June 2014 vs. June 2018. These pictures are taken 4 years apart. Same shirt, different chicken! It took me two years total to feel emotionally stable again, and three years total to lose the weight I gained on antidepressants.

At the beginning of my health journey, I looked for inspiration in pictures like these.

I found a relatable girl, Stephanie, who lost 60 pounds in 8 months with Whole30. I said to myself, “I’m going to do what she did.”

8 months came and went, and I worked really hard and “only” lost about 30 pounds. I was also really tired all the time, and my moods were up and down because of lingering effects from my antidepressant withdrawal.

I was super bummed that my life didn’t look like Stephanie’s, and that I wasn’t running around in vintage-inspired rompers from ModCloth — I still had weight to lose, my clothes didn’t fit, and I was still struggling with my mental health because I was harmed by psychiatric medications.

But something inside of me said, “just keep going.” And at that point, it was about WAY more than weight loss — I knew that gluten, dairy, and sugar made me sick and anxious, so I kept avoiding them.

I had a hard time not comparing myself to others. I bemoaned my “lack of progress.” Little did I know, I would plateau for SIX FREAKING MONTHS while I worked through adrenal fatigue and rebalancing my neurotransmitters.

I would spend thousands on practitioners, supplements, and self-help books — some of them worthwhile, some of them total garbage. I would go through a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth, which I can’t even begin to touch in a blog post. Little did I know, it would take me THREE WHOLE YEARS to lose all of the 60 pounds I gained on psych meds.

It’s good that I didn’t know. If I did know, I might have given up on myself. But because I didn’t know, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, and eventually, I found health, mental stability, and a happy size.

The hardest thing about being a coach is watching clients give up on themselves because change isn’t happening “quickly enough.” (It happens.) I tell all of my clients that this isn’t Amazon Prime, and you don’t get two-day shipping, but there are inevitably people who can’t accept that. And they return to their old ways and their old stories that “change never happens for them.”

And my heart breaks a little every time, because I know the secret lies in persistence and patience and self-love, but that’s not sexy enough. I shift my focus to the people who are dedicated, and hope that the others come around, because that’s all I can do.

Pictures like these can be incredibly uplifting or incredibly toxic, depending on your state of mind. If you are discouraged by your journey’s timeline, let me be the poster girl for slow progress. Know that you can do it too, one day at a time, and as my colleague Jennifer Joffe says, there is no “there there.” This story has no end for me because healthy is who I am and what I practice daily.

Here is the secret: healthy is not something you do for 30 days. If you want to be healthy, it has to become a core part of your identity. It has to become your default mode. The road to making that shift is bumpy as hell, and full of tears and scratches and bruises.

But if I had to guess, the road you’re currently on is even harder, and that is the ultimate question: which hard will you choose?