When a Truthful Monkey Hurts
Doctors love dashboards. Blood pressure, LDL, BMI, resting heart rate—all the blinking lights that make a patient feel like a malfunctioning appliance. But there’s one metric almost no medical professional ever talks about, even though it’s the only one an overweight person feels every second of their life. Load. Not obesity, not risk factors, not lifestyle modification. Load.
It’s the simple, brutal physics of carrying around an extra twenty kilograms everywhere you go. And not the modern OH&S‑approved fifteen‑kilogram bag either. I’m talking about the old‑school twenty‑kilogram bag of cement, the one that makes your forearms shake when you lift it off the ute.
Every doctor in the country could transform a patient’s understanding of their own body with one simple instruction. Pick that up. Let them feel the drag on their spine, the compression in their knees, the strain in their hands, the weight of their own life. Then say, now imagine carrying that for the rest of your life—not for a minute, not for a day, but for every step, every errand, every morning, every night.
Suddenly the conversation changes. It’s no longer abstract. It’s no longer about cholesterol numbers on a screen. It’s no longer about you should lose weight. It becomes about physics. About load. About the skeleton being asked to do a job it was never designed for.
Because here’s the truth nobody says out loud. When you’re overweight, you’re not carrying extra weight. You’re carrying a bag of cement. You’re carrying it getting into the car, getting out of bed, showering, brushing your teeth, walking to the bus stop, sitting through a meeting, standing in line at the post office, going to see your accountant, baking a cake for your granddaughter’s birthday, climbing stairs, and trying to sleep.
Every movement becomes a negotiation with gravity. Every joint pays interest on a loan it never agreed to. Every day is a shift on a construction site you never signed up for. And the medical system, with all its charts and guidelines and risk calculators, rarely mentions the one thing that actually changes a person’s life: putting the bag down.
When I dropped from one hundred kilograms to eighty, I didn’t just lose weight. I put down a twenty‑kilogram bag of cement I’d been carrying for years. My knees felt it. My back felt it. My breathing felt it. My walking felt it. My thinking felt it. My entire operating system felt it. And the next eight kilograms, the glide from eighty to seventy‑two, is the difference between carrying a heavy duffel bag and carrying nothing at all.
This isn’t about aesthetics. It isn’t about vanity. It isn’t about getting healthy. This is about load. This is about physics. This is about the simple truth that life is easier when you’re not carrying a bag of cement everywhere you go. Doctors should talk about that, but they don’t.
There’s a second lesson buried inside the bag‑of‑cement story. What other things are dead‑easy to see, completely obvious, and yet we never talk about them? They’re everywhere. We walk past them, live with them, feel them, and know them, but we don’t speak them. Not because they’re complicated or hidden, but because they’re true, and truth has a way of stinging on the way in.
People say the truth hurts, but the reality is simpler than that. Truth saves. Avoidance hurts. So why do we glaze over the obvious? There are many reasons, but in the load example I’ll offer a hypothesis—not a judgement, just an observation.
Doctors spend a decade learning Latin‑derived terminology, mastering complex diagnostics, and earning the right to speak in multi‑syllable precision. They’ve earned that, and they should be proud of it. But when you’ve invested that much in complexity, it becomes uncomfortable, even identity‑threatening, to reduce the problem to something as brutally simple as saying you’re carrying a twenty‑kilogram bag of cement everywhere you go and it would help to put it down.
There’s no Latin in that. No prestige. No intellectual theatre. Just physics, just truth, just a bag of cement. If I were a doctor, I’d have a twenty‑kilogram concrete monkey sitting on a shelf in my office, not as a joke but as a teaching tool. I’d hand it to the patient and say, pick up the monkey. Then I’d ask them to imagine carrying that monkey every second of their life—into the car, out of bed, into the shower, to the bus stop, to their accountant, to their granddaughter’s birthday party.
If the truth hurts, keep going, because on the other side of that sting is the thing that actually saves you. The truth isn’t the enemy. The truth is the exit.
About Jason Bresnehan
Jason writes in a modular, mind‑drift style that moves between business, recovery, faith, anthropology, and the oddities of everyday life without warning or apology. His work blends operator‑grade clarity with sideways narrative turns — the kind that start in a boardroom, drift through Scripture or Tasmanian riverbanks, and land in a piece of doctrine you didn’t see coming.
He has spent years helping organisations and people get unstuck, and his writing reflects the same instinct: take something messy, name it cleanly, and make it usable. His pieces — whether on addiction, Catholic symbolism, business operators, or human quirks — aren’t lectures. They’re field notes. Observations. Fragments designed for real people in real moments, including the tired executive delayed in an airport lounge at 11:45pm.
Jason publishes micro‑chapters as he writes them — standalone pieces that don’t follow a cadence or a theme. They accumulate over time into a larger body of work, shaped by curiosity, faith, operator discipline, and a refusal to perform — just get outcomes.
Founder of the Hadspen Foundation, Jason is committed to building frameworks for spiritual recovery that are both repeatable and personal. His writing is guided by discernment, narrative cadence, and the belief that doctrine should support—not overshadow—the human story.