Who says life should be easy? It is called Hard Work for a reason.

Obesity is being blamed, according to a report out of Davos, for 2.8 million deaths a year.  The report is from Sapa-AFP and published online by Times Live http://bit.ly/Uwih65.  It claims that 1.4 billion of us are overweight and that it is likely to increase to 60% of the world’s adults in two decades.  Among the reasons cited for what is being considered by Linda Fried of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University as a pandemic, are the ease of availability and the relative cheapness of high-calorie foods.

I think it also points to a deeper problem that may also explain why divorce rates continue to climb. Somewhere in our recent history we were told, perhaps by Madison Avenue or as a response to post-war life, that things should be easy. I think we must fundamentally change the way we think about this: if we believe life ought to be easy and that if it is easy we are somehow rewarded, I think we believe that when things are hard that they shouldn’t be. Have we lost our ability to tolerate discomfort?

Losing weight, especially for those of us who have been obese all our lives, cannot be remotely considered easy and, yet, I believed it should have been and that experiencing difficulty and discomfort was a signal that it wasn’t meant to be.

Do you think this is why we end relationships as quickly as we do, rather than work hard at them to find a resolution? I get a lot of fulfilment from the challenge of leading a healthy lifestyle and refusing to eat something that I’d like to eat but isn’t good for me. I’ve come to like that it is difficult because it means that I achieve more than maintaining a healthy weight – I achieve a solid sense of being hardworking and achieving something in challenging circumstances.

What spurs me on to increase my fitness now is the affirming feeling of getting better at something. I like the feeling of being stronger and the discomfort in my muscles tells me I’ve worked hard and will be rewarded.

Perhaps if we thought that life ought not to be easy, we might better tolerate the effort and time that it requires to do a good job of it.