If you really want to lose weight and get healthier, you are truly not alone — though it can definitely feel that way. When your weight loss journey starts feeling a little bit forced, you start wondering if anyone else is going through the same things that you are. It’s just not healthy to think this way. There are a lot of things that you can do to truly be able to live the life that you really want. If that means that you’re a few sizes smaller, so be it — life is for living, and if you really want to lose weight then it’s up to you to make sure that you are finding the root cause of why you’re not losing weight.

One of the major reasons why you’re not losing the weight that you want is because you’re stressed. Again, this is something that you might not realize at first, but it’s really the truth. Stress produces a hormone called cortisol that tells us to store fat — we’re going to need that fat for energy, so why would we want to lose it? It’s truly representative of our full evolution from where we started. In the past, high stress situations meant a time where food might be scarce or when food needed to be stored in the body for an upcoming time where food intake wasn’t the priority. Even though most of us live in a different world from that point, the truth is that we’re going to need to fight stress as much as we can to keep our bodies from storing fat.

So the goal that you want to have is to live as stress-free as possible. Think about everything that’s stressing you out — could you cut those things out of your life? If friends are getting you down, you might want to think about getting a different set of friends. In addition, you might also want to think about changing your job or at least switching to a less demanding schedule. A lot of people work way too many hours, which means that they always end up being stressed up and irritated.

Just remember that stress fighting is something that will take time. It’s not something that can be solved overnight. However, if you really do make the effort, you’ll find that you’ll be able to get things done with plenty of time left over to move on to something else… like living the rest of your life!