hiii it’s Leah 🩷

I lost 140 lbs over the course of about three years, and I need you to know something:

I still fall off.

I travel and suddenly I’m ordering food all week. I get sick and miss the gym. I get busy and meal prep disappears. Sometimes I’m tired. Sometimes I’m mentally checked out. Sometimes I just cannot be bothered.

And for a long time, I thought being “consistent” meant eventually becoming the type of person who just… stopped doing that.

Wrong!!

I think we hear “consistency” and imagine this perfect little streak where you hit every workout, eat exactly according to plan, get your steps, drink your water, sleep eight hours and never once encounter an inconvenience.

Be soooo serious.

Something is going to happen.

You’re going to travel. You’re going to get sick. Work is going to be insane. You’re going to have a bad mental health week. Or you’re simply going to have a day where you don’t feel like doing shit.

The goal is not to become immune to being human.

The goal is to get really good at coming back.

That is what consistency means to me now.

I have a baseline of habits I return to. I lift. I track my food. I keep food in the house. I pay attention to my progress. When life pulls me away from those things for a little bit, I’m not creating an entirely new life from scratch.

I’m just going home.

This was one of the BIGGEST things I had to kill during my weight loss journey: the all-or-nothing mindset.

You go over your calories at lunch and think:

“well, today is ruined anyway.”

So now dinner becomes a free-for-all too.

You miss Monday’s workout and think:

“I’ll just start again next week.”

WHY 😭

One meal does not erase months of progress.

One missed workout does not delete your muscle.

A few days off your routine does not teleport you back to Day 1.

But if every little mistake becomes an excuse to give up until some imaginary perfect reset date, that is when a tiny interruption becomes a much bigger one.

I try to care way more about my next choice than my last one.

Had a huge meal? Cool. My next meal can be normal.

Missed the gym? Fine. I can go tomorrow.

Haven’t tracked in a few days? Open the app and start with breakfast.

You do not need a ceremony.

When I’m getting back into my routine, I do not punish myself.

I’m not suddenly eating 1,000 calories because I ate out all weekend.

I’m not doing two hours of cardio because I missed some workouts.

I’m not desperately trying to “undo” anything.

I go back to my boring little basics.

I start tracking my food again.

I get groceries.

I prep some food.

I go back to my normal workouts.

I start paying attention to my steps.

That’s it.

And honestly, I think this is why building a sustainable lifestyle matters so much in the first place.

If your normal routine is absolutely miserable, of course you’re not going to want to return to it.

Mine has had to become something I can actually live with.

This is also where I think people get scared to weigh themselves again.

You go on vacation, eat differently for a week and suddenly you’re avoiding the scale like it personally knows what you did.

I get it.

But your weight can fluctuate multiple pounds from things like water retention, sodium, food volume and your cycle. One random weigh-in tells you basically nothing about the direction you’re going.

I care about the trend.

I weigh myself consistently and look at what happens over weeks and months, not whether Tuesday was 1.7 lbs higher than Monday.

I use the RENPHO Morphoscan Nova because I like having more than just body weight to look at. It tracks things like body fat percentage, muscle mass and other metrics inside the RENPHO app, so I can look at my progress over time instead of emotionally attaching myself to one number.

👉 The scale I use

Especially if you’re recomping, your body can be changing even when the scale is being incredibly unhelpful.

And please remember: the point of collecting data is to help you make decisions.

Not to find new ways to bully yourself.

The less friction there is between me and my normal habits, the better.

When I need to get my nutrition back together, one of the first things I do is make sure I have food at home.

Not inspirational. Very effective.

I also go right back to weighing and logging my food because it removes so much guessing.

👉 My food scale

The food scale is not there because I think you need to obsess over every gram for the rest of your natural life.

For me, it’s a tool that brings structure back really quickly.

Same thing with meal prep.

Same thing with having a workout program instead of walking into the gym and inventing a routine while standing next to the dumbbells.

Make the thing you want yourself to do easier to actually do.

I am not interested in making my life unnecessarily difficult just to prove I have willpower.

This is probably one of the biggest beliefs I’ve developed throughout my entire journey.

If you cannot do the full workout, do part of it.

If you cannot meal prep an entire week, prep one meal.

If you fell off tracking, track today.

If you usually walk for an hour but only have 15 minutes, walk for 15 minutes.

There have been times where my “win” was literally just getting myself into the gym and doing whatever I could manage that day.

It still counted.

Especially when you’re starting out, these habits are new. You are learning how to build your life around them.

Expecting yourself to immediately perform them perfectly is insane.

The goal is to keep putting effort in.

I think this is the part I wish more people understood.

Every time you fall off, you still have everything you learned before you fell off.

You know how to track your food now.

You know what meals work for you.

You know your gym.

You know the exercises.

You know what an average day in your routine feels like.

You know you’ve gotten yourself back on track before.

That is not Day 1.

I’ve had plenty of messy weeks over the last three years.

They did not cancel out the hundreds of weeks where I kept going.

And honestly, I think learning this is part of what finally made fitness feel like my life instead of a temporary project I was trying to complete.

There is no final week where everything becomes perfect forever.

You build a routine.

Life interrupts it.

You come back.

Then you do it again.

And eventually?

Coming back becomes part of the routine too.

If you’re reading this because you feel like you’ve been “off track,” here is your incredibly sophisticated reset plan:

That’s literally it.

You do not need to earn your way back into your routine.

You just need to re-enter it.

So if today wasn’t your best day, whatever.

Your next choice still counts.

See you in your inbox soon 🩷

- Leah

👀 things that make getting back into my routine easier:

⚖️ RENPHO Morphoscan Nova
the scale I use to track my weight + trends over time

🥣 RENPHO food scale
for getting back into actually measuring my food instead of pretending I know what 30g looks like

💪 my workout clothes
because unfortunately a cute gym outfit does, in fact, increase my odds of leaving the house

🏋️ want to see a real day of building new habits?
check out my latest youtube video!

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