How to stick with Intermittent Fasting or ANY diet. Two most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Ever notice how a new habit feels great for a week, then suddenly turns into an impossible grind?  

We dig into the 2 hidden reasons change collapses, and show how to flip both.  

Using intermittent fasting as a working example, we unpack what’s really happening in your brain when routines shift: the nervous system flags big change as threat, stress hormones surge, and your mind rushes to restore safety by pushing you back to old patterns. That’s not failure; it’s biology doing its job.  

From there, we build a better playbook.  

We lean into kaizen, small, steady steps that fly under the brain’s alarm threshold, until 16 feels normal. We talk practical sequencing. We also show why design beats discipline: aligning your fasting hours with your calendar, planning meals in advance, stacking cues like “tea at seven means kitchen closed,” and choosing low-friction activities on tougher days. The same system applies to sales outreach, workouts, writing, and any skill that looks intimidating until repetition normalizes it.  

You’ll learn how to reduce friction, add supports, and use the environment as your silent coach. When obstacles hit, you’ll know whether to lower the load or improve the design instead of blaming motivation.  

By the end, you’ll have a stepwise method to make fasting and other goals sustainable, joyful, and resilient under real-life stress.  

If this helped, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with change, and leave a quick review so more people can build habits that last.  

Transcript

Welcome And Today’s Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shorina. I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal and collective transformation, and your executive health and high performance coach 360. Just someone who is really passionate about human potential, about supporting your best and creating the most positive impact we can, living in this extraordinary world with experiencing the most extraordinary lives. Today, guys, we are talking about habits, health habits, intermittent fasting, new year resolutions, and why your goals that you set for yourself for 2026 might be failing right about now, or might be feel you might feel like they are too hard right about now. Why do most of New Year's resolutions fail for people? Why don't people change easier and stick with more of their goals, of their change efforts, behavior change efforts, uh habit change efforts? Why don't we stick with more things for longer? Let me start with the story. I was in the gym and a friend of mine, we were chatting about different workouts, and then he asked me, Well, you know, you look pretty lean all year round. Do you do like some sort of intermittent fasting or something? And I told him, Oh, that was there were a lot of things, but I do do some intermittent fasting, what one would call I stop eating around five fish and I start eating around nine-ish, so it's about 16 hours, 15, 16 hours. And he he shared with me. Well, I used to be able to do this intermittent fast so well, and it worked for me so well, but then now I but then now I just couldn't do it anymore. And I don't seem to be able to start. And I want to start and it worked well, but it seems like you know, too hard. I do it for a few days, maybe for a couple of weeks, and then I just get back to whatever I was doing before. And when I see a failure with behavior, people trying things, new workouts, new ways of eating, working, productivity habits, speaking to others or yourself, your mindset habits, communication habits, leadership habits, any change of behavior or sales habits, right? You need to reach out to a lot more people, you need to talk to a lot more strangers to build your business, for example. And you do it maybe for a few days, a couple of weeks, and then you stop and you wonder, like, where did all the results go? I definitely am guilty of that as well. And I've learned from that that it is just like intermittent fasting, or just like your workouts, and we fail for the same exact reasons as you would with your health habits. So there are two main reasons that are a cause of this, like quitting or failing, or you feeling like it's too hard and you reverting back to your old habits. Two reasons in 99.9% of the time. Reason number one: too much too fast. You throw yourself into a habit, and we are all guilty of this, as you would frog into boiling water. And so, as proverbial frog jumps out, something actually very similar happens to you and your nervous system. When we experience bigger change, your brain registers it a lot, and it releases a lot of stress hormones that make you aware of what's happening in your environment. So you adapt and you act in the best possible way. And your brain is always trying to bring back the balance, the equilibrium, the safety. And so when you throw yourself into too much change all at once, your brain actually wants to get you back to normal. Because a lot of change usually comes with a lot of uncertainty and possibly danger, and who knows, possibly death. So your energy tanks, your nervous system gets flooded with stress hormones, your hunger might spike if we are talking about intermittent fasting. Your tolerance mental and physical for this specific change just haven't been built yet. It's not like you are incapable, you just jump into too fast, and your body has to do a lot of adjustments all at once, and it will actually resist that action. You know, Japanese are a kind of genius nation, and long time ago they figured out this thing what they call kaizen, or small gradual improvements that lead to big change. And what the Japan what Japanese learned, and then they used it in Toyota industries, in manufacturing, so it actually is one of the best ways to approach transformation as far as humans are concerned, one small step at a time that your froggy or your the evolutionary brain doesn't register as a lot of change, and therefore it doesn't register it as a lot of danger, as a lot of stress, and therefore you don't get the same resistance from your own self. And yes, if you're trying to get to intermittent fasting from let's say 10 hours to 16 and 18, or maybe even one meal a day, it's a lot of change and stress for your whole system that just hasn't been conditioned for it yet. And so, of course, it feels impossible and you don't understand how people do it consistently, and of course you quit. But also think about that. Would you walk into a gym, especially if you are not into the gym, and start squatting with 100 kilos with zero training? Probably not. You're like, I'm not gonna do that, I'm gonna die. Well, guess what? With fasting, it feels easier because it doesn't feel like you're gonna die, but for a nervous system, there is almost no difference. It's still something that you've never done before. So, what do you expect? Do you expect a lot of stress, a lot of resistance, and your brain trying to get you back to normal, to safety. But is it possible like squatting with 100 kilos with training? For most adults without injuries, absolutely. The same goes for let's say sales. Can you do 100 cold reach outs a day, get mostly no, and still feel confident, excited, and peaceful, and just like nothing happened? Absolutely. From day one, when you did none of the reach outs before and you're not familiar with this concept that most trenches will say no to you, will it feel comfortable? Probably not. The same principle works here. Your nervous system adjusts through repetitions, and then that hard thing doesn't feel that hard. And that's why you see all the salesmen calling all day alone and not really being bothered by all the people saying all the different stuff. Because they conditioned themselves to treat it as a normal thing, that got used to it, it's become a normal part of their day. And intermittent fasting or another health habit isn't special in that sense. It's just another change, it's just another load, and for human psychology, it is best approached gradually. So start with 10 hours or 9 hours, whatever feels a little bit of a stretch, but still quite comfortable for you. And do it for a couple weeks, and then you stretch it a little bit further, and step by step you will get to squatting 100 kilos metaphorically. So get consistent with finishing dinner an hour earlier, do it for a month, and then you can push it further. And that's when the change starts feeling less like a challenge and more like something that's doable for you and sustainable. So instead of again jumping straight right to 18 hours or one meal a day or whatever that thing is for you this year, it is like trying to leave those 100 kilos without warming up. So give yourself time. Kaizen. Japanese learned it like 100 years ago. That's what works better for human transformation. One step at a time, further and further consistently. That's how you make big transformation happen. And most importantly, stick for a long time. The second uh reason why we so often fail with these new resolutions, new goals, new heroic efforts is we create no system of support for change. We just have this bias that we will just power through it, discipline ourselves, we'll power through, just become this new person who is able to do what we've never been able to do, which is not supported by any research studies on actual human beings. If you want to, let's say, fast again successfully, ask yourself: have you designed it around your work schedule, your social life, your energy cycles, your most productive busy hours, your have you planned your non-fasting meals? Have you put any thinking, any design thinking in place so that new thing can easily adjust and flow and fit into your life as it is, not as some imaginary perfect ideal version. Or again, you're eating at random times, random food, that you fight your biology, you fight your calendar, you fight your life, and then wonder why the habit feels like the whole world is against it, including you with some form of self-sabotage or lack of discipline, quote unquote. Yes, the world is against your new habit because you designed it that way. When I do my fasting, and this year I decided to restart my weekly 24-hour fasts, I organize it around my life, around my days, around my workload, around my social commitments. So it doesn't feel heroic, it feels like a natural part of my life. Like if I do it on Sunday, I might get myself out or get myself busy, so I don't even really have time to think about food. I'm nowhere around food and I'm just doing other things, and it feels natural. Less friction, more follow-through, fight less, design more, and win more, guys. This isn't a willpower problem, it's a design solution. So as we move into the second month of 2026, this week, it's gonna be February this Sunday. Dear listener, ask yourself where have I designed my game for this year as a losing proposition? And where would better design help me win more? Again, most of the things research says up to 88%, most of the things we do are automatic, our subconscious, it's driven by our environment, by our unconscious nervous system processing. And so if 88% of what we do, it's not even what we choose to do, but what we are automated to do by our environment and by the way we set up and design systems, then the logical answer is not to try to make better choices with discipline. It's like only again 20, maybe I don't know, 30 at the best percent. But instead become a better designer at designing things in a more gradual transition because it works better for our nervous system and how we build our habits. We humans design the systems, design the environment around you so it helps you to do the unconscious choices that work for your goals, not against them. So your new habits don't feel like you're fighting against yourself and against the whole world, but instead they feel like they are natural feet for your life and for you as a human as you are. Guys, before we sum it up and jump off, please don't forget to share, review, leave a comment, if send it to a friend, this podcast, to someone who might need to hear this, who've been struggling with some habit, some routine, some some transformation in their life, send this podcast to them so they can actually get it done this year with routines, with strategies that work for humans as we are, not some imaginary automatons that do everything perfectly from day one, no matter what you throw at them. They're just not how humans work, right? And uh, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening, thank you for learning and trying and working on developing your best. The world needs more of your best. And till next time, guys, don't stop and keep growing.