Motivation and Wanting It Bad Enough

I don’t understand people.

Let me be more specific. I have a friend that has complained about a few things over the years (as all people do): I’m gaining too much weight, I’m spending too much money etc. When someone asks me for advice on how to fix something I happily provide my opinion. I don’t offer it without someone else’s prompting.

So when this friend – after years of not doing anything about what she’s complaining about – reaches out to me and asks for help tackling her weight gain I’m happy to oblige. She asked if we could meet to talk about keto. I said sure and to read the two sidebar posts on the keto subreddit before we meet so she understands the basics and we can better use our time together to help with clarification and answer any questions she can’t find the answers to on there.

She arrived at my house and claimed that she “couldn’t find” the materials I told her to read. That should have been a red flag right there. So I pulled up the website which had it clearly marked and had her read it in front of me. She said she had no questions. I asked when she was going to start trying keto and she said “tomorrow.” I suggested right then. Personally saying you’ll do something “tomorrow” is a recipe for not ever doing it and making excuses. She agreed to start right then.

A few hours later we went to dinner. My friend asked me to order for her because she’s seen me order a keto friendly meal at this restaurant before. I ordered for her, returned from the restroom and she told me that they got the order 99% right, but left a few beans on the salad we subbed for rice. I told her no worries – I’ve eaten around the beans before. She said “Oh I already ate them. I guess I’ll start tomorrow.” I started to feel a twinge in my heart and wasn’t sure what it was. The next day I found out 🙂 .

I awakened and texted my friend asking how her first keto day was going. I wanted to check in because I love the support of others when I’m doing something difficult and know that going from a carbs based diet to keto can be difficult for your body and mind depending on how addicted to carbs you were. The response I received was not what I expected: “I had sugar in my coffee.”

I asked why she did that. She said she didn’t know. She said “without the sugar I’m under 20g carbs today” and I said “that’s not how it works…you can’t count carbs ‘except for something i ate'” and I started to get annoyed. Later she texted me that she just had a salad made of tomatoes and asked AFTER if that’s ok – if tomatoes have a lot of carbs and stating “carbs in vegetables don’t count right?” They absolutely do count and I found myself getting seriously annoyed. Not only did she obviously not actually read what I literally sat in front of her to read, but she literally doesn’t seem to care. She pretended to have motivation to make a change, asked me for my time and energy and then (I felt) basically spat in my face.

She asked me questions after the fact that she could have easily looked up or should have known. She seemed to not even try to change in a way she claimed she wanted to and she expended my emotional energy in the process.

My Mom has said in the past that I can’t expect other people to act like me and I know I shouldn’t. I just get annoyed when people waste my time – when I try to help them up (at their request), but they are not willing to help themselves. I may be different – when I set my mind to something I’m almost obsessive about it. When I started keto I read every book I could find and watched every documentary. When I learned about financial independence I did the same with personal finance and investing books. My Mom says other people are not like that – they can be more wishy-washy and I shouldn’t think of their failure as my failure.

My partner recently saw an article on a rationality blog that he thought was relevant. The article explains that there are 3 axes to do something: 1. Wanting 2. Liking and 3. Approving. The article explains that it can be very difficult to do something different if you don’t have all three. Dieting is something that you want for yourself and approve of as an action, but don’t “like” in that most people don’t enjoy it. This causes most people to just not do it.

So I’m curious to see what happens on my friend’s journey. I wish her the best and I’m going to try and separate my feelings from someone else’s results after they ask for advice. Motivation is a hard thing.