(Consistency + Flexibility) Compassion = Healthy Lifestyle
What is the perfect formula for a healthy lifestyle? There isn't one! Pick something you love, and practice it with consistency and flexibility. Then practice compassion when you don't get it perfect.
Reflecting on my nearly two-year 140-pound weight loss and fitness journey, I often ask myself, “How did I get here?”
I’ve had many people ask me, how did you do it? How are you maintaining your weight loss even without the weight loss medication [Mounjaro/Zebound]?
My answer is there isn’t a magic formula to my success—and yes, there is irony in the title of this article being a formula.
The truth is you can pick any plan, tools, and formula for health you want, as long as it is not a quick fix and it is something you can follow for the long term.
When you pick a plan, you commit to the lifestyle and habits that make up that plan.
You create a healthy lifestyle.
How have I been able to follow the healthy lifestyle I have created?
Three words come to mind — consistency, flexibility, and compassion!

Consistency has arguably been the most important attribute I’ve cultivated in the past two years.
When I talk about consistency, I’m not talking about rigidity or a self-hating form of discipline. I’ve honestly practiced a lot of flexibility within the context of the consistency of my routine.
I’ve practiced a lot of self-compassion and gratitude.
For example, at some point, I realized that having over 100 pounds to lose was something to be grateful for. That I had so much weight to lose ensured that I would learn to practice what I needed to do for the rest of my life to be healthy. I learned to be consistent.
To be successful, I had no choice but to take my health and fitness one day at a time, one night at a time. I had to practice patience and treat myself with compassion.
In the process, I’ve learned that this weight loss and fitness journey is a journey without an end — it is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life with consistency!
Creating a healthy lifestyle
Bringing the attributes to life—create habits you can practice consistently and flexibly while offering yourself compassion for the bumps in the road.
Step one: Recognize less is more.
Go-big or go-home is a setup for failure for the typical person.
You would be much better served by picking an activity or plan you can consistently do for 365 days than trying to grind your way through 75 days of rigorous pain to force yourself to accomplish some arbitrary goal.
Starting a new habit requires you to give the time that is going to something else to your habit. Whether it is extra sleep, scrolling, or watching TV, your new habit will occupy the space currently occupied by other activities.
This is why starting small is a more practical approach than taking on go-big or go-home fitness challenges. It gives us time to adjust to the space the new habit will take up. It allows us to cultivate the habit as part of our lifestyle.
As a meditation teacher and wellness advocate, Rebecca Doring points out in her podcast Inner Critic Freedom - Episode 181:
“Starting a habit is saying I want to live the lifestyle of this habit.” - Rebecca Doring
Key takeaways: Episode #181: The key to Starting New Habits So You’ll Stay Consistent.
“Habits are something that we want to last… If you start a habit, you are saying you want to live the lifestyle of this habit…”
“We need some mental and emotional space to get used to this new lifestyle and let go of that old lifestyle…”
“…[when] we take on too much too fast, we go from not doing this habit at all to wanting to do it 110%…”
"…[then] something happens that throws off the routine, and it all goes away—the most recent thing you have not established a connection to, a routine, a habit with, goes away first…”
Taking a less is more approach; we start small so it’s easier to win, and as we get better, we add more. But, before we add more, we must build consistency by building our habits in a lasting way.
Step two: Get alignment with your values and craft your health and fitness mission statement.
Once you have committed to a less is more approach to cultivating new healthy habits the next step is to get in alignment with your values and craft your health and fitness mission statement.
According to Brad Stulburg, the author of “Master of Change” and “The Practice of Groundedness”, core values comprise your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles. The things that matter to you the most.
Core values make up your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles; they are the attributes and qualities that matter to you most. - Brad Stulburg
The first step in clarifying your core values is to craft a list of the attributes that resonate with and light you up.
For example, the list of attributes that form my core values are:
Vibrancy
Presence
Joy
Excitement
Love
Once you have the list of attributes, take some time to form a mission statement to guide you. This is your why.
Here is my health fitness mission statement:
To live the most extended, vibrant life possible. To show up for myself, my wife, and my kids with joy and excitement. For my kids to not experience the pain I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old.
This is my why. It gets me up in the morning to work out and keeps me on track, even when I don’t want to.
No matter what happens, I can always come back to this.
Step three: Set goals in alignment with your why.
Now that you're clear on your values and why, it's time to set your goals. These goals will orient you toward a vision of realizing your mission statement.
Using the mission statement from step two as a guide, set some meaningful, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals.
Keep steps one and two in mind here:
Remember, LESS IS MORE, and being meaningful equals aligning with your values!
Instead of “I want to weigh 150 pounds,” Try something like “I want to hike the continental divide with my family by the 4th of July.”
The key here is to remember that your goals are only your compass, something to orient on.
In the past, my goals were a destination I was fixating on in the distant future, my salvation, and the eventual source of my happiness. My goals were my perceived escape from my suffering and a distraction from the current moment. A reminder that I need to be anywhere but right here, right now.
Today, my goals are my compass. They are the mountains in the distance, reminding me I’m going the right way.
My focus is on the current moment—the actions I’m taking today.
Step four: Pick a plan you can follow.
After establishing your less is more meaningful SMART goals, the next step is establishing your plan.
At this point, we are talking about the commitment to the actions and habits you will practice to reach your goals. These habits and actions will bring your health and fitness statement to life daily.
Here are some key points to remember when designing your plan and picking your daily habits and actions:
In alignment with your current reality—less is more.
Rituals over routines.
Tools over fixes—no magic bullets.
Consistency, Consistency, Consistency.
Pick Your Plan: 1 - Be alignment with your current reality.
First, you must remember to be in alignment with your current reality.
For example, if you weigh 300 pounds and haven’t run in 10 years, picking a marathon training plan for your daily actions would not be in alignment with your current reality. It would not be something you could do with consistency—picking a daily thirty-minute walk would be an example of choosing something in alignment with your current reality.
This is where less is more comes into play because your actions will be sustainable and easier to practice with consistency.
Second, you must accept yourself where you are right now. When you do this, you allow yourself to experience happiness right now!
You are not waiting for some goal to be happy.
You are not resisting the truth about what is — i.e., your current situation—as an obstacle to happiness.
You realize that right now, there is nothing to fix.
Though this may seem paradoxical — to change, you must accept the way it is.
This is because when you let go of the tension of wanting to be somewhere else, you can relax into the serenity of taking action aligned with who you are in the current moment.
When you cling to a goal and resist the truth, you create internal tension, and over time, be it tomorrow or six months, this tension will become more than your mind can handle.
And this is why we quit.
Because willpower alone is not enough.
Action becomes sustainable when it is not fighting the internal tension of clinging and resisting.
How to accept yourself where you are at.
How do you accept yourself where you are at?
This can be a frustrating concept to practice in the beginning because, after all, what you want is the feeling on the other side of your goal, and maybe, in reality, your health depends on meeting your goal—hence, it's easy to attach to the result of achieving your goal as the source of the feeling you desire and the fix for what is wrong right now.
For example, before I made the shift to accepting where I was at, I was rejecting the fact that I weighed 316 pounds. In other words, in my mind, I was saying there is something wrong with me because I weigh this much; I must fix this.
This created suffering and resistance within me. It shifted the intention of my actions away from my values and why to fixing what I viewed as wrong with me. The result was cultivating negative feelings and an attachment to the outcome.
When we are attached to an outcome, for example, losing weight, we have outsourced our happiness to that result. We are left feeling anxious in the current moment. We suffer.
The first step to acceptance is viewing what is true in the current moment as just what is and not adding meaning to it.
To do this, we must drop our story and focus only on the facts. This requires objectively looking at the story you are telling yourself about where you are at and seeing it for what it is - a story.
The second step to acceptance is to focus on creating the feeling you desire upon accomplishing your goal through the effort of your actions today.
What about your goal lights you?
It could be the feeling of aliveness after a long run or the pride of being fit.
When you are practicing your habit, for example, going for a walk, rather than focusing on accomplishing your goal, shift your focus to creating the feeling you desire—for instance, aliveness and pride from accomplishing the effort of completing your habit.
The third step to self-acceptance is to practice gratitude for the lesson of the moment. When you look for gratitude in the lesson of the moment, you shift your mindset from something is wrong here to being open to what is possible.
In the past, the reason I did not have consistency with my health was that I had a goal-oriented, outcome-based approach. In my mind, I needed to work hard to achieve some goal, and then I would be magically healthy for the rest of my life.
This led to me always looking for the “golden ticket” or “magic fix” that would solve my problems, which in turn led to me taking unsustainable approaches to weight loss.
This pattern of inconsistency repeated itself over and over until I was willing to let go of my story about my health and fitness.
I had to accept the truth about where I was. I had to let go of thinking that being skinny was the key to my happiness. I had to be willing to let go of my fantasies about finding a magic bullet.
Letting go of tying my happiness to my weight loss allowed me to choose to be happy even when I still weighed over 300 pounds. Letting go of tying my happiness to losing weight allowed me to shift my thinking.
I went from thinking there is something wrong here, ie. I weigh 316 pounds, to finding gratitude for where I was and seeing the more significant lesson of the moment.
In my case, the lesson was to learn consistency. I needed to practice being healthy for an extended time. I had so much weight to lose it would take a long time to get to a “healthy” weight.
This was a gift because it forced me to slow down and make sustainable weight-loss choices. It allowed me to view my health choices as the actions I will be taking for the rest of my life. It caused me to realize that my health and fitness are a journey without an ending.
*Note: if your inner critic is running wild, you may have some inner work to do before you can practice true acceptance of where you are now. See my article on “Accepting Yourself—With Boundaries” for more on this.
Pick Your Plan: 2 - Cultivate Rituals, not Routines.
The difference between rituals and routines comes down to intention.
Routines are something you do to accomplish an agenda, like making your bed every day so that your room is clean. Routines are a means to an end; the only meaning behind them is the agenda itself.
Rituals are similar to routines, with a big exception. They are something you do to cultivate a feeling. Rituals are less about the outcome and more about the meaning you put into them.
As you design your plan and create your daily habits its important to cultivate rituals rather than just creating a bunch of goal oriented routines.
When you cultivate meaningful rituals, you are much more likely to sustain doing them in the long term.
Pick Your Plan: 3 - Tools over fixes—no magic bullets.
A trap that I have fallen into many times in my life is looking for the “golden ticket” that is going to save me from all my problems.
Up until my Moment of Surrender on July 31, 2022 every diet I had ever done was an attempt to fix myself. Each and every time I had gone into it thinking this is the “magic fix”. I became attached to the diet and its intended outcome as what was going to fix me and make me happy.
The truth is Mindset alone is not going to accomplish your health and fitness goals. You will have to take actions that will get you to where you want to go.
The key is how you view those actions.
Are they a fix or are they just the tool you are using?
When I showed up at the endocrinologist's office in September of 2022 I had already shifted my mindset and intention. I wasn’t looking for a fix. In fact, I went in into his office in acceptance of the possibility that he may not be able to offer me anything that would help. I was completely open-minded to any possibility.
Pick Your Plan: 4 - Consistency, Consistency, Consistency.
Creating a healthy lifestyle is not about quick fixes.
When creating your health and fitness plan, it's imperative to think about sustainability over the long term. Think 365, not 30, 75, or even 90.
Consistently repeating a small habit for 365 days will have infinitely more long-term impact than repeating a big action for 30 days and then going back to an unhealthy lifestyle.
The longer you practice a habit, the more ingrained it becomes, and the more likely the plan you pick will lead to creating the healthy lifestyle you desire.
Step five: Focus on the step (and feeling) in front of you.
The final step to creating a healthy lifestyle is to focus on the action in front of you.
This is the workout today. The food you are eating today. The things you are doing today.
OR
The act of setting your intention for things you will do tomorrow—for example, setting your gym clothes out before you go to bed so that you are ready to go in the morning.
The critical thing to do here is to keep your current actions aligned with your vision and connect with how they make you feel in the present moment…
And know that your ego WILL try to pull you off track.
My ego has a remarkable doing this.
It has a way of hijacking my efforts to be healthy and taking them too far.
It can be subtle but starts with a feeling of shame that I quickly skip, followed by thoughts of fixing...
For example, if I eat poorly the following day, when I wake up, there will be a moment of shame followed by a stream of thoughts of wanting to go on a long fast or be super strict with my diet to fix...
Or I might think of a vacation we plan to take this summer, and pretty soon, I’m thinking about how I will look in July.
I've learned to become aware of this tendency very fast.
When I become aware that I’m doing this, my next step is to look up and determine if my thinking and actions are taking me in the right direction. Are they cultivating the desired feeling or creating tension and suffering?
Am I facing west towards the mountain I want to climb in July? Am I taking the actions that will get me there and filling my bucket right now? — Or Am I facing south toward the beach, imagining having a body that will get me validation? Are my actions leaving me feeling empty?
One key way to practice flexibility and to keep your daily actions focused on the feelings you desire is to shift from making decisions to making choices.
Shift from Making Decisions to Choices:
Is there a difference between a decision and a choice? After all, either way, you make a selection from a subset of options and then move forward.
I’ve come to realize on my healing journey that the difference between making a decision and a choice comes down to how I’m left feeling afterward. It’s all about intention.
Here is the definition I use:
DECISION: A selection made after making various logical considerations.
CHOICE: A selection made after making various logical considerations, exploring them, setting them aside, and then connecting to what feels right.
In other words, a decision comes after using your mind to logically analyze something and pick what you think will work best to attain an outcome or result.
A choice involves looking at all the options, examining and exploring them, then setting them aside and doing what feels in alignment with your truth…
A decision involves eliminating and narrowing options and picking what best serves the desired outcome; It involves an agenda.
A choice is all about what feels right and comes from a place of creation and possibility; It results in freedom.
When you make decisions you experience the “Have-To’s”.
Ie: I have to go to the gym today.
When you make choices you experience the “Get-To’s”.
Ie: I get to go to the gym today.
My experience has shown me that the get-to’s take me a lot further than the have-to’s.
When I shifted to making health and fitness choices instead of decisions the internal resistance to my actions dropped. I actually started to enjoy the process.
I experienced a sense of internal freedom.
Continuously Celebrate Success
The best way to keep the action you are about to take aligned with your vision is to celebrate the step you just took!
Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.
Celebrating my success and challenges has been critical to sustaining my momentum throughout my weight loss journey.
Each time I celebrated a small win, I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment.
When discussing celebrating success, it’s easy to focus on the wins. In my view, it’s just as important to talk about our failures and challenges because that is where growth happens.
When we have an opened-minded Mindset, our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lesson we need to learn to grow.
Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we become more integrated human beings.
As I reflect on my weight loss journey, I can see that the most meaningful times were found in failure and challenge — The moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.
Every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson, I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.
Closing Thoughts
I’ll close today with something I wrote back in March of 2022; It was one of the moments when I first accepted the truth of my health situation. The moment I realized I had let go of what was not working in my health and fitness.
What do I have to let go of to be healthy?
March 13, 2022
This morning I woke up after the fourth or fifth day of completely letting go of eating healthy. I’m not even going to sugarcoat it, I drove the train off the tracks and over the cliff.
I can look back and see where the dominoes began to fall; I let the stress of work and a busy week throw me out of my workday routine…
On the other side of the stress and the unhealthy binge, I am pulled to overcorrect the wheel in the other direction. The pushing thoughts are here. ”I’ll start a super strict routine”, “I’ll fast for a week”, “I’m going strictly low carb”...
I have a really hard time staying in a sustainable, steady state. I yo-you from one extreme to the other. Extremes are what I know; I have a really hard time with - consistency. (I struggled to even think of the word to put there)
This makes sense. Growing up with an alcoholic parent was extreme. There was no consistency. When my mom was drinking it was chaos; When she was sober she pushed hard to be perfect, for us to be perfect.
Normal was a perfect house or a disaster zone. Normal was never consistent.
So what do I have to let go of to be healthy? I need to let go of my fantasies.
First I need to let go of the fantasy that I’m going to find the magic solution where I push myself really hard and “then I will be healthy”.
I also need to let go of the fantasy that I won’t be pulled into chaos, and that I will heal myself in a way where I won’t be triggered to completely go off the rails.
Finally, I need to let go of the idea that being healthy is something I will get to “someday”. Being healthy is something I have to do right now, every day, over and over.
The lesson of this moment is that I’m not going to heal my way to health…
There is no magic fix waiting for me around the corner. I am being called to surrender to the truth…
The truth is that I have no idea how to be consistent with my health; I daydream about being skinny while plotting the perfect plan to get there. That when I’m “on fire” and working my ass off all I can think about is the next pizza.
The opportunity is to learn to work with the parts of me that want to pull me to extremes. To build a consistent, sustainable structure I can lean on. So I can provide those parts of me what they need to feel safe, soothed, seen, supported & challenged.
When I look at my health in this way, I see I already have everything I need; I’m doing this in other areas of my life. My challenge is to integrate my health routine into my daily rituals in a consistent and sustainable way. And to create space for and be with the parts of me that struggle with it.