I’ve had the thought more times than I can count.
I’d be driving home after a brutal clinic day. I’ve skipped lunch again. I’ve managed fifteen things that weren’t on my schedule this morning. And pretty soon after I leave the office parking lot – I’m thinking about whether the drive-through is worth it — feeling it was inevitable and not knowing how to stop myself.
I’d try to not turn in. I’d try to reason with myself. Try to think about my goals. Try to hang on. But I’d find myself in the parking lot, tearing into a bag of fries anyways.
And underneath all of that is this quiet, grinding thought: is there even any point in trying again?
If you’ve been there, this post is for you.
The System Is Broken. Not You.
Here’s the thing about that thought — “is it even worth trying” — that most of us never examine: it’s born of the process, not the person.
What I mean is this. If you’ve tried to lose weight or change your eating a few times, and each time it felt like a grind and then fell apart, you’ve been taught to read that as a you problem. A willpower problem. A follow-through problem.
It’s not.
You’ve been beat up by a system that was never actually designed to work for a physician living your life. And then you’ve kept putting yourself back into that same system and wondering why you end up feeling like a failure every time.
That’s not fair. And it’s not accurate.
The Way We Define Failure Is Getting In The Way
Most of us define success and failure in weight loss almost entirely based on the scale. And I understand why — we’ve been taught that’s the measure that matters.
But here’s where it gets really harmful: the scale is a fickle tool. It goes up and down for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you’re actually making progress. And when we use that one metric to decide whether we’re winning or losing, we end up quitting at the exact moment things were about to shift.
I see this all the time with the physicians I coach. You can logically walk through why the scale number doesn’t tell the whole story. And then you step on it, it’s up two pounds after a week where you genuinely did the work, and emotionally it feels like a total gut punch. Like you failed.
But you didn’t fail. You just used a bad measurement tool and called it evidence.
What Experience Do You Actually Want to Have?
Here’s a question I almost never hear anyone in the weight loss world ask: what experience do you want to have while you’re doing this?
Not “what result do I want.” Not “what weight do I want to reach.” But: what do I want this to actually feel like?
Because here’s the reality. If you want sustainable change — the kind that stays for the rest of your life — then the things you’re doing to create that change have to be things you can keep doing. For life. And if the experience you’re having is shitty, you’re not going to keep doing it.
Most of us never get asked this question. We just get handed a plan and told to follow it. And when following it is miserable — because you don’t like the food, or the exercise is more than you can fit in your schedule, or you’re constantly fighting the urge to eat the bread at the restaurant — we assume that’s what it’s supposed to feel like.
It’s not.
Managing Your Eating Is a Practice — Not a Diet
One of the most useful reframes I’ve found — for myself and for the physicians I work with — is this: managing your eating long-term is a practice.
Like yoga. Like meditation. Like any skill you develop over time.
Which means there’s no finish line. And if there’s no finish line, then there’s no failure. There’s just living.
A practice means waking up and asking: how is my day actually going to look today? Not the ideal polished version. The real version.
I have a standing full-office Tuesday every week. High volume of patients, usually running behind, rarely a real break. Those days are hard for me. And for a long time, I either pretended that wasn’t going to be a problem — “I’ll just eat a salad, it’ll be fine” — or I ended up in the drive-through by 6pm and then spent the night feeling bad about it.
Now I plan for Tuesdays differently. I think about what food would actually feel good and satisfying on that kind of day. I build in a lunch break even if it’s short. I’m honest with myself about what I’m going to need.
That’s not a diet. That’s a practice. And it changes everything.
Setbacks Are Part of the Process — Not Evidence That You Failed
Here’s what I want you to know about the times things don’t go the way you wanted: nothing went wrong.
This might sound too simple. But I genuinely mean it. Eating the fries after the day from hell is not a failure. It’s information. What was going on that Tuesday? What’s the pattern? What could be different?
When we slap the label of “failure” on something and stop there, we get nothing useful. We just feel bad and repeat the same cycle.
When we get curious about what happened — actually interested in it, not beating ourselves up about it — we start to build something that actually works for our specific life.
That’s not how diet culture teaches us to handle setbacks. Diet culture says: dig in harder, try more, be more disciplined. And continuing to do that while expecting different results is, to put it plainly, not fair to you.
You Don’t Have to Fight Food Anymore
I want to describe something for you. Imagine having ice cream in your freezer. It’s there. And you’re just… fine. You’re not white-knuckling it. You’re not having a running argument in your head about whether to eat it. You’re not calculating whether you’ve “earned” it. You just don’t feel like you need it right now, so you move on.
That is possible. I’ve seen it happen for physicians who used to feel completely out of control around food. And it doesn’t happen through more willpower. It happens through a different kind of approach — one that gets curious about what’s driving the eating, and builds skills to work with that instead of against it.
That’s what I teach. And it is so different from just telling someone to try harder.
So — Is It Worth Trying Again?
Yes. I think it is.
But not the way you’ve been doing it. Not another diet. Not another attempt to white-knuckle through restriction and hope this time it sticks.
What’s worth trying is a different approach. One where you decide upfront what experience you want to have. Where setbacks are information, not failure. Where the changes you make don’t require you to sacrifice your sanity. Where there’s no finish line, and no failure — just a practice.
You haven’t been failing. You’ve just been taught to do this wrong. And that’s not your fault.
Listen to the full Episode 350 of the Thriving As A Physician Podcast below.
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