00:03:26]It functions properly while I am in a caloric deficit. And that is the difference between somebody whose body is working for them and somebody whose body is working against them. And if you are concerned that this may be you, I highly recommend that you speak to a doctor and go down into the description box, check out my code for tryhed.com, talk to a doctor, and see if it really is willpower or if there's something else going on in your body that a medication can help you treat.