Why You Know How to Lose Weight But Still Can’t Stay Consistent

The most frustrating thing when it comes to losing weight is when you know what to do and you don’t do it. You know you should track your food.

You know you should exercise. You know you should get more steps. You know you need to eat more protein and fiber. You know all about calories and that you need to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight.

But when it comes time to do it, you don’t do it. Or you do it sometimes. Sometimes you track your food, Sometimes you get steps. Sometimes you exercise. Sometimes you pay attention to calories and portions and try to eat in a deficit.

And you’re thinking what’s wrong with me? Why can I just do what I know I should do? Why don’t I just do what I say I’m going to do?

And when you know what to do, but don’t do it you immediately assume what? Well, I must not be disciplined. I must be lazy. I must not be motivated. I must not want weight loss bad enough.

That’s ridiculous. Every woman I know who wants to lose weight, wants weight loss and good health badly. You wanting weight loss is not broken. The problem isn’t you.

In fact, the only problem is that you think there is a problem when this friction with doing habits is a normal part of behavior change. The friction you are experiencing with doing what you know you should do is a normal part of behavior change in the beginning of building new habits. It’s your habit brain, which I’m going to guess no diet has every explained to you.

Your habit brain’s job is to do things on autopilot. There are hundreds of habits you do every day on autopilot, and you’ve been doing those autopilot habits for years and decades. You’ve looked at food a certain way on autopilot for years and dieting has messed up how you look at food and exercise habits.

Now when you want to change your autopilot habits and you start doing new things, your habit brain goes wait a minute. What are you doing? That’s not what we do! We eat cookies when we’re stressed!

You mean to tell me I can’t eat cookies when I’m stressed anymore. Now what am I supposed to do?  What are you doing? We’ve done this calorie deficit thing before and failed. You mean to tell me you want to feel like a loser and fail at this again. Why would you do that?

You see when you start changing behaviors and habits, your habit brain throws a temper tantrum and that is normal. Your habit brain is just used to you living your life a certain way for years and decades.

Now you’re trying to do these new things or things you’ve even done before, and your habit brains goes OMG, what do you mean we’re going on a walk? We don’t do that! And it finds reasons not to go on a walk. What you mean you want me to track my food? We don’t do that!

And it finds reasons for you not to track your food. Or your habit brain tells you you’ve done tracking before. That doesn’t work anyway. We should go have fun and eat what we want like we always do. All normal, normal, normal. Your habit brain’s job is to throw a temper tantrum when it senses you’re doing something new. All normal, normal, normal.

Now what many of you don’t understand is that it can take up to 200 days for new habits to become a cemented habit. Your new autopilot. So, if you have not been tracking your food every single day for 200 days, it’s not a habit yet. If you have not been going on a walk every single day for 200 days, it’s not a habit yet. In the beginning, your habit brain is going to put up a fight. That is normal.

It’s like when your kids are little and you’re teaching them to brush their teeth. In the beginning, they’re excited because it’s new and they want to do it. But then suddenly, it becomes a battle. Night after night after night after night your kids are fighting you over brushing their teeth. That goes on for weeks and months. You think it’s never going to end until they’re doing it on autopilot.

That is how difficult it is to form one new habit. It’s also why you can’t change a lot of habits overnight and expect yourself to be consistent with them for a very long time.

The problem for most middle-aged women I’ve coached in my nutrition practice is that they think there’s something wrong that they don’t want to do the habits or don’t feel like doing habits. There’s nothing wrong. This is how changing behaviors works which is why changing your behaviors with food and exercise is hard because your brain throws a temper tantrum.

I mean do you say to your child when they throw a fit about brushing their teeth, what’s wrong with you kid? Don’t you know it’s good for you and if you don’t do this teeth brushing thing your teeth are going to rot and fall out? Probably not. Because you just logically know that overtime, they will brush their teeth on autopilot. The problem is you’re not recognizing that changing your behaviors works the same.

What I often see happening for women is they will track their food for like 3 months and then something happens, they stop tracking their food and then they’re doing the sometimes thing. Sometimes tracking their food here and there. They have a week or two stretch of tracking and then three weeks of no tracking. Then they get frustrated with themselves.

The thing is when you do the sometimes thing, you’re never giving your habit brain the opportunity to adopt the new habit. So, what would be 200 days to make that one habit an autopilot habit now becomes 400 or 500 days because you’re only doing the habit sometimes.

It extends the up to 200 days to form a habit, which is why once you start you cannot stop the habit. You really must find ways to keep going with your habits even when you can’t be perfect.

That means tracking some meals if you can’t track all of them. That means even if you guess at the portions of meals, you do it. The point is to keep the habit because doing imperfectly is still doing the habit.

You want to get good at doing it imperfectly vs. only doing it only when you can be perfect. Because only doing the habit when you can be perfect means your habit brain will never make that habit an automatic thing because you’re only doing it sometimes.

 Unfortunately, most women whether they’re willing to admit it or not, are in the sometimes camp so none of the habits and behaviors they want to achieve ever become cemented into their lifestyle because they only do them conditionally. Like, I only walk when I’m losing weight. I only track my food, if I see the scale going down. I only track my food when I’m eating at home and know what I’m eating. I only walk when I’m not stressed out.

I used to do habits conditionally too when I was 215 pounds. I would only do things to take care of my health when I was losing weight and then when I wasn’t losing weight, I would stop. I look at that now and think how weird that was that I did that. And I see a lot of women doing the same thing. I’m only doing these things if I see the scale’s going down and I’m losing weight.

The problem with this mindset is as soon as you lose weight, you stop doing all the things that helped you lose weight. You stop paying attention to calories, portions, steps, what you’re eating, how you exercise. Slowly but surely, you stop doing those things and then you’re back to your normal life that caused you to gain weight.

Your current life is compatible with weight gain. So, once you start, you must accept you can’t go back and you must build a life that is incompatible with weight gain. A life that is practical. Emphasizing the word practical.

Many of you have done diets or are doing diets that are not practical for you to do until you’re 85+ years old and your brains are a little messed up from years of following diets and rules. A lot of diets appear healthy but have you doing unhealthy behaviors with food.

You see just losing weight does not change your behaviors. You must modify your behaviors and habits while you lose weight to keep it off, and a lot of women are doing unhealthy behaviors just to lose weight.

If you are following a diet that tells you not to eat fruit because it has too much sugar that is an unhealthy behavior with food. If you are following a diet that only allows you to eat protein and vegetables, that is an unhealthy behavior with food. You see many of you are so focused on losing weight that you don’t even recognize that the behaviors you’re doing with food and your mindset with food are completely unhealthy.

One time I told myself if I could just eat carrots and cantaloupe until I lost weight, I could return to normal and I would be fixed. Carrots and cantaloupe are healthy foods, but my mindset and behavior were completely unhealthy with them. Many women who are doing these things with healthy foods do not understand their behavior isn’t healthy with those foods.

Whole30 is a great example of this. I did an episode on this awhile back. What happens every January? Women jump on the Whole30 diet to reset their cravings. They spend the entire holiday season eating like a jerk then come January feeling bloated and disgusting and doing Whole30.

Many women think this is healthy. It isn’t healthy. You’re swinging from one extreme of not caring what you eat and how you treat your body into another extreme of cutting out certain foods that are perfectly healthy. Whole30 is an elimination diet for food sensitivities, but many women use it to crash diet. That behavior of using

Whole30 to crash diet is an unhealthy behavior. This is what I mean when I say you could be following a diet with healthy foods, but your behavior and mindset could be completely unhealthy.

Now that you’ve done so many of these types of diets, your brain is all confused with food and now the habits that you want to make as your new autopilot feel even harder to do. This creates even more resistance and friction to doing the food and exercise habits. Often, we are just too focused on needing to lose weight that we don’t even recognize this is what’s going on.

So, when you say to me, “I know what to do, I’m just not doing it.” I’m not surprised because knowing what to do and implementing are two entirely different things.

For example, I’ve never worked with a client who was surprised that they needed to eat protein. They heard all about protein before working with me, but they didn’t know was what that looked like in a meal or how to figure out how much protein per meal they should be aiming for. They didn’t know how to eat pizza and get enough protein. How to eat out and get enough protein. How to travel and eat enough protein. How to eat their favorite foods and eat enough protein.

And because my clients have a bad relationship with food and emotional eating patterns, they would eat something like pizza, feel bad about it and do the start over Monday thing.

So, you can know you need to eat protein but not know how to implement it. You can know you can eat pizza and lose weight but not know how to do that without spiraling mentally.

Knowing and implementing are not the same thing, and because it takes time for our habit brain to adopt new habits many of us think there’s something wrong with us that we’re still struggling. The key to weight loss that I learned in my own 80-pound weight loss journey is you must do habits a long time before they become automatic.

In the beginning, it will require more effort to do your habits, and what’s important is doing the habit. Like I said earlier, doing habits imperfectly. So, tracking even if it’s not perfect. Walking even if it’s not the right number of steps. The goal is to get good at doing the habit not hitting a number. That’s what messes up a lot of you. You’re too focused on hitting numbers in the beginning instead of getting good at showing up for yourself and hitting your habits.

In the beginning your goal is to get consistent (not perfect), with the habits. That may look like 2,000 steps on Monday, 5,000 steps on Tuesday, 4,000 steps on Wednesday, 1,500 on Thursday. The goal is the habit. Not the steps.

Many women are going after numbers when they haven’t built the habits yet. That’s backwards. Start building your habits. Stop tracking the scale and start tracking your habits. Whether it’s going on a walk, going to the gym, tracking your food, eating your protein.

Get a calendar and X off the days you did the habit. That way you can visually see how many days you did the habit you’re working on. You can’t keep weight off without the habits because right now your habits are compatible with gaining weight.

What I also learned in my 80-pound weight loss journey is you must become okay with not being good at your habits for a long time. I got really good at failing and not doing things perfectly, and the more I stumbled doing the habits the more I learned and the more I learned the more automatic they became. You see most women have no tolerance for failing.

Why am I not good at this why? Why is this just so hard for me? It’s so much easier for everybody else. Why am I not perfect? It’s because you’re supposed to fail a million times before it becomes easy and automatic. That’s normal.

The things that you keep beating yourself up over are things you’re not good at yet and you’re supposed to fail before they become automatic, and if you have no tolerance for failing that’s a big reason why you’re struggling and without coaching and accountability (not just somebody giving you numbers) you stay stuck.

Most women think none of these struggles should be there when the truth is they are all normal part of changing your behaviors. The struggle is supposed to be there. You just don’t want it to be there and that’s the real issue. If you want the weight loss, but you want it to be easier. I don’t blame you.

Changing behaviors is hard. The steps are simple, but the change and implementation piece is hard which is why you can know what to do but find yourself not doing it. Because changing is hard. Implementing is hard.

And the two biggest things we are up against are our habit brain taking a long time to make a habit our new autopilot and our dieting history that messes up how we look at food along with our emotional eating patterns.

 So if you’re sitting there thinking, “I know what to do, I’m just not doing it,” I want you to stop using that sentence as evidence that something is wrong with you.

The resistance you’re feeling doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It doesn’t mean you’re unmotivated. It doesn’t mean you don’t want weight loss badly enough. It means you’re in the middle of changing behaviors that you’ve practiced for years, maybe decades.

Your job right now isn’t to be perfect. Your job is to keep showing up. Track imperfectly. Walk imperfectly. Eat more protein imperfectly. Do the habit even when it isn’t pretty, even when you don’t hit the number, even when life gets messy.

Because every time you do the habit, you’re teaching your brain, “This is what we do now.”

Stop measuring success by the scale for a minute and start measuring success by how often you show up for the habits you’re trying to build.

The women who keep the weight off aren’t the women who never struggle. They’re the women who keep practicing long enough for the struggle to become their new normal and eventually their new autopilot.

So this week, pick one habit. Just one. And focus on keeping it alive. Not perfect. Alive.

Because weight loss isn’t built on perfect days. It’s built on hundreds of ordinary days where you keep showing up, even when you don’t feel like it.

And that’s how lasting weight loss happens.

And if listening to this episode made you realize that your struggle isn’t knowing what to do, it’s implementing it consistently, and you don’t have to figure that out alone.

That’s exactly what I help women do inside my one-on-one weight loss coaching program for midlife women. We work on building practical habits, navigating emotional eating, and creating a way of eating that actually fits your life so you can lose weight and keep it off.

If you’re ready for support and accountability instead of another diet, you can schedule a consultation with me using the link in the show notes. I’d love to talk with you