It hurts sometimes

I was talking to a psychiatrist yesterday (my partner's stepfather), weirdly, about losing weight (as I tucked into Grandma's lemon cake).

We spun round the topic as you do and he commented that the thing people don't take into account is that losing weight actually hurts.

Now in one of my professional roles (as a lecturer) I quite frequently have reason to think about what I need to do in order to facilitate other people's learning. We often ask the learners. But it has often occurred to me that when they're in the thick of it, learners might be expressing all sorts of things in the feedback they give. Including, I guess .... yes, it hurts.

Changing what you do and think, or how your body works is going to hurt. Not agonising necessarily, but somewhere between strange and painful enough to make you want to take refuge in what you know. Seems to me this is something worth acknowledging.