Missing one workout or one healthy meal doesn't erase your progress. Discover why the habit of 'starting over' may be the biggest obstacle to lasting change.
Have you ever noticed how strangely we treat our healthy habits?
If we skip one workout, suddenly we're "starting again on Monday." If we eat one unhealthy meal, we tell ourselves the whole week has been ruined. We come back from holiday, look at the scales, sigh dramatically, and decide that now we need a fresh start.
I've always found this fascinating because we don't seem to think this way about almost anything else in life.
Imagine you've been learning French for six months. One day gets busy, and you don't open your textbook. You don't wake up the following morning convinced you've forgotten the language and should probably restart from lesson one. Or imagine you've been saving money for years, and then an unexpected expense comes up. You don't empty your savings account simply because you had to pay for a new washing machine.
Yet when it comes to our health, we seem to believe that one imperfect day has the power to erase months of good decisions.
Somewhere along the way we've convinced ourselves that progress is incredibly fragile, that it can disappear overnight, and that unless we're doing everything perfectly, we're somehow back where we started. As a holistic therapist, I believe this has very little to do with health and everything to do with the stories we tell ourselves.
Because the real damage isn't the missed workout or a piece of cake we had, but it's the moment we decide that because today wasn't perfect, today no longer counts. We stop noticing everything we've already done right and become completely fixated on the one thing that went wrong. That's usually when the cycle begins: we tell ourselves we'll start again on Monday, next month, after the holidays, when work is less stressful, when life finally calms down. As though our body has been patiently waiting for the next Monday to arrive before it's willing to benefit from another walk or another healthy meal. Of course it doesn't work like that — our body doesn't think in Mondays.
One unhealthy meal doesn't undo weeks of nourishing your body. One late night doesn't erase months of better sleep. One missed workout doesn't send your cardiovascular fitness back to where it was six months ago.
The only thing that usually resets is our mindset.
By the way, in therapy, we call it PAB — passive-aggressive behavior, or in other words, self-destructive actions we take to harm ourselves or prevent us from harmonizing our lives. That is why working with our subconscious and clearing limiting beliefs, old, redundant programs, often installed in our childhood or even in the ancestral code, is so important.
And once we've convinced ourselves that we're back at zero, it's remarkable how quickly we stop doing the very things that were moving us forwards.
Perhaps that's why I've never been a fan of the phrase "starting over." Because it suggests that everything which came before somehow disappeared.
It didn't.
You still made dozens of healthier choices than you would have made a year ago.
None of that vanished because yesterday didn't go according to plan.
Maybe consistency has never been about getting everything right. Maybe it's simply about shortening the gap between falling off track and gently finding your way back.
Because more often than not, the people who create lasting change aren't the ones who never stumble — they're the ones who never convince themselves they have to begin from the beginning every single time they do.
You have successfully subscribed to the newsletter. Check your email!
Something went wrong, Please try again !
