No, Getting Lean Will Not Make You Happy.

Your problems will still exist, you’ll just have abs.

I used to think my biggest issue in life was that I couldn’t get my weight under control. One dangerous source of rewarding feedback was that whenever I would get lean, I would feel happier. This was was one of the most misleading parts of the equation. It seemed pretty simple. When I was miserable, I would gain weight. When I began to lose weight, I would feel happier. So I reduced my mental health down to a simple equation based on my weight and body image.

The problem with this oversimplification is that there were countless other variables within it that I just simply overlooked. First off, these were more correlative, not causal. To understand this, I had to first explore my own mental health. It became abundantly clear that I have control issues. Sometimes, to a debilitating degree. When I feel in control, I feel safe. Therefore I tend to feel happier. When I am losing weight, I feel in control of my body. I feel in control of my food intake and when I succeed, I feel in control of the outcome. This all leads me to feeling safer in the world. The false sense of control. Conversely, when I feel out of control, I feel powerless. I feel chaotic. Finally, I feel deeply unsafe. When I feel deeply unsafe, food has always been a powerful source of comfort for me. So I lean on it — which would often lead to weight gain, perpetually fuelling a negative feedback loop. The comfort eating only tends to make me feel more out of control in the long run because it can lead me to gain weight and feel even more out of control. Which can just start the cycle all over again. If I break the cycle, then I may start to feel in control again. As you can see, these cycles have the ability to undulate indefinitely — and they did for a large part of my life.

Understanding my need for control was only the intro to how deep my psychological wounds impacted my relationship with food and my body. Next was having to figure out why I desperately crave control. From everything I’ve learned, this can largely be attributed to being raised in a chaotic environment. Which I’ve had to accept was my reality. I lacked structure completely. It was pretty come as you go in my household, even from a very young age. Almost nothing was predictable. The lone predictable behaviour was the reassurance that every Friday evening, my mother, sister and I would eat McDonalds. Other than that, it was mostly a free-for-all. We never spent time as a family. We never sat down to a dinner table to talk about our days or emotionally support each other. And finally, I never once saw my parents work together, as a team, in a meaningful or loving way. This made the idea of letting others in seem completely infeasible. So I developed tendencies that were very isolated. I never shared anything (truly vulnerable) and I fought to gain control independently. I’m not sharing this to rag on my parents. I’m writing this to show that even the seemingly insignificant and benign things you experienced in your environment can play a role in what drives your behaviour today. You can ignore them (I did) for as long as you’d like, but that doesn’t make their impact dormant.

So if we rewind, I used to chase getting lean to solve all of the aforementioned issues, mainly because I wasn't aware of them. I was attacking my mental health struggles in a superficial way. Literally. I was attributing my unhappiness to the lack of definition on my body, which would only be reinforced by the temporary feelings of contentedness. Which leads to the next issue: the powerful illusion of novelty.

Novelty can be a dangerous drug. It’s a lie. New things tend to be exciting. If we’ve been feeling stuck, then excitement is a powerful spark. The only issue is that novelty is literally dependent on being new — which puts a pretty short expiration date on it. This was something I never seemed to factor in. I was trapped within my reductionist view of my own shallow form of happiness. The other issue was that my dieting practices were fundamentally unsustainable, so I would always gain the weight back in a rapid fashion. This kept the lean version of myself always in the novel stage — I never kept it long enough for it to get old. I never sustained it long enough to stop getting compliments. To stop hearing “wow you look great!” or “looks like you’ve lost a lot of weight!” These things only reinforced my happiness while I would be lean because let’s be real, who doesn’t enjoy being gassed up?

Now, what happens when that novelty eventually does wear off? Well, I had my first rude awakening this year. I recently got down to a pretty lean body fat percentage — only this time, the novelty wore off quite quickly. I attribute this to being in the midst of addressing and trying to work on some of my own deep psychological wounds. My newfound awareness of it didn’t allow me centre my happiness on revealing my newly achieved set of abs. Sure, they were cool. But I was still disassociating from my emotions. I was meeting the social standards of being beach ready. Yet I still felt deeply unsafe in the world — completely contrary to my prior experiences. I no longer had that blissful ignorance which enabled me to treat all of my problems on a surface level. Now I was feeling unsafe, constantly anxious, operating with suffocating scarcity BUT… I had abs. Which, turns out, didn’t fix any of my actual internal struggles, because they’re tied to much deeper wounds and not a just product of excess adipose tissue on my belly.

So should you try to lose weight still? Sure, if that’s what your goal is. My only reason for writing this is to remind you not to put your all of your happiness eggs into the basket that represents your body image. Having a body you love and feel confident about is awesome, but achieving that is fundamentally not the solution to your deeper struggles. At least, it wasn’t in my case and I would be hard-pressed to imagine a scenario where it would be. It may very well be correlative though. By that, I mean addressing your mental health at a deep level and working on your psychological wounds may very well lead to a healthier relationship with food and the addition of a more active lifestyle. Which may in turn have you looking and feeling your best. All great things. I simply advise against actively tying your self worth and happiness to how your body looks. It can be a dangerous hole to spiral down.

There are plenty of ways to work on your mental health and improve your emotional state. Therapy is one. Engaging in a community is one. Communication with your loved ones can help. Being active and taking care of yourself is also one.

But you want to know what is not an effective way to work on your mental health struggles? A calorie fucking deficit.