I don't doubt, if there was a real, working and safe pill for losing weight, fat people would be fewer and the fight against obesity a lot easier.
As was said, the problem becomes greater by the fact that eating is a real pleasure, food a real and necessary good. Thus, on one side you have abstinence, a negative force, and on the other you have eating, a positive activity, permanent and necessary.
Unfair fight! It cannot support the feeling that you do something, that you act! Note that in this regard too weight loss resembles the struggle to quit smoking.
As all passionate smokers know, their ideal condition would be that of chain smoking. A lot of them do precisely this, ruining their health along with their self-esteem, but those who are a little prudent try to let some time pass before they satisfy their addiction.
However — and this is the most important here to note — the prudent time of abstinence, their useful and healthy time, is regarded by smokers mainly as wasted, empty and vain, tragically opposed to the ‘positive' time of smoking, this one being essentially identified as a time of pleasure and satisfaction!
Dealing with this problem when I was smoking, dramatically more when I decided to quit smoking, I tried to realize and appreciate the necessary abstinence as full of immediate positive consequences, a condition that revealed something so subtle, you couldn't tell it was there before: I tried to start enjoying the simple, beneficial and always present air instead of smoke.
In quitting smoking one gains an experience of health improvement even in a couple of days, but in weight loss things are not easy, especially in the beginning, when all benefits, no matter how certainly known, remain just information about an expected condition, a reality of a happy future, not only in the appearance of one's body, but also in health.
Is there any way out of this difficulty? Is there anything we can immediately enjoy as we suppress our appetite, a ‘hidden' reality that could emerge now for us in the place of taste, offering some alternative satisfaction and comfort?
