Bad Advice

There's a piece of advice often handed out in fitness and nutrition content that sounds reasonable, so it’s rarely questioned.

Make sure you can do it forever.

Pick the diet you could sustain for life. The training you'd still be doing in ten years. Don't do anything you can't keep doing is the common refrain. From people who’ve achieved results themselves doing things that were unsustainable.

I've given this advice. More than once, because it felt like the wise thing to say. It protects people from the crash-and-burn cycle. It sounds patient and mature. It positions you as the reasonable one in a room full of people selling 30-day transformations.

But I don't agree with it anymore. And upon closer examination, I never did. It’s incomplete.

Big change needs a bigger push

The problem is... large outcomes often require temporarily higher effort, constraint, attention, or sacrifice than maintenance requires. A 12-week fat-loss phase, marathon block, or focused strength cycle can be demanding without being reckless or radical. If you could already do it forever, it wouldn't be a change.

To the person who needs to overhaul their body, their health, their relationship with food, telling them to only ever do what they could do forever is telling them to start from the finish line. Your maintenance behaviors may only become sustainable after your environment, competence, fitness, appetite, routines, identity, and expectations have changed. You’re not only discovering sustainable habits; you’re building the capacity to sustain them.

The sustainable version is often so close to their baseline behavior that it never drives meaningful change. And they conclude they're broken; it’s their hormones, conventional advice doesn’t work for me… insert any number of explanations…but really, the change wasn’t big enough.

Why the sustainable advice exists

Now, I want to be clear:  the sustainable crowd isn't wrong about everything. The sustainable advice is based on real problems. All-out diet sprints that end in a binge, the January gym rush that's gone by February, the person who loses forty pounds and gains back fifty. Those things are real. They happen. And the reason they happen is not that the change was too aggressive.

Sometimes the approach itself was reckless. But often the problem is that there was no plan for after.

How to push hard and still build something that lasts

Intensity is not bad. You go hard for a stretch, but while you’re in it, you must be paying attention. What's working? What could you keep doing forever? What can’t you keep doing? What version of you will need to SHOW UP to make this sustainable? Changing your body is never just changing your body. You're working on becoming the person you need to be to keep the change.

During the period of pushing, learn which behaviors produce most of the result and what the new version of your life actually requires. Then deliberately reduce the intervention to the smallest dose that maintains what you built. 

And it doesn't have to happen all at once. Radical change doesn't mean everything, immediately, on day one. It means locking in — more than is comfortable — followed by maintenance. We want to be aggressive at times and sustainable in the average.

The fact that something couldn't be sustained forever doesn't mean it was a mistake. Temporary unsustainability can be part of making a large change. But treating that temporary phase as the only way to keep the result is a mistake that will cause you to burn out.

Forever is where you finish, not where you start

So no. Don't only do what you can do forever.

Lock in while you can. Identify what is worth keeping. And build, deliberately, the version of it that you'll still be doing once the lock-in is done.

“Forever” is what you’re building toward, but it is not where you start.