After a setback it can be hard to regain momentum with a healthy habit. These five steps will help you get back on track again.

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We’ve all been there. Seeing progress with our fitness when something (usually kids or work) throws us off course.

Things were going smoothly.

Eating well, without totally restricting yourself, hitting your steps, even strength training regularly.

You saw some pretty cool results, too: better fit in your clothes, more energy and improved sleep, you were leaner and stronger.

And then boom.

Kids happen.

Work happens.

Life happens.

For whatever reason, you missed a workout and a healthy meal.

One day turned into a weekend.

You started getting down on yourself for breaking your streak of workouts and healthy meals, and it started to snowball, “Welp, might as well just enjoy myself a little more.”

This is where you unknowingly entered the Danger Zone

You look back after a few days, mad because the scale spiked (largely due to excess water, glycogen and poop) but you freak out and think it‘s all fat and you’ve “screwed everything up.”

Frustrated, you give up, believing you’ll never be able to hit your goals.

It can feel like such an uphill battle to recapture that momentum you enjoyed when everything was going well.

And it feels so draining and defeating when obstacle after obstacle is in your way now.

Do not throw up your hands and assume this isn’t for you. Instead, let’s come up with a plan.

Today, you’re going to learn how to develop a system of habits for yourself so that you can get back on track after a break.

Whatever that break in the action might be (personal, professional, intentional or unintentional).

Learn how to go from struggling to being a consistency machine that will have your friends and family looking at you, like … how the hell does she do this shit all the time?

Let’s get into it.

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My plan to get back on track after a vacation

I took 10 days off of training and portion control to enjoy myself on a recent mini-vacation to Montreal with the First Lady. It was child-free, too. Yay for grandparents!

This break was intentional.

I train just about every single day (I view it as physiological hygiene) and every few months, I program in breaks from my training for a few days, maybe even a full week.

The time off from my workouts is for physical recovery. And breaking from my standard diet allows for a bit of a mental break.

On vacations, I believe life and food is meant to be enjoyed. So I did just that by following the one rule I have for those occasions: Enjoy yourself, but don’t eat like an asshole.

Montreal is super walkable (my average step count for the four days up North was easily 22,000 per day). On top of that, I kept up with my mobility practice. So it’s not like I was inactive. I just didn’t pick up heavy things and put them down.

But, my meals were pastries and poutine and everything in between.

To avoid “eating like an asshole,” I ate each meal slowly and until I approached fullness.

There was no time in there where I felt overly stuffed or made myself sick by indulging in tons of excess calories.

However, I did not concern myself with proper portions or protein.

As expected, when I returned from my break, I was a bit weaker, a little bit fatter and definitely unmotivated.

In the past, I would have freaked out about this and struggled to come up with ideas for what I wanted to eat in order to get back on track.

I likely would’ve taken the easy path and just defaulted to ordering processed food delivery for a few days and vow to start next Monday.

This would lead to my own journey into the Danger Zone

For years, I would lose all momentum with these breaks, and feel like an absolute failure for not having more discipline to get back on track quicker.

But I’ve since learned that it really isn’t about motivation. Or discipline.

It’s about developing a system.

I now have a meal plan strategy that keeps me accountable. It’s my system for getting back to work with my nutrition.

My 1-2-3 Meal Plan Framework is a system that I developed that gives me options that are healthy with a meal plan to follow that makes grocery shopping easier and food prep mindless and simple.

Side note: 1-2-3 stands for 1 breakfast, 2 lunches, and 3-5 dinners that I can cycle through each week to remove decision fatigue and stay consistent with healthy eating.

As soon as I get back from vacation, I fall right back into my meal plan and have my daily breakfast of protein oatmeal, my usual lunch of a big ass salad or a grain bowl and then my weekly rotation of about 5-6 dinner options.

I make sure the foods I need for those meals are stocked in my kitchen at all times. No excuses.

Once I return from any break (intentional or not), I’m locked and loaded and ready to go with my system.

This system works because it doesn’t require perfection, it just requires consistent practice.

Perfect is not the goal

The most successful individuals in any field on any subject are far from perfect.

What sets them apart from us mere mortals is that they bounce back quicker.

It’s not that they have this eternal source of unstoppable motivation that never burns out.

It’s not willpower.

It’s just this rugged ability to get back up quickly and get right back to work as soon as possible after a setback. Because they’ve developed systems to do so.

We are all human after all.

Learn this simple switch. If you can harness that power and ability to bounce back, is what will set you apart from the rest of the pack.

It’s what will finally get you in the best shape of your life.

It’s what will finally get that book written. That project finished. Perhaps it will even lead to a better job, career, your own business.

What we’re doing is building healthy habits

And habits become habits through consistency.

Smoking doesn’t become a habit after one cigarette you bummed off of someone at the club because you wanted an excuse to talk to the pretty girls (I might be guilty of this).

Instead, smoking becomes a habit because after that one cigarette, you bum another and another … and eventually, you do this consistently enough that you end up smoking regularly.

The same applies to the positive habits we want to create for ourselves—the only difference is that in many cases, you unfortunately do not get an immediate hit of dopamine after a salad like you do from housing a bowl of ice cream.

But the same systems apply: you must be consistent at the healthy behaviors for them to bake in and become actual habits.

Where most people trip up is by thinking that they need to practice some arbitrary 30, 60, 90 day program where they are completely perfect with that behavior in order for it to become a new habit. That’s not the case.

As James Clear points out in Atomic Habits:

“21 days? 30 days? 66 days? The honest answer is: forever. Because once you stop doing it, it is no longer a habit. A habit is a lifestyle to be lived, not a finish line to be crossed. Make small, sustainable changes you can stick with.”

There is some science showing that 66 days on average seems to be about the sweet spot for the amount of time it takes for a habit to bake in. However this can vary.

And the researchers that landed on this 66 day theory also noted that you do not have to be perfect every day, you can miss and mess up and still bake that habit in.

Because, again, we are all human after all.

5 Steps to get back on track

In order to get back on your plan, you need to have a plan to begin with.

The reason why you keep falling off track is because your track is shaky and poorly designed.

Strengthen your track, your foundation, by building better systems and behavioral habits.

With better infrastructure, you’ll be able to get back on track easier and more consistently, because it’s not so difficult to fall off in the first place. And the barrier to entry is so small that you’ll be able to jump right back on the onramp again.

A good plan will also account for the obstacles along the way.

Understand that you will get thrown off and honestly, it doesn’t have to be the doom and gloom shit that throws you off.

The fun stuff of life can lead to you easing up on your routines and habits.

Birthdays happen.

Weddings happen.

Family vacations to Disney World or the Grand Canyon or your in-law’s beach house happen.

When these things do happen, you must have a system in place that allows you to keep a little bit of momentum going and then another system in place that allows you to get back to work.

1 – Give a shit about your goal

Why are you doing this?

Are you doing this thing because some influencer or celebrity on social media said this was the “optimal” path?

Or because someone at work convinced you?

Or are you doing this because it is actually meaningful and beneficial to you in some way?

If you’re doing it for a real reason and it is something that you truly want and/or need in your life, you are more apt to make this a priority.

And if that new behavior or project is a priority, you will actually figure out how to make it happen.

It’s also important to realize that sometimes, it may feel like a priority (because that’s the obvious thing to say), but in reality it might not be that important to you right now.

I’ve had some students come to work with me and tell me how badly they’d love to lose the excess weight. But after a few weeks of avoidance and procrastination, they realize that other things are going on in their lives and weight loss is not a priority at the moment.

And that’s okay as long as you have the grace for yourself to acknowledge that and move on without feeling guilty about it.

2 – Schedule the desired behavior(s)

Make it a calendar invite that you cannot skip.

Let’s say weight loss is the goal and one of those new behaviors to get you back on track towards your goal is a morning walk. Awesome.

To help make this new habit stick, whip out your phone, open up your calendar app and block out the time you’ll need for that walk and when you’ll take it.

You’ll be much more likely to actually stick to these new habits if you take practical steps like this (see what I did there?).

And it’s much easier to get back to that habit if it’s still scheduled in your calendar.

Don’t skip this step.

3 – Avoid “zero days”

One way to never worry about getting back on track is to simply avoid falling off track to begin with, and you do that by having a “more than nothing” approach.

Avoid falling off the wagon completely next time by understanding that even a little bit counts.

On the busiest of days with my kids at home, I might not have the time for a full-on 30-minute workout, but I won’t skip my session altogether.

I’ll commit to doing what I can, when I can … even if that’s just a few sets or even just five minutes.

Is this going to get me on the cover of Men’s Health? Probably not.

But, keeping my momentum going by adapting to my schedule is what takes me from being a person who “wants to get in shape” to someone who stays in shape by prioritizing his fitness and adapting accordingly.

Even a few minutes of an exercise here and there throughout the day with my micro workout strategy can be super effective.

4 – Find one small thing that keeps you going

Most people base their entire fitness regime off of how much weight they need to lose (and in some cases, how much muscle you’d like to gain).

The problem with this endless cycle is that once you hit your goal weight, you have absolutely nothing to look forward to.

Maintaining the fat loss you’ve achieved is a decent goal, but over time, the motivation to keep that new normal wanes. You’ll end up needing something else, or risk falling back into poor habits again. Thus reigniting the cycle of dieting suck.

The solution is to have a weight goal, but quickly forget about it and then focus instead on a few things:

First, you must focus on the behavior goals.

That means understanding the proper level-moving habits required to losing weight and committing to a goal of consistency with those habits:

We know eating well-balanced meals through portion control with adequate protein and regular strength training is the best bet to achieve a desirable body composition.

So habit-based goals are focused on those particular behaviors.

Next, I always encourage my students of the Lean4Life Academy to have additional performance-based goals.

My student Casey, focused on learning how to perform the perfect push-up.

For other students, it’s learning something like unlocking their first pull-up.

Maybe you’d like to improve your mile, or have a deadlift goal, or perhaps you’d like to secure a handstand.

Having performance-based goals like these are ongoing and do not depend on the scale.

It gives you something to look forward to after you’ve achieved the weight.

And the performance-based goals require continued physical training on that particular skill, so you’ll keep up your behavior-based goal of exercising regularly.

It gives you something difficult to conquer, which provides continued motivation.

5 – Take small but measurable action

Once you have those goals all set, then you can go about the process of breaking those goals down to the tiniest nuggets.

You want to distill this down into the smallest (and seemingly most embarrassing) of habits.

Instead of committing to one full workout session, maybe just focus on doing a few reps of a squat and push-up for a couple of days with the plan of slowly increasing reps and sets until you are ready to get back into your full plan.

If you want to get back to reading again, start with one page.

If you want to get back to eating healthy again, start with adding a little protein at one to two meals. Or maybe add a plant. Or perhaps focus on at least one meal per day that checks all of your healthy eating boxes and then slowly expand from there.

One of my business coaches calls this “Kit Kat’ing”

You can get back on track with your habits with the same method you used to build the behavior at the beginning: by breaking it down into small, bite-sized steps.

One of my favorite Halloween treats was the Kit Kat. It was fun to break off a piece and enjoy the chocolatey wafer goodness.

Instead of this full-sized candy bar, you could slowly break it down into mini-bars and even share with others.

Well, instead of this full-on task, you are going to Kit Kat it down into even smaller pieces that you can tackle today when your motivation is absolutely shit.

Tomorrow, maybe you can eat a bigger chunk, but today, break off a piece.

One piece, one step, on rep, one page at a time.

When motivation is in the toilet and you’ve completely fallen off the rails with your healthy habits, it all comes back to simplifying the process.

Break it down to the tiniest fraction so you can get back on track after a break and start kicking ass again.

Now it’s your turn to get back on track

The simple 5-Step process to regain momentum after a setback:

1. Give a shit about your goal
2. Schedule the desired behavior(s)
3. Avoid “zero days”
4. Find one small thing that keeps you going
5. Take small but measurable action

Go get to work on that one thing you’ve been putting off for the next few weeks, apply these principles, and finally get back on track.

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. 

If you’re interested in working with me to get a complete body transformation program that couples minimalist training with a personalized approach to nutrition (no calorie counting here), then you should check out my Lean4Life Coaching Program.

I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “get back on track” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Until next time,
Pete