"If you haven't lost weight by the time you reach [fill in the blank] years old, you almost certainly never will."

For anyone who has been overweight, this blatant message is communicated by everyone from the medical community to tacky, spinster aunts. There is an unheard but not unfelt clock ticking for the overweight and obese. It's different than the old trope referring to a woman's biological clock, marking one day less for an opportunity to become pregnant. Instead, this clock is keeping time for our supposed diminishing chances to lose weight.

“…It’s too late…” Gee, thanks. Such encouragement! Whoever touts that line of thinking should never consider coaching young children, joining a booster club, or becoming a crisis negotiator. "Hey, you're right. Life sucks, it's too late for it to get any better, and no one can blame you. Go ahead, jump!"

One can be forgiven for wondering thinking assuming it may be too late to make a change that leads to better health, weight loss, and increased confidence. Once the doubt is there, it is difficult to shake. It is like a seed that has fallen on really fertile soil because there are few things more fecund than our firm knowledge that we can't lose weight, that we have no control over the food we put in our mouth. Haven't we tried and failed more times than Edison did in his quest to create the light bulb? We are already prone to believe the worst about ourselves, and outside influences reinforce that.

The thing is, all the magazine articles, doctors' pronouncements, and cynical opinions are often a load of bull $h!t — a large, steaming, stinking pile of it. Many of us are proof of that. I know because I changed my life when I started the ketogenic protocol. I did this in my mid-fifties, post-menopausal, and after thirty years of morbid obesity. All of those factors should have precluded me from success if the prognosticators are to be believed. (They aren't) I hear from people every day of the week whose stories are like mine, who decided that they wanted and deserved a future better than what seemed laid out before them, some in their 80s.

As trite as it sounds, the truth is that it is never too late to do the right thing. That doesn't hold just for being honest, fair, and kind. Doing the right thing for ourselves is always a good idea, no matter how long it takes to figure out what that is. For me, that right thing meant laying off the carbs—and laying off the excuses. (I feel a t-shirt, mug, and sticker design coming on!) It was not too late for me, and it needn't be for anyone else. The key is to be kind to ourselves, be firm, and, most importantly, to be honest with ourselves. Some of us bought into the negative messaging about the difficulty of meaningful change after years or decades of habits that didn't serve us. Couple that demoralizing forecast with non-stop marketing of foods, restaurants, treats, and ads that claim, "You deserve a break today, so get up and get away to"—well, you know where to—and the path to change can be challenging. Isn't it always? All of us have overcome all manner of obstacles. That's what life is: a series of bumps in the road, some of them more like boulders the size of Buicks. Yet, we're here to tell the tale, right? Yes, we are.

So, it's never too late.

It's never too early, either, for that matter. But that is a topic for another day.