Weight loss is a learning process. This is especially true when you are unable to lose weight. If you cannot lose weight, you have to learn how to do something you’re unable to do. You need to learn what’s going on that is making it difficult to lose weight. You also have to learn how to get around whatever obstacles are making you not able to lose weight. You have to learn what it will take for you to lose your excess weight. To learn, you have to be interested—interested, that is, in learning.

• How interested are you when it’s learning about the weight-loss process and your difficulty losing weight?

• How interested can you get yourself to be about losing weight?

• What’s involved anyway in helping yourself in the interest department?

If losing unwanted weight is a learning process, especially when you’re experiencing weight-loss difficulties, and having a high level of interest is necessary for learning, then being interested, as interested as possible, is key. How can you up your interest level so you can learn better, more easily, more comfortably, more effectively?

Two personal characteristics that make a person interested are curiosity and openness to experience. You can see how related these two qualities are to learning. They are probably part and parcel of persistence as well. In fact, if you want to stretch it just a bit further, you could say that curiosity and openness make for more interest, and more interest makes for better learning, and better learning—although we’re really not talking about it here—makes for stronger willpower.

Being interested enough to learn how to surmount weight-loss difficulties, in the simplest of solutions, may come down to you creating a process of weight loss that is interesting enough for you—one that makes you more curious and open to your experiences, and to learning.