Has Life Treated You Unfairly?
Do you believe if only your circumstances had been as good as others you’d do better?
Do you blame the universe, your upbringing, your social status for your weight?
Well, yes, life can be very unfair.
But, so what. It’s the life we have and it’s our responsibility to make the best of it.
Do not let the unfairness of life become an excuse for not always being your best.
Transcript – It’s Not Fair I Have to Diet (scroll up for Podcast)
Hey, this is Coach Carlene from Thin Brain Training coming at you with the new podcast on Thoughts with Carlene.
Today I want to talk about the fairness of life. Oh my god, sometimes it seems so unfair, doesn’t it?
I hear that at boot camp all the time.
It’s not fair that I have to walk and no one else does. It’s not fair that my significant other gets to eat whatever he or she wants, and never has to exercise. And they never gain weight. It’s so unfair. Life is so unfair. My body is not as good as that person’s body. It is so unfair.
Well, you know what, this is what I say to people when they tell me that. I say tough, tough luck.
You know, life is unfair. We don’t always get what we want. We aren’t born with all the attributes that we would love to have. Our bodies aren’t perfect. That’s it. That’s how life is.
And we have to instead of decrying unfairness and using that as an excuse not to become the people we want to be, we have to instead fight through that unfairness and balance things out on our own.
That takes hard work. It takes effort, it takes determination, just like anything else in life. Yes, there are people who are born with silver spoons in their mouths, that wasn’t me, it’s probably not you. There are people who get to be tall. That wasn’t me. I’m only five feet tall. You don’t think I’ve envied all the five foot eight and five foot nine women out there? Of course I have. But that doesn’t mean all of a sudden, my life is gonna change, it doesn’t mean that I can’t go after things I want. Okay, maybe I would never be able to get a jump shot in, in basketball. But there are so many other things I am capable of. And I’ll tell you what, being a short person, I’ve never hit my head on a cabinet door.
There are pluses and minuses to everything. We will look at life and say all the time, life is not fair. And it’s not. Not everybody was given the same life as everyone else. We all have our strengths. We all have our weaknesses. We all have our innate abilities. We all have things we suck at. But you know what? That’s life. That’s life.
So you’ve got to look at it and take your life, your very life and decide what am I going to do with this life that I do have? I can’t sit around and moan and groan about the fact that someone else has a better life than me. I have to take charge of my own life and make it the best that it can be for me.
That’s how you even things out. So in dieting, which is what Thin Brain Training is all about, we have to push aside this whole idea that life’s unfair. We’re all born with our own specific bodies, what we did with them in our past matters because sometimes we hurt our metabolism. We have children, we go through menopause, we take antidepressants, you know, we have all these things that come into play in life, that seem to make things very unfair.
Tough. That’s all I have to say about that tough, tough, tough.
Not to say I haven’t cried over my own unfairness in life. Of course, I have. My sister’s 18 months older than me, she had a much better body than I had. She never had to worry about her weight. Was I jealous? No, I was envious. But it never helped. It never made anything better by wishing I had had been given her body instead of my own. That never got me anywhere.
The only time I’m going to get anywhere is when I take charge of what I have. And I turn what I have into the very best I can be. So today’s podcast is about accepting, accepting the unfairness of life, accepting that things don’t always go the way we want or the way we planned and doing something about it.
You don’t sit back and just feel beaten in life. You take charge, and you make what you want to happen happen. So let’s take for instance, our bodies. You know, I always tell people that yes, my brother, my two brothers and my sister, they were thin all growing up, they were thin. They didn’t have to worry about their weight. They weren’t humiliated over their weight. You know, nothing like that happened about their weight. That’s not to say they didn’t have their own issues. But I was so focused on my weight. That’s all I could see. Is that how come everyone in my family gets to be thin and I’m talking all my cousins, all my aunts and uncles. I was the only fat person in our whole family. Yes, I felt betrayed by life as a child. But where did that get me? It got me absolutely nowhere. It wasn’t until I learned that I have other attributes. And I have the ability and the power and the intelligence to battle through what I felt was unfairly given to me.
I was always a smarter one. I love that about myself. Right? I was always the one who if I set my mind to something I could make it happen. So if I had different abilities and values in my life than they did, wasn’t that unfair to them?
Life is always unfair, regardless of how you look at it doesn’t matter, we will always find the things in our lives that don’t match up to what other people get to do, and, and cry foul and blame the universe for our situations.
But in the end, the truth is a hard truth is, it is always up to us to accept ourselves and where we are. And if we want to be better, we have to do the hard work, we have to get up and pull ourselves out of our situations and make our lives better. No one’s going to do it for us, maybe some people support and help us. But in the end, it’s always us.
Some things we just have to accept. I can’t change my height, there’s nothing unless I want to wear huge boots or walk on stilts all the time, my height is my height. I can’t change that. But I can work around it. Right? I don’t have to bemoan the fact that I’m short all the time, that’s not going to get me anywhere. Instead, I can look at what I can do at my height and find ways around the things I want to do that require more height, and just do them to get stronger.
I worked with a guy who was born without some of the muscles that you’re supposed to have in your shoulders, I think in your arms. And he had to learn to work around that. Was that fair that he was born that way? No. But he couldn’t just sit around and say, well, because I’m born this way. I can’t accomplish all the things I want. He went on to be a top-notch programmer. And he loves sports cars. He always made sure he had the best sports cars, and compensated basically, for his lack of stature.
He built his own life. He built his own by proving himself to be part of the worthy group. And that’s what we have to do as dieters, you know, yes totally unfair that we gain weight when other people don’t. Yep. My sister and I, very rarely do we ever weigh the same. But when we were in our early 20s, we both weighed about 115 pounds, which for me, was the lightest I had ever been in my life. And for me to maintain that I could eat half a tuna fish sandwich a day. That was it. That’s all I ate. And I went home from work every day and I walked for miles. My sister would call me and say, Yeah, I went out for breakfast with everybody I work with today. And it’s a break time and I’m starving. So I ate five ding dongs.
Was that fair? No, it wasn’t fair. But I wanted to be thin like her. So I had to do what I had to do to get to be thin like that. This is how life works. And we look at it ourselves and we think this is just wrong and the universe is against us. But you know, everybody feels that way. Everybody feels that way.
If you go up to any person, and you ask them what’s unfair about their lives, and about how the universe treats them. And they will tell you all sorts of stories. People feel that I drive down the road, I get the flat tire, not the car in front of me that was not fair, right. I don’t fit into that dress style. My sister does. That’s not fair? My spouse gets to go out and eat cherry pies and ice cream for lunch and I can’t. That’s unfair.
Yeah, it is. So what? Get over it.
That’s what you have to do. You have to get over it. And look at your own life and your own body and then decide what is the life I want? And how do I get that life? How do I stand up beyond all that unfairness and make my life the very best that it can be?
When I was in elementary school, there was this little boy in my classroom he was born with only three fingers on his right hand. And yet, he was born right-handed. And my teacher, who I thought was mean and cruel at the time, forced him to spend hours writing with his left hand and making sure his penmanship was good. I used to hate her for that. I thought it was so cruel. But what I realized, in the end, was, yes, life had been really unfair to him giving him his crippled hand. And yet she understood, and I’m sure he did when he grew up and look back at what she did to him, she understood that he had to overcome the unfairness in his life. If he wanted to have a good life, he could not use his hand as an excuse. In her mind, to not have good penmanship. But in his mind, he couldn’t use it as an excuse to be less than.
That’s how we have to look at our bodies and our weight. We cannot sit around and cry over the unfairness. That because of menopause or quitting smoking, or you have PCOS, or that your metabolism shifted, you can’t sit around and blame all that. You can’t blame your parents. If I had had better parents. Well, you know what? Life is beyond that. Here you are sitting today, and you have a choice?
Are you going to even the odds by doing the hard work that’s required for you to have the life and body that you want? That’s your choice. And every day you wake up, and you have to make a choice. You can’t sit around in self-pity mode and say to yourself, it’s unfair, therefore, I shouldn’t have to work so hard.
Well, it is unfair. But yeah, you do have to work harder. You do have to work harder than others. If you want the body and the health and the well-being that you envy in other people, or you look at it and wish it was yours, go make it yours. Don’t wait for it. Don’t say I can’t ever have it. Just go make it yours. Do the work, change, change your habits, make it happen for you.
Our weight, our health, even our well-being are things that we have control over. It doesn’t matter what we were born with, what matters is what we do with it. It doesn’t matter what life throws at us. It’s how we respond to it. Get up, do not be beaten up by life, get up.
Just like we fix the flat tire, fix it. Work hard, make it happen and be the person you want to be.
We’re done. Self-pity me or pity me, we’re done with that. It’s time to become the women and men that we want to be and achieve the goals and dreams that we have set forth for ourselves. Regardless of what we’ve been given or not given in life. We can do it. But we cannot keep crying foul. Because if we do every time we say that we tell ourselves, we can’t beat this life. It’s against us, the odds are against us. As long as we have ourselves as long as we have belief in ourselves, the odds are always in our favor.
So come on, get up, get going. Do the things you want to do. Stop crying, unfair, and just make it happen. Make it happen in your own life.
Alright, that’s it for me for today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with people and help me build my fan base. Mostly because, my dream, my purpose in life is to help obese women change. To help them to find what they need in their lives to make permanent change so that they can live healthy, happy lives. That’s my goal, and I need you to help me share it. Thanks for listening.