Does this sound like you: “I know what to eat and I know how to exercise, I just can’t stick with it!”

If so, you are not alone. Consistency is the biggest challenge people face when it comes to weight loss, especially over the long term and through changing circumstances. This is often the main challenge clients mention when they contact me, and it’s also the essential step towards achieving real, meaningful results.

But when talking about consistency, almost every client I know says, “I just can’t stay motivated long enough.”

And I’m here to tell you, motivation has nothing, and I do mean nothing, to do with it.

Which is why today I’m sharing the 7 biggest blocks to your consistent habits.
And yes, relying on motivation is one of them!

consistent actions creates consistent results.

1. Your only goal is weight loss.

Having a weight loss goal isn’t a bad thing. But if it is the only reason you’re changing your habits, you’re not going to stay consistent for long.

Because while it might sound really nice to have a bikini body that you can show off at the beach, that image probably isn’t going to override the desire to scarf down a pizza at the end of a really stressful day, or to get shit-faced with your friends at happy hour.

Plus, even if it is enough to drive your habits now, shortly after you hit your weight loss goal, the carrot you’ve been striving for will be gone and the stick of being uncomfortable in your body will be gone. Poof goes your motivation and up goes the scale.

You can’t just rely on the eventual gratification of having a lean body, you need to create short-term gratification, which leads to our next point…

2. You’re following diet plans and workout regimens that you hate.

How many times have you followed super restrictive diet plans that have you cutting out your favorite foods or leave you starving?

I know the thought process: If I can just stick with this long enough to lose the weight, then I’ll be able to keep it off! But what’s going to happen as soon as you hit that goal? You’re going to go right back to your old habits, and therefore right back to your old body.

3. You’re trying to change too much, too fast.

George Leonard, an American writer, editor, and educator known for his work on education and human potential, states, “Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of change.” The bigger the changes, the bigger the resistance and the easier you’ll fall back into old patterns. This is the reason that 99% of the time diets don’t work. They don’t take the actual science of behavior change into account! In order for our brains to latch on to a new habit, we can’t overwhelm it.

Think about it like working out. If you’ve never worked out before and you go into the gym and try to lift 50 pounds, you’re going to get debilitatingly sore at best, and injured at worst. Either way, you’re not going to be able to work out again for a good amount of time. And working out sporadically will never get you to a consistent routine. You have to start slow and small, doing simple body weight exercises until they feel doable, then slowly increasing weight and complexity over time.

Remember, it is the little things you do most of the time that have a way bigger impact than the big things you do some of the time. Consistency is key.

4. You’re hung up on what the scale says.

There are so many things about this that are messing you up. The scale is not a good representation of body composition at all. A million things can affect the scale that has nothing to do with fat gain: stress, a hard workout, eating bit more carbs or salt than usual, not enough sleep, not enough water, hormonal fluctuations, etc.

The scale doesn’t take into account all the other signs that show what you’re doing is working: more energy, higher sex drive, better sleep, more strength/endurance, a better mood, improved digestion, clearer skin, fewer PMS symptoms etc.

And finally, just looking at the scale means you’re too focused on the outcome. As James Clear says, “It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

5. You’re planning your habits based on your best day, not based on your typical day.

Yeah sure, when you have all the time, energy, and motivation in the world you might be able to cook every meal, workout for 60 minutes, and have the willpower to say no to all sweets.

But those days are few and far between. Most days you are likely busy, or tired, or overwhelmed, or stressed out, or some combination of all four. Knowing that, choose your habits accordingly.

Because when you set your expectations too high and you constantly can’t meet them, you are chipping away at your confidence in your ability to change and you are getting more and more in the habit of breaking promises to yourself.

6. You aren’t addressing your mindset.

I recently had a new client send me this message, “I am honestly struggling a bit to keep implementing the healthier options. And it’s hard not to get frustrated. I know what I’m supposed to do and eat, mostly, but I just can’t seem to make myself stick to it.”

And the first thing I asked her was, “What beliefs do you have around healthy eating?”

Most of us have been raised in a culture that associates healthy eating with dieting. So the associations our brain has made with healthy choices are boring, stressful, restrictive, we have to miss out on fun, it’s a chore. No wonder we don’t want to keep doing it day in and day out.

So if we’re ever going to be consistent, we have to create new association in our brain that paints our healthy habits in a more positive, enjoyable light.

7. You’re relying on motivation.

One small positive thought in the morning can changed your whole day.

Motivation will never be consistent. Period. It is fleeting, and for many of us rare. If you look at anyone who is successful in business, in health, in anything, none of them will point to motivation as their secret power. Instead they hone their discipline and focus on daily habits (you know, those actions you do without thinking about it).

Now I know none of this is easy. Everything in our culture screams at us to lose weight, do it fast, and if you can’t do it perfectly you’re a failure. Which is why I want to invite you to not do this alone. It is a hard enough journey as it is, made only harder by a million experts throwing different advice at you on the daily.

I’m here to give you the accountability, the hand-holding, the encouragement, and the step-by-step guidance you need to be successful at this. And I promise, you can be successful at this.

FAQs

Inconsistency is rarely a willpower problem, it’s usually a design problem. The most common causes are setting habits based on your best day rather than your typical day, trying to change too many things at once, following a plan you actually hate and relying on motivation rather than building systems. When the plan doesn’t fit your real life, breaking it is inevitable.

Motivation is a useful starting point but a terrible long-term strategy. It’s fleeting by nature, it spikes when you start something new and disappears when life gets hard, boring or busy. People who are consistently successful with their health don’t rely on motivation. They build habits and systems that don’t require them to feel inspired to follow through.

Start smaller than you think you need to. Most people fail at consistency because they build a plan based on their best, most motivated day and then can’t execute it on an average Tuesday when they’re tired and stressed. Design your minimum baseline around your worst realistic day, not your best. A 20 minute workout you actually do every week beats a 60 minute workout you do twice and abandon.

Weight loss is an outcome, it’s the result of consistent behavior, not the behavior itself. Once the initial excitement fades or progress slows, an outcome-only goal leaves you with nothing to show up for day to day. Adding process-based goals such as getting stronger, sleeping better, having more energy, feeling capable in your body, gives you reasons to stay consistent even when the scale isn’t moving.

Most people have deeply ingrained associations between healthy eating and restriction, deprivation, and missing out because that’s how diet culture has framed it for decades. When your brain associates healthy habits with suffering, it will resist them. Building consistency requires re-framing those associations so that your habits feel like things you’re choosing for yourself, not punishments you’re enduring.

Motivation is an emotion. It comes and goes based on how you feel. Discipline is a practice. It’s doing the thing regardless of how you feel because you’ve built it into your routine. Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going. The goal is to build habits so ingrained they require as little decision-making as possible, which is when consistency stops feeling hard.