I take it the tingle’s gone.

Time to serve you up something you won’t like the taste of.

You and your almighty willpower take credit for the weight you lose.

When the weight finds its way back home? Different story.

That’s your environment. Your genetics. Your metabolism.

Dieted hard all week. Weekend happened.

I enjoyed a few more (thousand) calories.

I can’t diet every single day. I’ve got a life.

Monday Hits. Scales are up again.

My damn metabolism.

Monday through Thursday: black coffee, no milk. Meal replacement shake. Easy on the salad dressing.

We go again. I got this.

Said with total conviction—every single week.

Never once wondering why last time needed the same speech.
Another round of blasting affirmations in the mirror.

Willpower gets the credit. Everything else gets the blame. That’s the deal you’ve struck with yourself.

Right now, you’re thinking of someone else who does this. A mate. Your ex, the milkman, the lollipop lady.

“No diet or exercise works for me. I’m trying this detox body wrap everyone’s raving about.”

My damn metabolism.

Here’s the annoying bit....

A bloke called Pontzer ran the biggest study ever done in 2021 on how many calories humans actually burn. Your metabolism barely moves from your twenties right through to your sixties.

Flat. For forty years.

Past sixty, it does dip. About 1% a year.

Strength training, eating enough protein, and keeping enough muscle can help offset the drop.

So if you’re in your 30s+ blaming your metabolism: it isn’t your metabolism. It’s the muscle that’s turned to fat. Lugging muscle around costs you calories. Fat’s cheap to keep.

It’s the slow, then rapid, decline in movement.
It’s the unbalanced diet you’ve been running since your teens.

The same thing that happens to nearly everyone else. For the exact boring, yet painfully true reasons.

They’ve got a name for this—self-Serving Bias.

Credit yourself when it goes right. Blame something else when it doesn’t.

It’s your almighty willpower when the weight comes off. It’s your broken metabolism when it doesn’t.

You’ll take all the credit next time the scales go down.

Take some responsibility the next time they don’t.

P.S. Yes, yes, there are loads of other reasons why the scales didn’t flash the number you were hoping for, namely, you’re yet to drop the kids off, but for the purpose of these ramblings, let’s stick with the idea that you simply shoved too many calories into your gob and didn’t move quite as much as you liked to think last week.