There’s a way of thinking about having weight problems where you are the hero on a difficult hero’s journey and you come out victorious in the end.

As an overweight person, you might be tempted to believe the story other
people tell about you explaining why you are overweight. It usually begins by
talking about how weak you are, how lazy you are, how you lack discipline, how
if you just ate less and exercised more you would be thin, and how if you were
just a better person inside you would look better on the outside. The story usually
ends with a shake of the head, a sigh, and one inevitable conclusion: you deserve
anything evil that comes from being overweight because it’s all your fault.

You’ve probably listened to this story a thousand times. You may want
to shout that the story isn’t true. You may want to say it’s not that simple. You
may want to say something but you don’t know what to say because when
you say something you get shouted down by people just yelling the story
even louder.

And you may have even come to believe this horrible story about yourself
and why you are the way you are. You may think there’s no reason to try
anymore because you can’t change how the story ends. But that’s not so.
What if there was another story you aren’t being told that would help
explain why you are the way you are and that in this story you aren’t the bad
guy? What if in this story you are the good guy? What if you are really just a
misunderstood hero doing the best you can against terrible odds? That’s the
story told in this book.

When you read a story, the hero doesn’t know what comes next. But you
as the reader can usually guess what will happen because the author has
given you clues. In a scary movie, you might even yell out for the hero not to
go into the basement because you know that they don’t know there’s a monster
waiting for them.

The hero must work out everything for themselves making use of help
from people along the way. Even then the hero won’t know all the threats and
enemies and troubles they will face. Yet the hero presses on. Sometimes the
hero must be incredibly brave. Sometimes the hero must figure out a difficult
puzzle. Sometimes the hero makes horrible mistakes and pays a devastating
price to learn what they must learn before they can move on.

Later, when we talk of the threats sabotaging your diet, you’ll hear a very
different story about your weight than the one you’ve heard before. In this
story you learn how you face monsters of all different types and descriptions
on your hero’s journey. Most of these monsters are unknown to you, yet you’ve
been fighting them your entire life. And because you didn’t know about them,
you may have believed the earlier stories telling you how being overweight is
entirely your fault. You may have even given up for a little while and put your
journey on hold.

But once you learn about all the threats trying to throw you off your diet,
you’ll be ready and able to pick up your hero’s journey once again. You’ll learn
that you really are a hero. You’ll learn you have been fighting against terrible
odds and that you’ve been doing much better than you thought. You’ll learn
how wrong all those old stories are about you and there’s a different and
more powerful way of understanding why you are the way you are. And this
understanding points you the way forward.

This is the hero’s journey of discovering your own nature. You can’t
believe the stories anyone else tells you about who you are. You have to write
your own story for yourself.