5 things I need to tell people that are not meant to hurt your feelings (but sometimes do)
Alqemis exists for education, intense ideas, and honest arguments. The health influencer culture has a talking head for every one of your excuses about how you feel or what is stopping you. We aren't "yes" people. If you want comfort, look elsewhere. If you want results, you start with radical honesty and then we can help. Here are five of those arguments.
1. You aren't working hard enough to demand what you're eating
If you are carrying excess weight, your lifestyle isn't demanding the energy you're feeding it. End of story. Your system is over-fueled, and no training block outworks a total absence of nutritional discipline. Create the physical demand first. Then feed it. What people recognize as “training not working” is not a “bad metabolism”, it is what we call efficiency. Increases in demand from new workouts require more energy. But once fitness attributes adapt, energy requirements go down. That’s usually where we find people, still eating like they just started their new HIIT class thinking routine is what wins. Often simply writing down what you ate yesterday starts to illuminate this.
2. "Not eating enough" will never be the reason you're overweight
Your metabolism cannot manufacture fat out of nothing. That is a physiological impossibility. If you are holding an energy surplus, you are consuming more than you burn. The "starvation mode" story survives because the people telling it aren't auditing what actually gets swallowed in a day. Honesty equals results. Study after study reveals that people routinely under report their caloric intake. And it’s easy to do, we tend to only look at food we would be proud to report, but treat all those handfuls passing the pantry as “a little extra”.
3. Hormones do not make you fat
Watch the logic: women accept weight gain as hormones decline with age, then blame those same hormones for fat storage the moment they're restored to healthy, youthful levels. Both can't be true. Hormones regulate the system. They do not suspend thermodynamics. They do however need to be addressed if they are out of balance, because they can play a key role in the psychology and motivation responsible for controlling nutrition and training.
4. Tracking food isn't a disorder. It's math
Refusing to track because you're afraid it will become "disordered" is like trying to build wealth while refusing to open your bank account. Avoidance isn't protection; it's willful blindness. Awareness is the tool, not the disorder. What this points back to are unbalanced hormones. Neuroticism that is often associated with tracking calories and learning to manage intake is very much affected by deregulated hormonal profiles. The counting is not the disorder, the emotions attached to the process are. And unfortunately, a lot of us have faced pressure to use diet to change ourselves, and this is very hard to break apart from. It is possible. And while I don’t say that every one needs to track, there is power in learning to slowly bring yourself to a position where observing your eating habits is not connected to a negative event.
5. Your embarrassment of your digestive problems is keeping them hidden
Ignoring a long-term gut problem is a passive agreement to live with down-regulated hormones, tanked dopamine, low energy, and a compromised version of your life. It is a massive physiological tax. It is also very common especially among women who excuse bloating after meals as “normal” or think that living with stool softeners is just the way they are. These are all signs of gut dysfunction that can be corrected if we know the culprit Once we run the diagnostics and identify the root cause, fixing it is a no-brainer. And honestly, everyone already knows about your stomach issues. They see you adjust your shirt after meals, watch you squirm because of frequent stomach aches, or watch you escape to the bathroom more frequently than anyone else in the office.
What we do about it
All of these problems are common. And I used to hide from them too. I nearly lived on magnesium just to make me regular. I avoided foods that would make me bloat, and I went a year thinking I was premenopausal because I refused to just test and see what was out of balance.
