After doing health and fitness for over 20 years now (successfully and unsuccessfully), and subsequently giving people advice and coaching clients (also successfully and unsuccessfully), I’ve realized something really important:

One of the hardest things about all of this is: you start doing something that feels easy, you get some results, you feel the urge to do more to get more results faster…

…but you need to just keep doing the same thing anyway.

That is indeed to say: you want to work harder, but you should not do that.

Consider a hypothetical client story that’s all too common in my experience:

You give them a consult and a program, and it’s often much simpler and easier than they thought it would be. “That’s it?” they say. Yup. That’s it.

The client does the program for a few weeks. They lose three pounds and half an inch off their waist. It’s working! They are cruising. Then I get an email:

Hey Pete! This is great! I’m going to start doing paleo carb cycling and two-a-day HIIT training too!

Jackie Chan raising his hands beside his head with a bewildered expression.

I’d earnestly ask in return: so… why are you deciding to do more and make things more complicated when what you’re doing is already working? And then I never hear from them again.

This is something that always stung in the coaching business: people will shoot themselves in the foot for no reason. It’s tough to help someone start doing something, and it’s working, then they just… try to do more or change or complicate things, and then they just stop altogether.

Believe me, I get it. You’ve finally cut through the nonsense and you’re seeing progress. You’re doing it. It’s happening. It’s very exciting. You feel that surge of starter’s motivation. And you want to step on the gas. Do more. Because you feel like you can. And why not get there faster?

Until you can’t do it, because the novelty starts to wear off, and then life throws a curveball and things get a little tough. Your simple four-walls-and-a-roof system that malformed into a sprawling house of cards collapses in the face of inevitable adversity.

Here’s the thing about weight loss and health and fitness in general: once you start laser-focusing on the right things and ruthlessly eliminating the rest, it can actually be really simple and easy. But it can also be very slow and boring. That’s the inevitable trade: an easy process… that’s really hard to be patient with.

That little devil will pop up on the other shoulder one day and say “heyyy, let’s do more and get things faster!” And you have to ignore it. Same meal plan, same simple workout routine, wait three weeks, lose one to two pounds. BORING. I know.

But at the end of the day, only one thing truly matters: will you actually do it?

Not what you want to do, or think you should do, or believe you’ll do, or are told to do. What will you actually do? Even when work gets crazy, or when your stove goes out, or when you’re visiting family for a week, or when any of the other stuff that inevitably happens in life happens?

There are two very important truths in health and fitness:

  1. A system is only as good as its resilience during the hard parts of life.
  2. The simpler and easier your system is, the more likely it is that you'll actually do it, and keep doing it.
  3. Why would you ever want to do extra unnecessary work beyond the bare effective minimum?

So, if you’re doing something and it’s working, and maybe it feels suspiciously too easy, and you feel that urge to work harder and make it faster… do not do it. Just keep doing the same boring thing anyway. Because you’re actually doing it and it’s actually working.