Can We Skip to the Good Part

I love a good progress photo comparison – a before and after, a then and now, a never again and a never going back.

I love the TikTok “Can We Skip to the Good Part” trend. Videos of before and during and after, a journey, a life, a celebration.

But here’s the thing. Weight loss doesn’t help you skip to the good part.

Weight loss changes the number on the scale. It changes your clothing size. It can change some health markers.

It does and it doesn’t change your life.

Losing weight doesn’t lead to instantaneous happiness. It won’t improve your job situation, it won’t fix your marriage, it won’t make your kid stop talking back to you.

Losing weight won’t make you love yourself or find yourself. It won’t give you self confidence or self assurance. It won’t fix all of your problems.

My life has changed completely, but not because I lost weight. I found what I needed to change my life because of the uncomfortable places I pushed through while losing weight.

The more I accomplished, the more I did that I never thought I could do, the more I felt I could do.

Changing the thing that seemed impossible to change brought about the realization that I could change anything, or even everything.

It started with forcing myself to show up. I forced myself off the couch and out of my comfort zone. There were workouts I cried through, and nights I sobbed in my car, because it all felt so hard, and I felt so certain I couldn’t do it. But I kept showing up. I cried through a few more workouts, and somehow, somewhere along the way, my tears turned from frustration and “I can’t do this” into pride and “Look what I can do”.

No one could put in that work for me, and while many advised me and inspired me, at the end of the day the only person I could credit was the person I once didn’t believe in: me.

For a while I danced in an odd limbo, between the old me and the new me, some days believing the best of myself and sometimes falling back into the habits and lies that told me the worst. Some days I was confident and some days I felt like a fraud and some days I was a study in “fake it til you make it”.

But I made it. I became a person so completely removed from who I used to be that I don’t recognize the old me – the smile that never reached my eyes, the self-deprecating thought patterns, the nonstop inner dialogue telling me why I wasn’t good enough and would never be good enough.

Weight loss didn’t change me. It turns out the story is better than that – I changed me. I worked and dug and fought through to the good part, and it’s even better than I ever could have imagined.

If I could change, you can too, I promise. I hope you are the path to your own good part, and if you aren’t, I hope my story helps you know we can all change, we can all do hard things, we can all fight through the bad and get to the better.