Trying to Escape or Transform? Why Rushing Weight Loss Keeps You Stuck

Why do we try to rush weight loss? Take a moment to think about your own reasons for wanting to speed up the process.

Let me share a metaphor that's been on my mind lately. There's a massive building undergoing complete transformation. Not just a remodel or facelift, but a total foundation rebuild. This 100-year-old structure needs to withstand earthquakes and natural disasters for many more decades.

The process requires going all the way down to the base, rebuilding and fortifying from the ground up. The engineering is incredible, the daily work is intensive, and you know how long they said it would take? Several years. Not months, but years.

Imagine someone walking by saying, "That's too long. Let's speed it up and get it done in a few months. I want to host an event there soon."

We all know what would happen. We'd end up with a shaky, unsafe building. It might look fine from the outside temporarily, but it wouldn't be sound. Eventually, it would show cracks and possibly collapse.

This is exactly what many of us do with weight loss.

The Foundation We're Really Rebuilding

We've spent years, sometimes decades, living in bodies and minds shaped by diet culture, unrealistic beauty standards, emotional eating patterns, poor relationships with food, and deeply ingrained beliefs about our worth.

We've learned to use food to comfort, distract, avoid stress, or numb anxiety when food was never meant to cure these things. We've internalized beliefs like "I'll always be this way," "It's selfish to take care of myself," or "My worth is dictated by my appearance."

If we're going to truly change, not just drop pounds but genuinely heal, we have to go all the way down to the foundation. We must unearth old beliefs, rewrite our relationship with food, and rebuild how we think, speak, feel, and care for ourselves.

That doesn't happen in 30 days.

The Urgency Trap

Many conversations with clients sound like this: "I want this to work right now." "I've only lost a couple pounds and it should be more." "I have a vacation next month and need to look good in my bathing suit." "There's this wedding, reunion, event, and I have to look better."

When we dig underneath that urgency, we discover something important. Urgency is usually driven by fear or anxiety, which are clues we need to go deeper.

We want to rush because we're uncomfortable. It might be discomfort with clothes that don't fit how we want, being in photos we don't want taken, facing our current reality, or confronting the hard work of change ahead.

We don't want to sit in discomfort. We want relief. So we rush, look for shortcuts, and hope to feel different fast, not just physically but emotionally. We want confidence, pride, and simply to feel better.

This is totally understandable, but it's where we get stuck.

Our Culture of Impatience

We live in a world that's trained us to be impatient and avoid discomfort. Amazon delivers in two days or same day. We speed up audiobooks, podcasts, and videos to absorb more faster. If our phone takes longer than a second to respond, we get annoyed.

We've forgotten what it means to wait and sit in discomfort. Remember dial-up internet? That scratchy robotic sound just to get online, taking minutes, sometimes getting disconnected and trying again?

Remember waiting a full week for the next episode of your favorite show? Waiting months for the next season? Now we binge entire seasons in weekends and feel annoyed when the next one isn't ready immediately.

A Microsoft study found that average human attention span is now 8.25 seconds, shorter than a goldfish's, and has dropped 25% in just a few years.

If you're struggling to be patient with your process, give yourself grace. Our entire culture is wired to expect immediate results.

But healing and true, lasting, inside-out transformation is slow foundational work.

What Happens When We Rush

When we rush through extreme dieting, over-exercising, or trying to bypass inner work, we might lose weight momentarily, but we end up in the same situation repeatedly.

Many people tell me, "Just tell me what to eat and how to exercise." You can Google that information anywhere. But bypassing foundational work means the weight comes back, guilt returns, self-doubt creeps in, and we internalize it as personal failure.

We tell ourselves, "See, I can't do this," when reality shows the method failed, not us.

We do damage to our minds and bodies without getting sustainable results because we haven't healed the reasons we struggled with food and our bodies initially.

The Foundation Approach

You are not behind, slow, or doing it wrong. If you're doing internal work, you're rebuilding your foundation. Foundations take time, especially when unlearning decades of false beliefs, cultural programming, people-pleasing patterns, and emotional numbing.

When you do this work and truly commit to healing, you build something that lasts. You build something better than weight loss: strength, self-trust, peace with food, a healthy relationship with your body, and a new identity.

That is worth the wait.

Three Transformational Questions

Next time you catch yourself rushing or beating yourself up for not seeing results fast enough, pause and ask:

1. What Am I Feeling Right Now?

Don't stop at "frustrated" or "anxious." Get specific. Are you feeling ashamed, embarrassed, worthless, lonely, powerless? When you name it precisely, you gain power over it.

2. What Discomfort Am I Trying to Escape?

Maybe it's not recognizing yourself in the mirror, tension about social events and potential judgment, or the exhausting mental weight of feeling like you constantly need to "fix" your body. Recognizing what you're truly trying to avoid can soften your inner critic.

3. What Do I Really Want to Feel?

Do you want pride, comfort, freedom, control, peace, love, value? These are valid deeper desires beneath the rush, and you can provide these for yourself right now.

The scale can never truly give you these feelings. Even if you lost 100 pounds, if you don't find ways to feel proud, comfortable, free, peaceful, loved, and valued beyond the number, you'll keep chasing something else.

Building What Lasts

Ask yourself: What's one small, doable thing I can do today that supports my true need and the long-term foundation I'm building?

You're not just trying to lose pounds. You're laying a new foundation that can hold the full weight of your life, not just easy days but hard ones too. You're building strength to withstand life's earthquakes: stressful family situations, work pressure, aging parents, grief, busy weeks, sleepless nights, holidays, vacations, hormonal shifts, major transitions.

Those challenges will come because this is life. But when you rebuild from the ground up, your health won't be the first thing to crack. You become someone who bends but doesn't break, who weathers storms without starting over every week.

That kind of strength and internal peace is worth infinitely more than any quick fix.

Your Foundation Reminder

If you're feeling hurried, behind, or tempted to chase shortcuts again, pause. Take a breath, put your hand on your heart, and remind yourself: "I am rebuilding my foundation, one that will last because I'm worth building something that lasts."

Your value never changes and is beyond measure. You're choosing the slower, deeper, stronger way, and it matters more than how you look in any photo.

The fact that you're here, taking this in, and working to make these changes is remarkable. You're doing foundational work that will serve you for decades to come.

Ready to explore the difference between escaping discomfort and transforming it? Listen to the full episode of Wellness Mastery with Jen Hoyer for more insights on building lasting wellness from the foundation up.

Listen to Episode 24: Trying to Escape or Transform?