Where Are You Actually Getting Stuck With Weight Loss

School is starting again, which means backpacks are coming out, alarm clocks are going off way too early, sports schedules are changing, and someone will inevitably remember at 9:00 p.m. that they need something for school the next morning.

Good times.

As I was getting ready for another school year, I started thinking about something that took me almost the entire school year last year to figure out.

Our mornings were a mess.

My older daughter has a tendency to wait until the very last possible minute to get moving. If she missed the bus, I had to drive my older two kids to their schools, race back home, and hopefully get my youngest to her bus on time.

If that happened, my youngest sometimes ended up getting ready in the car. I would throw her clothes in with us, rush everyone where they needed to go, then hurry to the gym because I had clients waiting for me.

Technically, it worked.

Everyone got to school.

I got to work.

We survived.

But it did not feel good.

And because everything technically got done, I kept repeating the exact same routine for almost an entire school year.

Then toward the end of the year, I finally realized something ridiculously simple:

We weren't bad at mornings. We weren't giving ourselves enough time.

Okay...maybe we were a little bad at mornings.

But the bigger problem was the setup.

I started waking my kids up about 15 minutes earlier. I gave myself a little more margin before I had to start working. I put a toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush in the car because I also accepted the fact that there would still be mornings when things did not go according to plan.

And suddenly, mornings felt so much better.

Not perfect.

We did not turn into the family calmly sitting around the breakfast table discussing our hopes and dreams before school.

But we weren't beginning every morning feeling like we were already behind.

And it made me think about weight loss.

What If You Don't Actually Need to Try Harder?

So many women get stuck in the same place over and over again with weight loss.

You keep overeating at night.

You miss your workouts.

Dinner turns into takeout.

You barely move all day.

The weekend comes and suddenly everything feels completely different from Monday through Friday.

Then you decide the answer is obvious:

I need more discipline.

I need to get serious.

I need to try harder.

But what if the problem isn't that you aren't trying hard enough?

What if something about the way your day is set up is making the habit you're trying to build much harder than it needs to be?

Sometimes you don't need a new diet.

You don't need another workout plan.

You definitely don't need another promise that you'll start over Monday.

You need to find the place where things are actually going sideways.

And that may happen much earlier than you think.

Step 1: Name What Keeps Happening

Start with the thing that keeps frustrating you.

Do not fix it yet.

Just name it.

Maybe it's:

“I keep overeating at night.”

Or:

“I can't stay consistent with exercise.”

Maybe dinner keeps becoming takeout, your weekends feel completely unstructured, or you reach the end of every day wondering how you only got 3,000 steps.

Whatever it is, identify the thing that keeps happening.

But here's the important part:

That may not actually be the problem.

It may simply be the outcome you can see.

My outcome was rushing.

I could have decided:

“I need to get better at mornings.”

I could have tried to move faster, become more organized, or tell everyone to hurry up even more than I already was.

But none of that would have addressed what was actually wrong.

We didn't have enough time.

The same thing happens with weight loss.

Saying, “I need to stop eating at night,” tells us what is happening.

It does not tell us why.

Saying, “I need to work out consistently,” identifies an outcome.

It does not tell us what keeps getting in the way.

So once you know the thing that keeps happening, we need to go backward.

Step 2: Rewind the Tape

Take the problem and rewind it.

Go back 30 minutes.

Go back two hours.

Sometimes you need to go all the way back to the beginning of the day.

Let's say nighttime eating is where you struggle.

Instead of standing in the pantry at 9:00 p.m. thinking:

“Why can't I control myself?”

Back up.

What did dinner look like?

Did you actually sit down and eat a satisfying meal, or did you pick at food while feeding everyone else?

What happened in the afternoon?

Did you have anything to eat?

What did lunch look like?

Did you even eat lunch?

Because there is a big difference between having an emotional urge to eat at night and arriving at 8:30 genuinely hungry because you spent the entire day trying not to eat very much.

Your 9:00 p.m. problem may have started at noon.

Now think about workouts.

You keep telling yourself:

“I'm just so inconsistent.”

But when are you scheduling the workout?

If you repeatedly plan to exercise after work, but your evenings are filled with practices, dinner, homework, driving, and everything else your family needs, is motivation really the problem?

Or are you putting the workout in a place where it rarely has a chance to happen?

We can be incredibly hard on ourselves for not following plans that were never realistic to begin with.

Dinner is another great example.

You tell yourself your family gets takeout too much.

But when are you deciding what's for dinner?

If it's 6:00, everybody is starving, someone needs to leave in 45 minutes, nothing is thawed, and you're staring into the refrigerator trying to figure out what to make with mustard, yogurt, and half an onion...

The problem may not be your lack of discipline around takeout.

The dinner decision happened too late.

Rewinding helps you find the first place where the day started making the later choice harder.

Step 3: Find the Friction

Once you rewind, ask:

What is making this harder than it needs to be?

I like calling this friction.

Friction is anything between you and the habit that makes following through more difficult.

For my school mornings, the friction was time.

I was expecting everyone to wake up, get ready, remember everything they needed, get to the bus, deal perfectly with any surprises, and somehow get me to work without feeling like I had already lived an entire day before 9:00 a.m.

I didn't need to become better at rushing.

I needed to stop creating a morning that required me to rush.

Bring that same question into your weight-loss habits.

Do you really need to become better at resisting food at night, or do you need to stop arriving at night starving?

Do you need more workout motivation, or does your workout need a better place in your schedule?

Do you need more discipline around dinner, or would two easy backup meals remove half the stress?

Sometimes friction is time.

Sometimes it's too many decisions.

By the end of the day, you have already made a thousand decisions, and now you are supposed to decide what to eat, whether to snack, when to exercise, what tomorrow's workout will be, what everyone else is having for dinner, and apparently solve world peace before bedtime.

Your brain is tired.

Reducing decisions matters.

Sometimes your environment is creating friction.

You bought fruit, but it's hidden in the bottom drawer where no one remembers it exists.

Your walking shoes are upstairs when you spend your evenings downstairs.

The equipment you planned to use is somewhere you never actually want to go.

These things seem tiny, but tiny obstacles repeated every day add up.

And then there's energy.

This one is huge.

Are you giving the most exhausted version of yourself the hardest jobs?

I give 8:00 p.m. Michelle a lot of responsibility.

She's supposed to get on the treadmill.

She's supposed to make perfect food choices.

She's supposed to prepare for tomorrow.

She's supposed to get herself into bed on time.

Meanwhile, 8:00 p.m. Michelle is done.

So whenever possible, I want the version of me who has more energy to make some decisions ahead of time.

That's not cheating.

That's setting yourself up to win.

Step 4: Find Your “15-Minute Fix”

Now we get to the part I really want you to use.

I do not want you to overhaul your entire life.

Think about what changed my morning.

I didn't create a color-coded family command center.

I didn't make everyone lay out seven outfits on Sunday night.

I didn't create a perfect 14-step nighttime routine.

I woke everyone up 15 minutes earlier.

I put a few emergency items in the car.

I shifted my work schedule slightly.

Those small changes gave the morning room to breathe.

So now ask:

What is my version of the 15-minute fix?

It doesn't have to involve 15 actual minutes.

You're looking for the smallest adjustment that makes following through easier.

If nighttime eating is your struggle and rewinding helped you realize you barely eat during the day, the solution might be a real lunch and a satisfying afternoon snack.

If workouts aren't happening because you keep waiting for an hour you do not have, perhaps 30 minutes twice a week becomes the plan.

If dinner is where everything falls apart, you probably don't need seven brand-new recipes. Choose a couple of meals your family already likes and keep ingredients for an easy backup meal around.

If movement disappears once school starts, look for ten minutes somewhere else in the day rather than continually expecting yourself to make it happen during the busiest part of the evening.

We spend so much time trying to become more disciplined when sometimes we simply need to make the supportive choice more convenient.

And convenience is not cheating.

Healthy living does not have to be difficult for it to count.

A freezer meal does not automatically make dinner unhealthy.

A 25-minute workout still counts.

There is no magical health benefit that suddenly appears at exactly 10,000 steps.

We are trying to build habits you can repeat.

Making your life easier to live is smart.

Then Test It

Once you choose your fix, don't turn it into another rule you're expected to follow forever.

Test it.

Give it a week.

See what happens.

Waking my kids 15 minutes earlier could have done absolutely nothing. They are incredibly gifted at finding ways to waste additional time.

If that had happened, I would have learned something and adjusted again.

Your habits work the same way.

You might decide an afternoon snack will reduce your evening eating and discover after a week that it changes nothing.

Okay.

That's information.

Maybe the eating isn't coming primarily from physical hunger.

Now you can look at habit, stress, boredom, or what happens emotionally when the house finally gets quiet.

That is very different from saying:

“Well, that didn't work. I failed again.”

You didn't fail.

You tested something.

It gave you information.

Now you adjust.

You are trying to figure out what works for your body, your family, your job, your schedule, and your current season of life.

There isn't one magical routine that works for every woman.

Back-to-School Is the Perfect Time to Look for Friction

School changes a lot.

Just when you've finally figured out the summer schedule, everything shifts again.

Wake-up times change.

Bedtimes change.

Practices start.

Homework comes back.

Dinner times move around.

And, of course, the bedtime requests for supplies that were apparently needed three days ago return.

Instead of waiting until you're three weeks into the school year and completely overwhelmed, look ahead now.

Where is your schedule about to create friction?

Where are meals going to become difficult?

When can movement realistically happen?

Which days actually make sense for strength training?

What nights are likely to make dinner difficult?

Where are you most likely to arrive overly hungry?

You do not need a plan for every possible thing that can go wrong.

Something will always go wrong.

Find one predictable place where your health habits tend to become difficult and make that place easier.

The goal isn't a perfect school year.

Good luck with that.

The goal is to stop unnecessarily making things harder for yourself.

Your Action Step This Week

Choose one thing that keeps happening.

Then work through these four questions:

1. What keeps happening?

2. Where did it actually begin?

3. What friction is making the supportive choice harder?

4. What is one small change I can test this week?

Notice what's missing from that list:

“What's wrong with me?”

We're not asking that question.

We're asking:

What's happening here?

That completely changes the way you approach weight loss.

Instead of finding another reason to criticize yourself, you're looking for a problem you can actually solve.

Sometimes the thing you've been struggling with for months does not require a massive overhaul.

It might just need your version of 15 extra minutes and a toothbrush in the car.

So before you decide you need a stricter diet, more motivation, or another fresh start on Monday, look at the place where you're actually getting stuck.

Not just the outcome.

Rewind.

Find the friction.

Then ask:

How can I make this easier to follow through on?

That question may take you much further than continuing to try harder at something that isn't working.

Struggling With Nighttime Eating?

If the place where you keep getting stuck is at night, I'm opening a brand-new 4-Week Evening Eating Reset.

We'll figure out why your nighttime eating is happening, work through your specific pattern, and create a plan that fits your real life. You'll receive weekly lessons along with live group coaching so we can work through what's happening while you're actually trying to change it.

I'm keeping the first Founding Round small—only 8–10 women—and the founding price is $197 for the entire month. The price will increase in future rounds.

One month. One problem. Let's figure out your nighttime eating and help you move forward.

Join the waitlist here: Evening Eating Reset Waitlist