If you've ever decided that this is it—this is the week you're finally going to get serious about your health—you probably know exactly what happens next.
You decide you're going to eat healthier, work out five days a week, drink more water, meal prep every Sunday, get more sleep, stop eating so much sugar, walk every day, and lose those extra pounds. And, of course, you're going to start doing all of it on Monday.
I know this approach because I've done it myself. More than once.
Before I became a fitness and nutrition coach, I spent most of my life trying to lose weight. I tried diet after diet and had plenty of experience with the cycle of getting motivated, making a long list of everything I was going to change, doing really well for a while, and eventually stopping it all.
At my heaviest, I weighed over 260 pounds. I eventually lost more than 60 pounds and have kept it off for years, but it wasn't because I finally found the perfect diet or figured out how to be more disciplined than everyone else.
One of the biggest things I eventually learned was that I couldn't completely overhaul my life every time I decided I wanted to make a change.
And honestly, that's one of the things I wish more people knew about getting healthy.
You don't have to (and you shouldn’t) do everything at once.
Trying to do everything at once can make getting healthy much harder than it needs to be and it’s simply just not sustainable for the long term.
Think about what happens when you decide you're ready to “get healthy.” You might go from barely exercising to planning six workouts a week. You completely change what you're eating. You decide you're going to meal prep every meal. You cut out all the foods you think you shouldn't be eating. You start tracking everything. You buy a giant water bottle. You set an early bedtime.
All of those things are awesome in theory. But when you try to change all of them at the same time, you've suddenly created a completely different lifestyle to maintain.
And then life happens.
You have a busy week at work. You get sick. You have kids activities. You travel. You don't get enough sleep. You order takeout. You miss a workout. And suddenly that perfect plan you created on Sunday doesn't look so perfect anymore.
This is where a lot of people decide they've failed.
They didn't stick to the plan, so they might as well give up. They'll start again Monday. Or next month. Or after the holidays. Or when life slows down.
But what if the problem wasn't that you failed?
What if you simply tried to change too much, too quickly?
Start smaller than you think you need to.
One of the things I encourage people to do is to look for the smallest action that will move them in the right direction even if it doesn’t feel like “enough”.
Maybe that's taking a 10 minute walk after dinner instead of deciding you're going to work out for an hour every day. Maybe it's adding protein to your breakfast instead of completely changing your entire diet. Maybe it's spending five minutes in the evening thinking about what you're going to eat the next day. Maybe it's doing two short strength workouts each week and building from there.
These things might not feel like enough when you're excited and motivated to make a big change.
But here's the thing: you don't need your first step to be impressive. You need it to be repeatable.
That's the part we tend to overlook.
We get so focused on what would produce the fastest results that we forget to ask a much more important question: What can I actually keep doing?
Because doing something that is “less than ideal” for months or years is going to get you a lot further than doing something “perfect” for two weeks and then quitting.
I've seen this play out over and over again in my years of coaching. The people who make lasting changes aren't necessarily the people who start out the most motivated. They're the people who figure out how to make healthy choices fit into their actual lives.
They learn how to have a busy week without throwing everything out the window. They learn that missing a workout doesn't mean they have to wait until Monday to start again. They learn that one meal doesn't determine how they eat for the rest of the day. And they stop expecting themselves to be perfect.
That's a very different mindset from constantly starting over.
Small doesn't mean insignificant.
I think we often underestimate the things that seem too small to matter.
Five push ups might not feel like a workout. A 10 minute walk might not feel like enough exercise. Adding some vegetables to one meal doesn't suddenly make your entire diet healthy. Planning tomorrow's breakfast doesn't seem like a life changing event.
But these little actions are how you start building evidence that you are capable of taking care of yourself.
You take the 10 minute walk today, and you do it again tomorrow. You make the protein packed breakfast a few mornings a week. You do those two strength workouts. You start noticing that these things are becoming part of your routine rather than something you have to constantly convince yourself to do.
And once the thing becomes easier, you can build on it.
That's how sustainable change happens. Not by doing everything at once, but by making one change, letting it become part of your life, and then deciding what comes next.
This is also why I don't want you to dismiss a small action just because it isn't going to produce a dramatic result overnight. Your health isn't determined by what you do on your best day. It's shaped by what you do over and over again. (read that again)
So if you're feeling like you need to completely overhaul your life right now, take a step back.
You don't need a new diet, a six day workout schedule, a perfect meal plan, and a whole new morning routine.
Pick one or two things.
Make them easy enough that you can do them even when life gets busy. Give yourself some time to get comfortable with them. Then build from there.
Getting healthy isn't about seeing how much you can change at once.
It's about figuring out what you can realistically change and keep.
And if you've been trying to do everything and feeling like you keep failing, maybe the problem isn't you.
Maybe you're simply asking yourself to do too much.
Start smaller.
Build from there.
And give those small things enough time to add up. YOU GOT THIS!
And if you're looking for a simple place to start, I've got an idea for you...
My Push Up Challenge is built around this exact idea: start small, practice consistently, and build from there. You don't have to be able to do 20 push-ups on day one. In fact, you don't even have to be able to do one full push-up. The challenge walks you through how to start where you are, build strength over time, and turn a small action into a habit you can actually stick with.
And along the way, you'll learn how to take that same approach and apply it to other healthy habits in your everyday life.
