4 Steps to Getting Back on Track After You Mess Up In Your Health Journey

We've all been there. One weekend turns into a week. A vacation throws off your routine. You overeat at a party, have a binge eating episode, or simply stop doing the habits that were making you feel your best.

The good news? You don't need to start over.

In this episode of Isn't She Powerful, I'm sharing the exact 4-part strategy I personally use (and teach my clients) to get back on track without guilt, punishment, or the all-or-nothing thinking that keeps so many women stuck.

Instead of overcorrecting with restrictive diets, hours of cardio, or promises to "be perfect" on Monday, you'll learn how to approach setbacks with a clear plan that helps you rebuild consistency quickly and sustainably.

Whether you've been off track for two days or two months, this episode will help you reset your mindset, remove the emotion from the situation, and confidently take your next step forward.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• When it's actually time to use this 4-step reset strategy
• Why getting off track is a normal part of every health journey
• How to remove guilt, shame, and emotion from a "mess up"
• Why overcorrecting often leads to another cycle of burnout and inconsistency
• The simple 4-part framework for getting back into healthy habits
• How to build consistency instead of chasing perfection
• The mindset shift that makes healthy habits feel sustainable for life

If you've ever felt like one unhealthy meal, one vacation, or one difficult weekend erased all of your progress, this episode is for you. Your success isn't determined by whether you get off track. It's determined by how quickly you return to the habits that help you feel your best.

Remember: You don't need a fresh start. You just need your next healthy choice.

—

WORK WITH LAURA:

• Seismic Shift: Group Health Coaching (code POWERFUL for 10% off)
• 1:1 Coaching

—

💌 Connect With Laura:

1. Website: Health Coach for Teachers & Busy, Working Women
2. Instagram: LAURA B. | Teacher turned Health Coach | Podcaster🎙️ (@laura.b.healthy) • Instagram photos and videos
3. TikTok: Laura B. | Health Coach (@laura.b.healthy) | TikTok

—

Topics Covered in This Episode: getting back on track, healthy habits, weight loss mindset, binge eating recovery, all-or-nothing thinking, consistency over perfection, healthy lifestyle, vacation weight gain, habit reset, mindset shifts, emotional eating, food guilt, sustainable weight loss, healthy routines, burnout prevention, behavior change

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Isn't She Powerful podcast. If this is your first episode of the show, welcome. I am your host, Laura B Healthy. I'm so excited to have you here with me today. I'm going to be talking about getting back on track. This is a lesson that I did recently in my seismic shift group coaching program. The girls in that program were going on vacations or just simply doing summer things. And a lot of times those things can lead to us partaking in actions that aren't in alignment with our goals and we feel like, oh darn, I've ruined everything. I'm off track. I've messed completely up. What do I do now? And so I taught my clients about this strategy called the PASS Strategy. That is an acronym that I want to walk you through today to help you in those moments whenever you've gotten off track, you're feeling like you've messed everything up. You kind of want to throw the towel in and just say, screw it. I'll start again when school starts back. I'll start again at the beginning of the year, whatever that might look like for you. Instead of that, I want you to avoid that. I want you to apply this strategy and you can come back and use this strategy. You can come back and listen to this episode in the moment next time that you're like, oh, I've kind of messed up again. Come back to this. Use that as your invitation to say, what was that strategy Laura was teaching me? Go back, re-listen to it, and apply it. Because when you do, this is going to make getting back on track and staying on track and therefore reaching all of your health goals so much easier for you. So with all of that said, let's get into the episode. Welcome to the Isn't She Powerful Podcast. I'm your host, Laura B, health coach, educator, and founder of the Be Healthy Lifestyle. I'm here to bring you all of the health education and motivation so that you can sign off each week feeling equipped and empowered to tackle all of your health goals. Come along with me as I teach you the basics of healthy living so that you can have everyone in your life say, Isn't she powerful? So as I mentioned, the acronym for the strategy is PASS, P A S S, and each of those letters stands for something. The P stands for pause and breathe. This is the only part of the strategy where emotion is allowed to be present. This is the part of the strategy that you come to when you're feeling emotional. So let's take, for example, you've been being on track, you've been being good with your goals for a couple of weeks now, maybe a month, maybe two months. Like you've been super consistent, and now suddenly something has happened. Maybe it's a vacation, maybe it's something happened with your family, maybe whatever it was got you off track, and now you're feeling really bummed and you're beating yourself up, you're feeling really guilty about it, you're telling yourself you're a screw up, you ruined it, there's no point in you trying anymore because you're not made to be a healthy person. Like you're just listing all of these negative things. That is you feeling into the emotions of what has occurred in your health and wellness journey. In that moment, when you're feeling those deep negative emotions, that's when you come to this strategy. That's how you know it's time to go through this strategy, is when you are feeling all of those negative emotions. What you do is you sit back for a second and you pause and you literally just breathe. I like to put one hand on my chest and one hand on my stomach and just breathe and breathe through that emotion. Say, I'm allowed to feel this. Like talk yourself through. It's okay if I feel this emotion, it's okay if this emotion exists with me, but I'm not moving on to trying to solve this, to trying to get back on track until I've moved through this emotion. Because that is how you shift your mindset. That is you taking yourself from being this all or nothing personality, from having this unhealthy relationship with food to saying, I'm allowed to feel this way. And as soon as I am done feeling these emotions, then I can move on to the next step of this strategy. Okay. So everything beyond this emotion is not allowed. We're going to be very analytical, we're going to have a logical brains. We are going to come at that from the last three parts of the strategy. We're going to come at those from a very centered, peaceful mindset. The P is where you get rid of all of that emotion. You're working through, breathing through that emotion, allowing it to say, it's okay that I messed up. It's okay that I had that hamburger when I said I wasn't going to. It's okay that I ate junk food for an entire weekend. It's okay that I had alcohol. It's okay that I ate dessert four times yesterday. All of those things are okay. You breathe through that, you accept that, and then you say, once I'm good, once that emotion's gone, then I move on. The next step of the strategy is the A. And this is where you assess the situation. And once again, you are to assess the situation without emotions. So this isn't where you say, yeah, well, this is exactly where I screwed up. This is where I'm, I messed everything up. Like there's no beating yourself up anymore. All of that is in the past. It's it's it's gone. You you've you've made the action, you've taken those steps, you ate that, you drank that, you didn't move, whatever it was, it's done. So we're not beating ourselves up anymore. And instead, you're saying, this is exactly what happened. This is the moment where I made a misaligned choice. It wasn't aligned with my goals. And you even can start assessing and say, and the next time I'm faced with that decision, here's what I would like to do differently. So you can go back to that situation, put yourself back there in that moment. And as long as you are still at peace and you're still present, you're still thinking at it from a logical point of view. If you're not, you gotta keep breathing, girl. You gotta keep working through those emotions. But if you can go back and be there at a centered and peaceful present point of view, then I want you to look at that situation and say, What was the choice that I made? Why did I make that choice? Was there a different choice that I could have made that would have made me feel better in this present moment right now? And I even want you to ask yourself the question: why do I want to get back on track? Why do I want to make myself be that person that I was being? But that's gonna help you list all of those positive emotions. It made me feel really good. I had energy, I was able to get up and down off the floor. I felt it like really energetic in my body. I felt like my body was running efficiently. All those things, those things that feel good. I want you to start listing those things out that's gonna take you from beating yourself up to taking you to feeling really good in your body again. So the first strategy is to basically remove all of the emotion by pausing and breathing. That's what the P stands for. Then we move on to the A, and this is where you analyze the situation. What happened? Why do I want to get back to a place of back on track? Why am I trying to get myself back to where I was before? And then you can move on to the first S, which is setting your mindset. I am going to be so for real with you right now. Subscribing to a podcast is one of the only ways that you are guaranteed to see the content that you want to see. I have over 60,000 people that have chosen to click the little follow button and follow along to see what recipes I'm creating, what I have going on with my group coaching programs. They've chosen to look at what I do. And yet, most of my videos get between 1,000 and 4,000 views, which means that 60,000 plus people have said, hey, I want to see what Laura B. Healthy posts, and yet they don't get to see it. And that's not a complaint. It's not because you are doing anything wrong. That is just social media. It's just the way that it works. You don't decide what comes on your feed, somebody else does. And unfortunately, my videos aren't showing up for you a lot of times. And I'm not saying this so that you feel bad for me or so that you go over to social media and look at what I have posted. I'm saying this as a reminder that you really don't have control over a lot of the media that you receive. But you do have control over the podcasts that you get to listen to. It may not be guaranteed that when you press the follow button on social media, you are going to continue seeing that creator's content. But it is guaranteed that when you press the follow button or the subscribe button on a podcast, every single time a new episode of that podcast is released, you will get a notification about it. That's a guarantee. So if you are listening to this right now and you are not already subscribed to this podcast, please go up to the top of whatever site you were listening to and press the little follow button so that you get the notifications for when a new episode of the show is live every single week, multiple times a week, and you don't miss a single thing of what you genuinely want to be consuming. This is the first S. There's a reason why this comes before the next S, which is setting your goals. Your mindset has to be there before you can set these goals, before you can do anything beyond that, before you can take any actual action, your mind has to be in the right place. You cannot be approaching it from a place of all or nothing. You can't be approaching it from an unhealthy relationship with food where you're beating yourself up and feeling bad about what you did. And you can't be doing this as a punishment for what you had done. So what I mean by that is so many times we come back from a vacation, we say, I've eaten too much on vacation. I had way too many treats, I had way too much alcohol, I did way too much of everything except for moving, and now I need to overcompensate for that. I need to go to the gym so many extra times this week to make up for what I didn't do last week. I need to eat like very low calorie this week. I need to skip my meals. I can't drink anything but water this week. Like we try to go from one extreme to the other in a matter of seconds. The second we get back from vacation, we're like, cool, I've got to get back on track. And we try to white knuckle it to the point of overcompensation. And when we think about like if you were driving down the road, it's an icy road, or there's water on the road, you're going down the road, you hit some that patch of ice or water, and your car starts to slide off, if you were to grab that steering wheel and try to overcorrect and get back on the road, you're gonna crash in the other direction. And so that's what's going to happen in your health and wellness journey too. If you try to say, I was really bad last week, let me get back on track by going in the complete opposite direction this week, you're going to end up crashing in the other direction. You're gonna get burnt out, you're gonna feel bad about your choices because you're not gonna be able to stick to that. And so you're gonna end up right back where you are. So we have to get our mindset in the right place. We have to say, this isn't me overcorrecting. This is not me going into an all or nothing mindset and saying I'm not allowed to have this, I'm only allowed to have that. We are not doing that to ourselves. There are no good and bad foods. I'm not going to sit here and tell myself you are allowed to have this, you aren't allowed to have that, this is good for you, this is bad for you. You're gonna remind yourself, I didn't ruin anything. It was just a day, it was just a week, it was just a month. I've got many other months that I've lived, I've got many other weeks, many other days. I've had so many in the past, and I have a lot more coming up in the future, and I am not going to let that one day, week, or month dictate my entire future going forward. It's in the past, it's done. I didn't ruin anything. I'm continuing on this journey right here, right now. I'm not going back and trying to fix what happened in the past. I can't. I'm just moving forward. And then once you've done all of that, you've removed the emotion from the situation, you've assessed the situation, you've got your mindset in the right place. The last piece of this, the last S is for you to set your actual goals. And there's two really important rules that I have for these goals. The first one is that your goals are realistic. I want them to still challenge you. I like to tell my clients to set realistic yet challenging goals. Just like Goldilocks had those her, those three bowls of porridge. One of them was too cold, one was too hot, one of them was just right. If we don't set goals that are realistic yet challenging, we're either setting goals that are too easy or too hard. We want to find our Goldilocks goals, the goals that are just right for us in this particular situation. Your Goldilocks goals are going to change over time. You are going to come into situations in the future where you're going to need to set goals that are much easier than you're used to. You're going to be dealing with a sick child or a sick parent that you have to help. You're going to be traveling and doing something out of your normal routine. You are going to be starting a new job. Like there's going to be so many things that happen in your future that are going to need you to set easier goals. And then there's also going to be situations where you can set more challenging goals. I used to be a teacher and the summertime was that time of year where I was able to set challenging goals for myself because I had more time. I had more energy. I had the space in my day to be able to work out a little bit longer, to be able to really put intention into my meal plan or learn something new. I had that time and opportunity at that time, but then as soon as school started back, I had to go back to setting a little bit simpler goals because my energy was now being taken up by something else. So there's going to be these times in your life where you float back and forth. Your Goldilocks zone, it changes throughout your situations in life. You need to assess your situation and determine what I could do with ease this week that's going to be realistic for me, something that's not going to make me feel bad about myself. It's not going to push me to the point of wanting to give up, but it's also going to challenge me enough to where I feel accomplished. We want to feel like we're doing something. You don't want it to be so easy that you end up being like, yeah, I mean, I ate a vegetable this week, big whoop. You know, I want it to be something that like really makes you feel accomplished. Because when we get that feeling of accomplishment, it's like, man, that's when we decide, yeah, I can I can conquer the world. I can keep going on this. It really ignites that motivation when we feel super accomplished. So that's my invitation to you with this is to set goals that challenge you and make you feel accomplished without burning you out. And only you know that zone for yourself. The other thing about these goals that you need to work on is making them very specific. Like, I don't want you to say, this week I'm gonna eat better. What does that mean? That could mean a bazillion things. That could mean that you're gonna stop eating when you're full, that could mean that you're gonna eat more protein or eat more fiber, eat more color, like it could mean so much. So be specific. What exactly do you want to work on in this upcoming week and reflect on it at the end of every single week? Did I do that? Did I not? If I did that, amazing. What allowed me to do that with ease? And if I didn't do that, okay, what could I do differently next week to allow me to achieve that goal, right? So set very, very, very specific goals because that's the only way that you're going to be able to effectively determine if you are or are not doing what you said you were going to do. So the next time that you find yourself in one of those situations where you went on vacation or you went out and did something, you had a festival that you went to for the fourth of July, whatever it might look like for you, next time that you find yourself in that situation, it could even be something just like a one-night thing. Like tonight, from the night that I'm recording this, tonight I'm going to the movies and we're definitely gonna get popcorn, we're gonna get candy, we're gonna get a soda, like we're gonna enjoy going to the movies because we do it like once in a blue moon. So we're gonna enjoy that experience. Uh first of all, that's not me getting off track. I'm planned ahead for that. I know it's coming. I am at peace with the choices that I'm gonna make there. So it's part of my track. It's on my journey because I've accepted that it's part of my journey, which that's another conversation for another day. But if I did look at that as me being off track, I that is fine. I'm gonna accept it. I'm gonna use this past strategy. I'm gonna breathe through the emotions of me being like, shoot, I got off track. I'm gonna assess that situation. What was the choices that I made? How can I make different choices in the future? What are gonna be the things that I'm gonna do to get me back on track, assess that situation, and then I'm gonna get my mindset in the right place and I'm gonna set my very specific, realistic, yet challenging goals. And if you do all of that and do it consistently, and like I said, you check in with yourself and you don't let this turn into one of those things that's an all or nothing mindset where you're like, well, I screwed up, might as well just say screw it for the rest of the summer or screw it for the month, screw it for this week, even this day. I've made choices like when I was teaching, especially when I was still really working on healing my relationship with food, I would make choices sometimes at lunch or in the afternoons when school day was over that didn't align with my health goals and they didn't make me feel good about myself. And you know what I did? I still came home that night and I made a good choice for dinner. I made something that was in alignment with my goals for dinner, a choice that I was proud of because I refused to let one choice turn into two or four or eight or ten or the rest of the month or the year. You get to make that choice, you get to decide if this is going to turn into a forever thing, like this is the way that you live your life, it's all in or all out, or if you are gonna live a lifestyle where you say, Okay, yep, that was not a choice that was in alignment with my goals, the next one can be. That is your choice, your prerogative. You get to decide that. Now, if you found that this episode was helpful to you in any way, I encourage you to send it to somebody because I promise you, you are not the only person who needs to hear this content. So send this to a friend, send it to a coworker, send it to a family member, whoever is in the back of your brain, like thinking, I feel like somebody might need to hear this, send it to that person. They would, I'm sure, love to hear it, and I would appreciate it so much as well. Thank you so much for being a part of another Isn't she powerful episode? And I will see you again in the next one. Thank you so much. I can't wait to see you again next week. And always remember the more you know, the more you grow.