Stick to the Plan, Not Your Mood: Building Healthy Habits That Survive a Bad Week

That 45-minute workout plan feels completely doable when you’re making it on a Sunday. Same with the meal prep, the protein goals, the whole “this is the week I get it together” plan. And then Tuesday hits…

Your sleep is off, work is a lot, someone in the house gets sick, and suddenly the routine that looked so reasonable a few days ago has completely crumbled. Then comes the “why can’t I stick with anything?” feeling that you failed.

But what if the plan was just never built to survive a hard week?

In this episode, we’re talking about why the health routines that look best on paper often fall apart the second life gets messy. Plus, we’ll get into the “survival test” every routine needs to pass, and how to make the healthy choice the easy choice before your mood has a chance to talk you out of it.

References

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All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

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Transcript

0:28

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. How are you all doing today? I wanna talk a little bit about a recent keynote speech that I heard at a graduation. A few months ago here, I attended multiple high school graduation ceremonies. And you know these can be kinda long and drawn out, but the best part of a lot of these is that someone gets picked usually to give a keynote speech. At this one high school graduation I'm talking about, the graduates, they got to vote on what high school teacher got to give that talk, they picked the high school economics teacher. And I don't remember the whole speech, but this is the part that stood out to me. He gave this quote from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This is from 1986. I had to re-look up the quote so I get it right, and here it is: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." And basically, the whole message that he gave is that it's likely not gonna be the big things that you remember. He said, "Look, you're probably not even gonna remember having sat in this..." The graduation was in the gymnasium, on the floor of the gym. "You're likely not even gonna remember being here, but it's gonna be these small things where, you know, you have a moment with a friend, an evening where you just took a moment out to do something. So as I'm hearing this, it really struck me, and then I got to thinking, because then they went through hundreds of graduates' names, and I got time to think to myself, and I thought, "If I had to give a keynote, what would I talk about?" And I realized I would talk about consistency in life and how far that's gonna get you, but not this being perfect version and having to get everything right. I basically thought to myself, I would talk about how imposter syndrome, don't let it hold you back. You're never gonna feel ready. You're never gonna feel like you're good enough, but keep taking steps in the direction that you wanna go and how far that can take you. And I would make it sound better, but that would be the rough premise of what I would talk about. It got me thinking about how people build these really high motivation health routines, right? It's like they're really complicated meal plans, intense workouts. You're trying to track everything perfectly. It's really elaborate. But the problem is that aspirational system, it doesn't pass the survival test. The survivable system is really the minimum baseline that can occur no matter what is happening in life. But you're planning for the best case scenario habits. When we take, for example, let's say you have this 45-minute workout plan, and that sounds really great, but then you become sleep deprived because you're going through menopause, or you have a baby, or a kid's sick, or you're emotionally drained, and suddenly you can't do that, and now you feel like trash. Instead of just saying, "All right, I'm gonna do a five, 10-minute walk no matter what," that system survives it. Or you have this really complicated protein regimen with these meals that need to be all prepared on Sunday, and again, you get sick, something happens, and the thing that would work is that you have three emergency protein meals in the freezer, or you have some type of meals that have maybe 10 grams of protein. Is it the perfect 30 plus? No, but it does the trick. It's in the freezer. It's there for you when you need it. For me, my equivalent are the Amy's meals. I'll do that, and I'll throw in some cottage cheese with it. We're good to go. The thing is, when we're thinking about consistency, it's often not as emotional as people would expect. You brush your teeth, you put on your seatbelt, you charge your phone. You don't debate those daily things because it's really an identity level for you. You do them. It's not mood-based. People always have this perception, when I feel better mentally, then I'll become consistent. But it's actually the reverse. This consistency is gonna improve your mood. When you have a bunch of structure, your anxiety goes down. You're not always having to think about when you're gonna do it. You just have a time when it happens. When you have this predictable nourishment, it's stabilizing your hunger hormones and your emotions follow. The movement improves your resilience. You can process things more. You can handle more emotions that are coming up, all of it. You make the healthy choice the easy choice. You already have the proteins ready. You, your walking shoes are by the door. You have a time slot in your calendar for it. Frankly, you need fewer decisions, we need to reduce that activation energy. If any of you have done science class and you see for a reaction to occur, there's this huge mountain that has to go up, and then it goes down. But that initial energy to put that in, that's exhausting. I need you to do everything in the universe to decrease that activation energy. I saw a quote here online, and it said, "Stick to the plan, not your mood." At first, I wanted to fight with this quote. I'm like, "Eh, sometimes I wanna feel bad." But the reality is, when you have a plan, you have to keep going on it even if you don't feel good. Sometimes you know if you planned it with the realistic baseline minimum version of yourself, you know you still need to do it. Now, if you did it with perfectionistic self, of course you're gonna abandon because you knew to begin with you had no confidence that you were gonna do it. But if you really did something that's baseline minimum, you know you can execute on it. I wanna give an example for myself over the summer, just because I always like to show you real-life things. For me, I massively slow down my business in the summer. Now, I keep the same amount of patients, and that's all stable, but you all know that there are different courses and programs and things that I'll do, or maybe I get interviewed for other people's podcasts, things like that. I basically do very little of that June, July, August, and then in December as well. Those are the four months out of the year. Now, that might sound like a lot. You're thinking, "Oh my gosh, that's a third of the year," when you think about four months out of 12. Well, guess what? Those other eight months, I am working my rear off, like massive overtime all the time, and so I need those other times for recovery. I want to be the type of mom right now that at night plays soccer in the backyard with my kid, walks to the pond, picks up the sticks, has the energy to go to the park. That matters to me, so I will say no to some other things in order to make room for that over the summer. The point being this: I'm not setting a to-do list that is for perfectionistic Matthea over the summer. I'm making it super realistic. Like right now, when I'm recording this podcast, I know I have to get a few ahead because there's gonna be times over the summer when my head won't be in the game. I'm not gonna be in a great spot to record a podcast, so I'm gonna make sure to get those ready, it's very simple things where my ability to be able to do it is very future-proofed. I realize, all right I have enough energy for patients, for taking care of those clinical things, and then after that, I scale back a lot of other things. I want you to think about for yourself, you know when you look at the week, the month, the year, you know when you look at it what could be realistic from you. Let's plan that bad mood days, low energy days are gonna be normal, that you're going to have times of grief and stress and burnout and hormones affecting you that week and parenting out of control, work overwhelm, you having stress with family members, whatever the case might be. This is normal. The answer is not gonna be perfection. The answer is that we design a life that still supports your health during imperfect seasons or times when you want to intentionally go slower. You cannot always be in these hypergrowth phases. There's a reason in the past when I've done a lot of thirty-thirty programs, when do we do them? January is when I typically did them, April and September. You can't constantly be pushing it. It's not normal, okay? So your future health, it's not built on your most motivated days. It's built on these really ordinary Tuesday nights when you didn't feel like doing it, but you did it anyway. You kept the tiny promise to yourself. The biggest version that I see here of this when it comes to nutrition, it's gonna be those of you where at the end of a Thursday, Friday night, whenever you're super exhausted, you just wanna go get the takeout, go do whatever you wanna do. And you might even do that, but you first start with eating some fiber and some protein, and then you have some of the takeout. You have some of the Indian food, some of the Chinese food, whatever it is that you got. But you don't start with the noodles where you know, okay, then you're gonna fill up on that. You're not gonna get enough protein. You're not gonna get enough fiber. It sets you up for a world of hurt, plan for the healthy choices to be easy. The best health plan is not the most impressive one. It's the one you can really follow when life feels hard, heavy, like everything isn't kinda falling into place. Here's the one thing I wanna leave you with today. Here's your homework. I want you to think about what are those things that keep not happening for you. You always let the strength training drop off. You don't meal prep on the Saturday or Sunday, whatever it is. Those systems we've got to change. Because if it was easy enough, you would be doing it. And there's something about it. It's either a location of how it's happening. Either your pain level's too high with it. Either you don't have the knowledge. There's something happening there where we've got to crack the nut, and I want you to do some experimentation this summer on an easy level for what that could be for you. Because some of you, you're putting the bar too high. You're expecting yourself to feel good, to follow through all the way on all these things. You halfway following an easy plan is gonna get you so much further than these complicated things that you abort. I know we talk about this a lot on the podcast. It's because if things are not rocking and rolling along for you, it's too hard what you're doing. Most of you are not gonna have to do as much as you think to be successful, but you do need to do consistently some of these simple, basic, easy things, but you've gotta set your life up where it happens that way. Coming back to this quote from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Stop and look around at things. Let's have a moment of gratitude, and then let's think about how can we make this really easy on you so that you don't miss all of the other amazing things in life. All right. I hope you are having a great start to the week and that your week continues to go great. You can always at every moment reset and make the next best decision. I believe in you. You can do it. We'll talk soon.