How to Stop Falling Off The Fitness Wagon

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this: “I was doing really well sticking to my diet and going to the gym. Then I went on vacation and fell off the wagon.”

Maybe you’ve also “fallen off the wagon” while on vacation. Maybe it happened when you had a stressful week at work. Or maybe it was the holidays, or that stretch of the year when it seems like every one of your friends, family, and coworkers have birthdays.

What if there was a way to avoid falling off the wagon altogether or an easy way to get back on track after a “slip-up”?

There is, and like most aspects of leading a healthy lifestyle, it all comes down to your mindset.

Why Do People “Fall Off The Wagon” When It Comes To Exercise And Healthy Eating?

When most people are trying to improve their exercise or eating habits, they start a workout program or a diet. That workout or eating plan forces them to drastically alter their normal lifestyle.

Suddenly, they have to completely change the way they usually eat. They have to add a totally different behavior to their usual daily or weekly routine.

It’s really hard to change your lifestyle all at once. After struggling for weeks to avoid junk food and drag themselves to the gym, life inevitably “gets in the way” and they eat something that’s not in the diet plan or miss a workout or two.

This happens to everyone. The reality is that you can’t prepare for every eventuality. No matter how committed you are, no matter how strong your willpower or how perfect your plan may be, there will always be obstacles. At some point, you will miss a workout. You will eat some “unhealthy” food. It’s going to happen.

Human beings always fall back on our easy, familiar habits and behaviors when we are faced with difficulties. It’s part of how our brains work.

If your mindset has been to focus all your energy on “sticking to the program” by giving up all sugar or hitting the gym every day, you'll easily fall back to your usual behaviors when something interrupts you and you deviate from the plan once or twice.

What Can You Do Differently?

If you know that you’ll never be able to stick to your plan perfectly (no one can), and you know that human beings will always fall back to our easy and familiar behaviors, then your goal from the outset should be to change your “normal” behaviors. Your effort should be spent making healthy behaviors into easy and familiar habits.

If your “normal” is to work out 5 days a week and eat 5 servings of vegetables and 2 servings of fruit every day, those are the familiar habits you will fall back to if you have an “off” day or week.

When you go on vacation and indulge in more relaxation or “unhealthy” foods than usual, you will automatically go back to your normal healthy lifestyle when you get back.

When you have a particularly busy week and miss a few workouts in a row, you will easily pick up your “usual” workout habits the following week.

You can choose to indulge in a not-so-healthy treat or skip a workout without fear of derailing your efforts. Feel like ordering that burger at dinner? Go ahead! You know that you will be eating nutritious foods tomorrow, because that’s just what you do.

Have an invitation to go out with some friends after work even though it means you’ll miss your gym session? No problem, you know that you will hit the gym the next day, because that’s part of your normal lifestyle.

More than that, you know that you’ll be eating nutritious food and exercising a year from now and beyond. There’s no need to stress about the small stuff.

This is just a change in mindset and focus.

Instead of trying to overhaul your lifestyle to attain an external goal, make it your goal to permanently change your lifestyle by adopting healthy, sustainable habits.

The overall goal behaviors might be similar (either way, you’ll probably focus on eating less junk food and more healthy foods, and exercising more). But the way you get there is very different.

To Build Healthy Habits that Become Your “Normal”

Change Your Mindset

Change your mindset and embrace the slow and steady lifestyle change approach. Be patient and persistent, and you will achieve your goals. More importantly, it will be easy for you to maintain your results. By building sustainable habits, you will never have to worry about falling off the wagon again.

Focus on your behaviors, not results.

You can't always control the results you'll get, but you can control your choices and actions. Set yourself daily goals and trust that if you complete those goals consistently, the benefits will come.

For help with this essential step, download my FREE Goal-Setting Guide. It walks you through the process of setting good behavior goals (I call them "process goals") and creating plans to achieve them.

Start small.

You won't get anywhere by trying to change everything all at once. Choose one easy behavior to start with, and build from there.

In fact, that change should be even smaller than you think. When you decide on a habit goal, rate how confident you are that you'll be able to follow through, on a scale of 1-10. Your confidence should be at least an 8/10. If it's lower than that, the change is too big. Make it smaller and easier.

There won't be fast results this way, but fast results are not sustainable.

Use research-based "success strategies"

There are simple strategies that can make it easier for you to achieve your goals. They include things like changing your environment, anchoring your new habit to an existing one, setting up reward systems, limiting decisions, and tracking your progress.

Incorporate as many strategies as possible when you're creating your plans.

Check out my article on strategies for successful behavior change to learn more.

Good luck, and if you need help, contact me! My personal training programs include habit and mindset coaching to help you get the sustainable results you want.