104. Get Back On Track Today - Motivation vs Momentum

Ever feel like it’s way harder to restart a habit than it was to begin in the first place? You’re not alone — and it’s not because you “aren’t motivated.” The real issue is momentum.

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger breaks down why restarting feels so heavy and how to make it easier with brain-friendly strategies that actually work.

You’ll learn:
 ✅ Why your brain resists restarting (hint: it loves the status quo)
 ✅ The power of the “never miss twice” rule
 ✅ Tiny hacks to lower friction and make habits effortless
 ✅ Why fresh starts beat trying to “go back”
 ✅ Simple ways to reset your environment so your habits stick

Whether it’s walking, journaling, or drinking more water, this episode will help you get back on track without shame, stress, or starting over from scratch.

✨ Ready for your reset? Press play and let’s get your momentum rolling again.

Free 2-Pound Plan Call!
Want to jump start your weight loss? Schedule a free call where Dr. Stacy Heimburger will work with you to create a personalized plan to lose 2 pounds in one week, factoring in your unique circumstances, challenges, and aspirations. Schedule now! www.sugarfreemd.com/2pound

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. First things first, I'm really sorry if you can hear my dog. He is losing his mind today. I don't understand. He sometimes just has these phases where he has to be super protective. So I'm sorry if you can hear him in the background. There's really nothing I can do about it. But I am safe, I'm fine. So don't need to worry. And then I'll give you just a quick No Buy 2025 update.

The only thing that I've bought, we're trying to teach the kids about money. And so I'm making them save money. And so there's been a couple of things that they've really wanted. And so I've offered to pay half for them. So I have bought a couple of half things, I guess, is how I will say it. But no major purchases, no small purchases, nothing, nothing really. So it's been going really well, I think.

I'm surprised, like here we are in October and I really have not bought that much and it was much easier than I thought it was going to be. So I'm sure it's going to roll into like a no buy 26 somehow too. We'll have to come up with a different name, but it's been great. So today I want to talk about something, a lot of us sometimes have had like a really great routine going. So maybe it's a great morning routine, like you're walking every morning or you're journaling every night or you're drinking water, like you.

You're like dialed in and then something happens, right? A vacation, a busy week, sick kid, you get sick or just who knows, right? And then the habit just feels like it disappears. And then when you try and restart, it feels weirdly hard, right? Even if it was something that you really liked doing. And I was thinking about this and then it came up with one of my private clients too, but I love to walk in the morning.

But I stopped for some reason, I can't tell you. I think it just got hot, I don't know. There was no major event, no major injury, no major thing. And then it felt really weird to restart it, even though everything logically was telling me, like, I like to walk in the morning, the weather is nice, the dog gets a walk, like, I get to listen to a book, I feel more creative, like, work is easier.

All the good reasons and I wasn't lying to myself about any of them. I really like all of those things, but it was weirdly hard to get back into the habit, harder than it was the first time and harder than we think it should be. And then we kind of start to feel a little bit ashamed, right? Like what is wrong with me? Why can't I get back on track? Okay, what's wrong with me? Why can't I get back on track? So insert whatever habit, but I hear this all the time.

Like I used to do this thing and like, I don't know why I'm not doing it and what's wrong with me. I can't get back on track.

Nothing's wrong with you. I say that all the time. You were perfect. You were perfectly human, okay? And our brain is, our human brain is being a human brain, okay? So I want to talk about why restarting feels so hard from like a brain standpoint and then some tips and tricks of how to maybe like get back in the groove, okay? So.

The nerdy part, I guess a little bit, but our brain is basically like an energy saver, right? It does not like to work hard. It likes to be entertained, but it doesn't want to do a lot. Path of least resistance. So once we've stopped doing something, it's like, okay, I guess we don't do that anymore. And then the other way I like to think of it is that it really is trying to keep us safe.

So I always try and remember that about my brain when I can't understand, I'm like, why does it think this is keeping me safe? And what I've come up with is if we have, I'll take my morning walk. If I have not done my morning walk for two days in a row, and then day three I wake up, my brain is like, we're alive and happy, we should just keep doing what we were doing, right? Like we didn't walk yesterday and the world didn't end and we're safe and happy and cozy in our bed. So we totally should just repeat that.

Like that worked, so why would we change that? Okay, and this came up with our client of mine too, who has had like a very like dialed in habit for two years and all of a sudden was like, I don't know why my brain like doesn't want to do this. So I think that's why I think if we miss two days in a row, our brain is like, oh, well, we're safe and happy. So why let's just keep doing this, right? Like this was easy.

We're alive, we're safe, let's just keep doing it. New normal, great, less energy, like I can just sleep longer, whatever it is. And then our brain really is not going to put up any resistance to quitting that habit, right? It likes to be like safe and warm and cozy and lazy, all right? That's just our beautiful human brain.

Some people say it's like a thermostat. Like once we set it, it just wants to stay there, like homeostasis, right? So if we've been consistently not doing our habit, like not walking, not journaling, whatever, our brain kind of resets that as the baseline. So now we're asking it to like heat things back up or like generate some momentum, and that can be hard. So we sometimes misinterpret this as I'm not motivated.

But I think the nuance here is like, you can be motivated, but there's still like some friction, some resistance to getting going again. And so it's momentum that we're trying to create. It's not the motivation. If we weren't motivated, we wouldn't be thinking about it at all. Like we wouldn't care that we weren't taking our walk or we wouldn't care that we're not journaling or tracking our food or whatever that habit was that we're kind of missing. So we are motivated. We just...

I mean momentum, okay? So it's a momentum problem, not a motivation problem. But we are constantly told by the diet industry that everything's our fault and we're just not motivated, okay? Well, that's not the problem here. It's a momentum problem, okay? So this is like, we've set a new status quo and now we gotta turn the wheel and start going again.

Momentum is easier to maintain than restart. Okay, so any of you like Price is Right people with me like 80s kids, right? That big wheel like people kind of had to get it going, right? But once it got going it kind of spun easy. And so that's the wheel of momentum. Okay, or pushing a kid on a swing, right? The first push is hard, but once the swing is moving, it's super easy to keep it going. So,

The idea of never missing twice is kind of to combat this, is to try and stop the restart, is to try and keep momentum going. So if I'm doing something all the time and I miss one day, my brain like hasn't really taken that as the new normal, because it's like, we could go either way, right? We were walking and now we're not, which way are we going to go? But if we miss two days,

Now it's like, we don't walk. The last two days we haven't done it. So obviously we don't do that anymore. So that's why the concept of never missing two in a row comes into play. It's to fight this resistance and having to restart the momentum wheel.

Atomic Habits talks about that. James Clear, I've recommended his book before. I recommend it again. It's like on my website, on my Amazon picks. Like that book is so great. But that's the idea, okay? Is this momentum? We gotta get that wheel started again. So that's why it feels hard. So I think part of the problem, and what he would argue is, he would agree with me, I think, is that most of us try and restart at 100%.

Now, if we've only missed two days, we can probably restart it 100%. Okay, but if it's been a minute and we used to walk for 30 minutes a day, just getting up and like going out and checking the mailbox at the time we used to go for a walk can be enough to get the wheel started again. Because if I, like if you try and jump right back in and walking might not be the best example if you really like it, okay, but if you try and

jump back into what you were doing before, your brain's going to be like, no ma'am, we've decided we don't do that anymore, like denied, we're not doing that, absolutely not. But if we make it ridiculously easy to start, I'm just going to walk down the street, right? I'm just going to like go check the mailbox and like see what the neighbor is doing and come right back. That is enough to start this going, okay? Like ridiculously tiny.

So like a three minute walk instead of a 30 minute walk or one pushup instead of 30 pushups or filling your water bottle, right? Not even having a goal of like, I'm going to drink all this, just fill it up, okay? So we want to just dip our toe back in if it's been a minute. Again, if we've only missed two days, like get back in there, okay? But if your brain is like having all this resistance, even though we understand why.

And remember, understanding why is sometimes enough to hack your brain back and make it do what you want to do when we understand why it's fighting us. If it's not, then we just need baby steps, okay? Habits don't happen in a vacuum, they happen in an environment, they happen in a system. So we have to kind of reset the system. So if we want to restart workouts, put your shoes by the door, put them right by the bed. We want to drink water, like keep a...

keep an extra bottle of water at your desk, keep an extra water, like a refillable one or whatever, like have one at home and one at work so that we don't accidentally forget to bring our cup to work or whatever it is, okay?

Little tiny things and like kind of make it just so easy and then make it get in the way, right? So if I'm trip over my shoes when I wake up, that's the reminder like, yeah, we're supposed to put those on and go for a walk. If I have an extra water bottle at work, like, yeah, I remember now, I was going to try and drink more water today. Okay, so we kind of have to interrupt our brain signal of whatever the status quo of yesterday was.

So maybe that's putting Post-it notes, it's putting stuff in our way. I think one of the examples is in that book is they put their walking shoes like on top of the toilet seat, right? So they couldn't even like do their morning go potty without being reminded like, yeah, we are going to put those on, we were going to go for a walk, okay? Sounds silly, but we just have to like do one small thing.

The reminder to like get the wheel restarted. It's not about willpower, it's not about motivation, it's about momentum.

Remember too, sometimes we do have rose colored glasses. So if it's something that you haven't done in a really long time, and the example I will share with you is that I used to do a lot of intermittent fasting. And so there was a time and I built up to it. And so I got where I just really wouldn't have breakfast. I wasn't hungry for it anymore. So I would start eating at noon. And then for Lent one year, I pushed to two o'clock.

And I, in retrospect, my rose-colored glasses, that was very easy. And then, like, I had dropped that habit for whatever reason. And when I wanted to restart, it was really hard. Like, my body was really fighting me. And it wasn't fighting me on restarting the process. It was just telling me I was too hungry to do that. And so finally, I had to, like, search my brain and say, why is it fighting so hard? This used to be so easy for me.

I realized, I don't think my brain and body thought it was as easy as I'm remembering it, right? I think there was a little diet trauma there and my brain was really fighting it. Like we didn't like not eating till two o'clock. It didn't feel good to us and we don't want to do that anymore. So I had to be very compassionate about that and be like, if I'm hungry, I'm going to eat. And there's days I'll go till two o'clock without eating, but I'm not forcing the issue. And the reason,

It was hard to restart that was because I was remembering it differently. Okay, because I have clients do this all the time. They're like, hey, I used to work out like eight hours a day and not eat and I was in great shape. I don't understand why I can't get back to doing that. It's like, and I think it's because your brain's like a little traumatized from that. And it doesn't want to redo that. So this is a little bit different. This is like, hey, I used to do this. Like, here's the 10 reasons I did really enjoy it.

Like I liked going for that walk in the morning. I liked being outside. I liked seeing my neighbors. I liked that I felt good. It made me more creative. Like there wasn't a reason it didn't overstress my body. There's no reason that I shouldn't like shouldn't be able to do this again. And I really want to do this again. That's a little bit different than like, hey, I was on this crash diet and I'm finding it hard to get back on it. Okay, so just one thing to keep in mind.

So what we want to remember is if we have a good habit in place, don't miss two days in a row, okay? We gotta keep that momentum wheel going, right? It's easy to push the swing once it's already swinging. It's easy to keep the wheel turning once it's turning. So we don't want to miss two days in a row. So just be careful about that. And that kind of goes with my like try and be consistent more days than not, right? So if we don't miss two days in a row, we're going to hit more days than not. The other thing is if...

It's been a minute, we don't need to go back to what we were doing before. We don't need to go back to the hour and a half that we were doing whatever. Or we can start really, really small. So, so small that it seems silly is perfect. Okay, so if it's like, just put your shoes on and walk to the mailbox, that's perfect. We just want to restart, like retraining our brain, like this is what we do. This is the thermostat we're setting where we go walk.

Okay. Visual cues is the next thing. So that's like the habit interrupter or the pattern interrupter. So if I want to start walking, like put the shoes where I'm going to fall on them, put them on top of the toilet seat, whatever it is, put the Post-it note, put the extra bottle of water, lay the yoga mat out so that you're going to trip on it. Leave your journal open, right? Put a journal everywhere you sit if you want to get back to journaling. So.

Have these visual cues, these pattern interrupters, so that when you're a little groggy and your brain's on autopilot, you have that reminder of like, wait, I'm doing this other thing now. Okay? And most of all, don't think of it as like going back. This is just, it's new, okay? It's new and it's fun and like have that curiosity and compassion. And most importantly, know this is not a you problem. This is not like, you're not motivated.

Momentum is hard, right? There's a lot of resistance or friction in starting something new. And so we have to just do these little hacks and like these little tricks and it'll get you really like started back up with no problem. So this is not a you problem. This is not a motivation problem. This is not a willpower problem. It's just fighting the momentum wheel and we have to just hack our brain a little bit for it. So hopefully this has been helpful and given you enough tips and tricks. Please, please share this with a friend and.

If you're in my pumpkin challenge, keep going. Y'all are doing great. All right, talk to y'all next week. Bye.