A simple question, really. Yet, so many of us cannot answer it
Either you have no answer, or there’s a huge list of unrelated things pulling you in many different directions.

And then you feel like you’re spinning your wheels.
And you are.

Let’s use a weight loss example.
For the better part of a decade you have been trying to lose 20-30 lbs. You put it on your new year resolutions list.
You get the expensive gym membership and the cute workout clothes.
You save the “healthy” Pinterest recipes.
Then Monday comes and you go to the gym, eat the healthy food and feel good about yourself. For about a week or two things are going well. Maybe the scale even moves a little.

Then life happens. A dinner invite to your favourite restaurant, a drink or two you didn’t plan for. You wake up tired the next morning, skip the gym, and think “I’ve been good all week, I deserve a little break”.

And suddenly, it’s been weeks again.

You repeat the cycle over and over through the years. You feel like you’re trying and nothing is working. You start thinking it’s your metabolism. Or maybe that you’re just not built to lose weight. Maybe it’s not even worth it.

The thing is – you’re both too nice and too strict with yourself. You want the results without doing the hard, boring, unglamorous work. But you also don’t allow yourself to get back up and continue the things that ARE working. You’re lost in the all or nothing mentality instead of embracing slow, messy every day progress that gets you to where you need to be, sustainably.

“Alright”, I hear you say, “so how do I get out of this”?

Instead of living in black and white, learn to live in shades of grey.
What do I mean by that?
Look at what your day really looks like. And I mean REALLY look. Give yourself as much honesty as you can.
Do you get up and scroll for hours instead of working out? Write it down.
Do you eat a lot more in the evenings than you would like to? Write that down too.
The point is we will replace these behaviours with better ones slowly. If you progress too quickly you will burn out. You want to make sure you have one thing down before adding on 10 more.
It is not very realistic that you will go from eating 3000 calories a day to 1500 or go from having no gym experience to working out 5 times a week.

And here is the good news: YOU DON’T NEED TO.
But to work a behaviour has to be measurable and replicable. So no vibes- based goals. Make sure you have a very realistic understanding of what you need to do.

So, let’s say you want to start eating less.
Start with just tracking your food.
Don’t want to count calories? Simply take pictures or write down what you are eating, no numbers needed.
Get honest about what you are currently consuming.
A whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s on Monday evening? Log it.
Two giant plates of pasta for dinner? Log that too.
Just the simple act of writing these things down will confront you with reality.
As you go maybe you will start mindfully curating a menu for yourself, maybe you will get curious macros for gym gains and all of a sudden you’re not sticking to a diet, you’re living a lifestyle that is consistent with your goals.

The secret sauce of achieving anything is consistency.

Forget to track one day? Fine, start with your next meal again. Don’t be perfect, just keep getting back up.
The people that succeed are not better than you or smarter than you. They are just more consistent than you. They have fallen and gotten back up more times than you have. For now.

So the next time you get stuck thinking that you have to change everything all at once I implore you to just start, mess up and fix it along the way. Then all of a sudden you will have the body you want, the knowledge that got you there and a more disciplined mind.