Picture if you will, a warrior in a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with danger and treachery at every turn. Nearly everything in his environment is trying to kill him or otherwise defeat him. The choices he has available to him are typically choosing the lesser of the evils. It takes all his inner strength to keep going amidst the hardships and horrors that abound around him.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it; the first week to three weeks (depending on a person’s level of addiction to sugar) is pretty rough. That’s the portion of this lifestyle where I can see people jumping off the wagon, so to speak. This is where the biggest changes happen, and they all come at you in quick succession: needing to eat specific foods while eschewing others, controlling portion, resisting temptation, and forming new and healthier habits. This is the wasteland that must be crossed before entering into the veritable jungle of good food and healthy living.

There are no shortcuts or quick fixes that I can offer you to make it easy. It’s not easy. If it were, nobody would be obese or overweight, and we’d have a handle on our weight and health. The reality is that we don’t, and as a society, we have great difficulty in cutting the cord from our sugar addictions and eating right. With all the contrary information we’ve been fed over the years, it’s no wonder people have a hard time finding the truth and the path to success in losing weight and getting healthy.

The key ingredients for me have been a respect for myself, respect for the process, and trusting in the diet. Food prep remains an important part of my continued success, and running keeps my heart healthy. The inner strength that people talk about is, to me, the culmination of many years of military training, many years of being unfit, heavy, and out of shape, and an overwhelming desire to get healthy and to stay that way. There’s also the unsavory side of where inner strength comes from: difficulties, failures, and mistakes I’ve made.

It’s incumbent upon everyone to find their inner strength and to draw from it. We all have motivations, and reasons for wanting to get healthy and to lose weight. It’s different for each of us, but what it all boils down to is that your inner strength comes from different aspects of your past, and it’s up to you to harness those strengths, to get past the weaknesses, and to draw upon what we’ve learned to succeed where we failed before. You’re worth it, and your health is worth it.