You can’t just think about wanting to be healthy or healthier, and voila, it happens. 

Our entire culture is set up in a way where healthy living and eating aren’t simple, easy, or made readily available. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

If you want to eat and live in health-supporting ways, you have to plan and prioritize for it. It’s very confusing, backwards even. Why wouldn’t healthy living be simple, straightforward and easy?

I can’t tell you how many of my clients are confused about the same thing. They want to lose weight and heal the chronic health issues they’re facing. Many of them are desperate to feel better. 

But feels like they have to work really hard just to make healthier choices. I’m here to remind you that it’s not you, it’s the systems of the culture that we live in.

There are roadblocks to making better food choices, eating a health enhancing diet and living a health promoting lifestyle. 

It’s these very roadblocks that are making it more difficult to live a healthier life. These roadblocks include: 

Financial constraints – It’s no secret that processed and fast foods are less expensive than quality foods are. Your budget may not allow for shopping at a health food store, or splurging on fresh produce when you can buy a meal for a family of 5 at a fast food restaurant for a fraction of the cost. This brings in the question of accessibility to not only quality food, but to health itself for an entire section of the population – a serious topic for another time.

Not enough time – Even if you have all the desire in the world to lose weight or eat better, who has the time to shop, prep, cook and even sit to enjoy a quality meal these days? With work hours, keeping up with household tasks, kid’s schedules, appointments, self-care requirements and more… it makes it very challenging to fit everything into a single day. So very often, a quality meal is what gets pushed to the wayside. 

Low energy – Even if you work an 8-hour day and you work from home, by the end of a workday, who has the energy to figure out what to eat for dinner? Especially if you’re dealing with a health or body challenge of some kind, decision fatigue is a very real thing. If you haven’t planned ahead of time, you’re going to reach for whatever is simple, easy and convenient. Why wouldn’t you? It’s the sane thing to do! But then it becomes a mess that never leads to the outcomes you desire.

Addictive food-like substances – The food industry is well-versed in how to create a food product that consumers can’t stop eating. They don’t do this because they are promoting a food that’s going to enhance your health. They do it so you will buy more of their product and become a life-long consumer of it. They do it for profit. It can be very difficult to give up these foods that we’ve formed a long-term relationship emotional connection to – even if they are harming our health and expanding our waistlines.

Self-regulation – It’s easy to overlook that we’re constantly regulating our emotions and our physical states with food. If we’ve been dragging throughout the day, we’re going to reach for a pick-me-up. If we’ve been pushing hard throughout the day, we’ll want to unwind and relax at the day’s end. If we’ve had a hard day full of conflict or difficult decisions, we’re going to seek comfort. Food is an easy, mostly inexpensive, mostly readily available way to adjust how we feel. Do not underestimate how much self-regulation plays into our food choices throughout the day.

Habit – We are all creatures of habit with the routines and rhythms that we’ve established over time. We slip into them far more often than most of us recognize, and many of them aren’t actually helping us create the health we desire. Establishing new habits that yield the outcomes you say you want means letting go of your former ways, trying new things and embarking on a learning curve. It requires willingness, courage, and support.

When these roadblocks are left unnoticed and unchecked, they perpetuate the lifestyle and eating habits that drain energy, promote weight gain, and leave us feeling like our best days are behind us.

So many of my clients think they lack willpower and discipline, but that’s seldom the case. What they lack is a clear picture of what’s really getting in their way, and how to set up health-enhancing systems in their lives so that their success is inevitable. 

If you’re struggling to do the things you know will support your health and body, you’re not alone. In today’s busy and stressful way of living it’s incredibly rare that I meet someone who isn’t struggling to eat and live in a way that enhances their well-being.

But with the right support and guidance, it IS possible. In fact, it can be incredibly relieving to discover that a few adjustments and different choices that don’t upend your life entirely can create massive change in a positive direction. 

Sometimes we simply need another set of eyes to help us see what we cannot. Or someone to ask a powerful question that gets us thinking in a new way. 

If a healthier body is what you desire, it can be yours. You only have to be willing to identify and face the roadblocks that are getting in the way, make the changes that want to be made and stay the course as a healthier you emerges.