Total Health in Midlife Episode #204: How to Create Sustainable Health Habits

Have you ever noticed how every January you start out absolutely convinced that this time is going to be different? You’re motivated, you’re excited, and you’ve got the perfect plan. And then, by February, you’re right back where you started feeling like, ‘you failed again.’

Well, what if I told you that the reason that you keep falling off track isn’t because you lack willpower or discipline? What if the real reason your health goals keep slipping away has nothing to do with how committed you are and everything to do with a critical mistake that almost everyone makes when trying to change their health habits.

In today’s episode, I’m going to reveal why getting serious, quote unquote, or trying harder isn’t the answer. And I’ll share a completely different approach that might seem counterintuitive at first but could completely transform how you think about your health goals.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by your inability to stick to a plan, even though you know exactly what you should be doing, this episode is going to be a game changer. Stay tuned because what you’re about to learn could finally free you from the exhausting cycle of starting over and help you to create lasting change without the constant struggle. Let’s get started.

Welcome to Total Health and Midlife, the podcast for women embracing the pivotal transformation from the daily grind to the dawn of a new chapter. I’m Elizabeth, your host and fellow traveler on this journey.

As a Life and Health Coach, I am intimately familiar with the changes and challenges we face during this stage. Shifting careers, changing relationships, our new bodies, and redefining goals and needs as we start to look to the future and ask, what do I want?

In this podcast, we’ll explore physical, mental, and emotional wellness, offering insights and strategies to achieve optimal health through these transformative years.

Yes, it’s totally possible.

Join me in this amazing journey of body, mind, and spirit, where we’re not just improving our health, but transforming our entire lives.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Total Health in Midlife podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I want to thank you for tuning in today. I really super appreciate you being here, and I love it when you reach out to me on social media or email with your thoughts and experiences. Because it helps me to understand what you like, what doesn’t resonate, and what you need more or less of.

So, you know, there’s something that’s magical about January. And I’ll admit, I am a total nerd about new planners and office supplies and all of that great stuff when we buy new things at the beginning of the year. There’s this exciting energy about setting new goals and imagining what’s possible.

But before you dive headfirst into another ambitious health overhaul, I want to invite you to pause for just a moment. Here’s why. I’ve worked with hundreds of women who start each year full of determination, ready to transform their health. They’re motivated, they’re excited, and they want to harness all that new year motivation and energy to make big changes.

Does that sound familiar? But here’s what I’ve learned, and what I share with my clients. You are absolutely capable of creating lasting change in your health. That’s not the question. The real issue is that the traditional approach to health transformation, you know, the one that says, ‘all in,’ change everything at once method. Well, it’s setting you up for frustration and failure.

Today, I’m going to show you a different way. A way that actually works even when life gets messy because it will. Even when motivation fades, because it does. And even when stress hits because that is also going to happen. If you’re tired of starting over every few months with your health goals, this episode is so going to help.

So, one of the biggest traps I see with my clients and people that I’m friends with. And I’ve absolutely done this myself is how we dramatically overestimate what we will be capable of doing in the future. We sit down to plan our health goals, and we imagine this idealized version of ourselves who will somehow have endless willpower, boundless energy, and zero obstacles.

But let’s get real here for a second. While it’s easy to fantasize about how great we’re going to feel in our healthier body, we completely forget to factor in those really tough days. You know the ones that I’m talking about too. The ones where your boss drops an urgent project on your desk at 4:45, when your teenager is having a crisis, or when you’ve had back to back meetings and barely had time to go to the bathroom and you are just dog tired at the end of the day.

These aren’t extraordinary circumstances. This is life. And if you’re trying to pile new health habits on top of an already cramped schedule without creating space for your new health habits, guess what’s going to be the first to go when things get hectic? Your health goals. I see it all the time in my coaching practice.

A client will tell me, I’ll start eating better on Monday or next month will be different. I’ll have more time then. But here’s the truth. Future ‘YOU’ is dealing with pretty much the same constraints as current version ‘you.’ The only difference is that current ‘you’ is making promises that future ‘you’ will have to keep and might not be able to.

This is exactly why knowing what to do isn’t enough. It’s not about knowledge, it’s about learning how to navigate real life while maintaining your health habits. Through coaching, I help my clients develop the skills to turn these inevitable setbacks into learning opportunities rather than evidence of failure.

Because here’s what nobody tells you. The path to better health isn’t about avoiding obstacles. It’s about learning how to handle them without completely derailing your progress every time.

Let me introduce you to something that I call the River of Misery. I have an old podcast on it. It’s the emotional space that we hit when maintaining all of our new health habits feels completely overwhelming and we start thinking about and romanticizing our old lifestyle.

The one where we didn’t have to think. You know that moment when you’re like, was it really so bad before? At least, I could enjoy my wine with dinner or I didn’t have to do all of this food prep. Life was easier when I wasn’t trying so hard.

Every single person who tries to change their health habits encounters this river of misery. It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but rather ‘when.’ And here’s what makes it particularly treacherous. The more habits you try to change at once, the deeper and more difficult this river becomes to cross.

I want to share a story about my client, Claire, that perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Claire went to a Halloween party with the best of intentions. She had promised herself that she was going to quote unquote, ‘be good.’ No alcohol, stick to the veggie platter, avoid all the tempting treats.

But when she got there, there was Queso. And Queso was her absolute favorite thing in the world. And they had margaritas. Her plan just unraveled. When Claire showed up to our next coaching session, she was so beating herself up about it. Not just about the Queso and margaritas, but about everything.

She was ready to throw in the towel on all of her health goals because she couldn’t execute her plan perfectly. Her expectations for herself were so high that one deviation made her feel like a complete failure.

This is exactly what the river of misery does. It makes us want to abandon all of our progress and go back to our old ways. It whispers things like, “see, I knew you couldn’t do it.” You may as well give up. And while we’re trying to change too many things at once, these whispers become really super loud and convincing.

The problem isn’t that Claire had some queso and margaritas. The problem was that she had set such rigid, all or nothing expectations for herself that any deviation felt like a total failure. And this is what happens when we try to make too many changes at once. We set ourselves up for an especially deep and turbulent River of Misery.

Through our sessions, Claire learned that it wasn’t about having perfect execution. It was about having a realistic plan that could bend without breaking. Because here’s the truth, the River of Misery is part of change, but we don’t have to drown in it.

Think about when you were a kid and brought home a test with a B plus or an A minus. For many of us, the response wasn’t, ‘Great job!’ But rather, ‘what happened to those extra points?’ We’ve been conditioned since childhood to believe that anything less than perfect isn’t good enough, especially as women.

This perfectionistic mindset is deeply rooted in how we were raised. Our parents, with the best of intentions, often placed adult expectations on us as children. They forgot that children don’t think like adults. And honestly, even adults don’t perform perfectly all the time. Yet here we are still carrying these expectations, still believing we should be able to execute everything flawlessly.

There’s a brilliant quote about creative work that perfectly applies to health. It states, “nobody tells beginners this, but there’s always a gap between your taste and your ability. You can see exactly what good work looks like, but for the first while, you just can’t produce it. Your taste is what got you into the game, but it’s also why your work disappoints you.”

This quote is exactly what happens with health goals. We can perfectly envision ourselves meal prepping every Sunday, working out five days a week, drinking our water, getting eight hours of sleep. But we’re expecting ourselves to execute like experts when we’re still developing these skills.

And then, what happens when we Inevitably fall short on these perfect expectations. We stress out. We feel like failures. And where so many of us turn to when we’re stressed out and feeling like failures is right back to food and alcohol that we’re trying to moderate. It becomes this vicious cycle. We set impossible standards and we fail to meet them. We feel terrible about ourselves. And then, we cope with the very behaviors that we’re trying to change.

This is exactly why I work with my clients to break this perfection cycle. Because until we address this underlying pattern, we’ll keep setting ourselves up for disappointment, no matter how many new diets or exercise plans we try.

I want to introduce you to what I call B Minus Habits. And before you cringe at that term, yes, I see you perfectionist sisters out there, hear me out.

B minus habits are about doing what’s sustainable rather than what’s perfect. B minus habits are about building on progress, not maintaining perfection. I know some of you are having a visceral reaction to this concept right now. You’ve spent your entire life hearing things like, ‘if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ Or the sarcastic side of it is, ‘it’s not just good, it’s good enough.’

These messages have conditioned us to believe that anything less than perfect is failing. But I need you to really hear this. Human beings are not perfect. Life is not perfect. It’s messy, it’s complicated, and it’s constantly throwing curveballs at all of us.

Let me tell you about my client, Kara. When she first came to me, her schedule was absolute chaos. She hated cooking, she stayed up too late trying to get some ‘me’ time in. And her demanding work schedule left her feeling like she was failing at being a mom because she couldn’t keep up with all the household chores.

Can you relate to that? So, instead of putting her on some rigid plan that would have fallen apart at the first unexpected work meeting, we took it slowly, really, really slowly. There were weeks when she couldn’t exercise at all. Yes, she still hit the drive thru sometimes. But here’s the thing.

By embracing this B minus approach, by making small manageable changes that fit into her real life, Kara actually lost 40 pounds. And can I tell you something that’s really super important, especially for those of you who are mothers and grandmothers? We need to break this cycle of perfectionism. Your daughters and granddaughters are watching.

They’re learning how we treat ourselves, how we talk about our bodies, how we approach our goals. Do you really want them to inherit this burden of perfectionism that we’ve been carrying?

B minus habits aren’t about lowering your standards. They’re about setting realistic expectations that you can actually maintain when life gets messy. Because let’s be honest, life is always going to be messy. The question is, do you want to keep starting over every time things get complicated? Or do you want to build habits that bend without breaking?

You know, what I hear all the time? “Elizabeth, I know what I should be doing, I just can’t get myself to do it.” And let me tell you, this isn’t about lack of knowledge or willpower. Most of my clients are incredibly successful women who can tackle complex projects and manage countless responsibilities. Yet, when it comes to their health, they keep getting stuck. Here’s why.

There are actually two main reasons we don’t follow through on our health goals. First, we make the goal too big. So, we try to change everything at once, which is where B minus habits come in. Second, we set goals that look good on paper, but don’t actually connect with what matters to us in real life.

So, in other words, we want to want to do the thing. This is exactly where coaching becomes transformative. When we work together, we’re not just creating another health plan, we’re developing the skills. Yes, skills that you need to navigate real life while maintaining your health habits. I help you identify those sneaky thought patterns that derail your progress. And we come up with strategies that will actually work for your life. not some idealized version of it.

So, think about it. If you could do this alone, wouldn’t you have done it by now? There’s no shame in that. Just like you’d hire an accountant for your taxes, or a lawyer for legal matters. Working with a coach who understands these struggles can make all the difference.

That’s why I offer an “I Know What To Do, I’m Just Not Doing It” strategy call. This isn’t about getting more information; it’s about understanding what’s really holding you back and creating a clear path forward that actually works for your life.

So, we’ve covered a lot of ground today and I want you to walk away with the core truth. You are absolutely capable of creating lasting change in your health. The problem isn’t you, it’s the approach that you’ve been taught to take. You wouldn’t expect to become an expert pianist in a month or to be able to speak a new language fluently in a week. Heck, it’s been eight years and I’m still struggling with Spanish.

Yet somehow, we expect ourselves to completely transform our health habits overnight. It’s time to let go of that impossible standard. This year can be different not because you’re going to try harder or be more disciplined. You’re the same person that you were last year and the year before. But because you’re going to be smarter about how you approach change.

Through B Minus Habits, you can build a foundation that actually lasts, even when life gets messy. Because life will always be messy. If you’re tired of starting over, if you’re ready to break free from the cycle of all or nothing thinking, I want to invite you to schedule an “I Know What to Do, I’m Just Not Doing It” strategy call with me.

During this call, we’ll uncover what’s really holding you back and create a clear path forward so that it works for you and your real life, not some idealized version of it. You can schedule your call at elizabethsherman.com/call. This isn’t about getting more information. It’s about finally understanding why you keep getting stuck and what to do about it.

Keep in mind, you don’t have to choose between perfect execution and giving up entirely. There’s a middle path. One that leads to lasting change without the constant struggle. Let me help you find that path.

That’s all I have for you today. Have an amazing week. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Thank you for tuning in today. Now, if you enjoy the podcast and are ready to take the next step in addressing your health concerns, I would love to invite you to schedule an I Know What To Do, I’m Just Not Doing It strategy call.

In this 60 minute session, we will explore what’s holding you back and create a personalized action plan. You will gain clarity, support, and practical steps to move you forward.

Visit elizabethsherman.com/call to book your call now. You can transform your health and I would love to be there to help.