Being Lazy Might Get You Better Results

There is a version of a healthy habit that looks correct and a version that actually happens. And most of us have been so committed to the “correct” version that we have been accidentally choosing nothing at all. This episode is about the gap between those two things — and why closing it might be the single most important shift you make in your entire health journey. 

Whether you have been skipping your morning walk because you do not want to deal with the hill or your workout because you do not have a full hour or your meal prep because Sunday is never what you think it is going to be…this episode is going to change how you think about every single one of those moments. The version of the habit you actually do consistently will always produce better results than the perfect version you never do. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to This Life Gets Good, the podcast where we talk about what it actually means to feel good in your body. Because around here, we don't just settle for healthy. We believe you're allowed to feel good everywhere you go, at work, at home, and yes, even whilst you're burning your kids to practice. I'm Lauren Melton, founder of This Life Uncluttered, mom of two, and living proof that life can get really good after 40. I help high-achieving women to lose weight, feel hot and healthy, and bring that confidence into every part of their life without doing more or burning out. So last week I made an Instagram post that really resonated with a lot of followers. So I think it's worth diving into a bit more here to really make sure it sticks. Because if you're like me, you probably get the idea in concept, but acting on it probably feels so foreign to you for a variety of reasons that you might like the idea, but never actually follow through. And it's one that is so impactful for moms like us, juggling so many demands, coming at us in so many different directions. And if we want to really feel good in our bodies consistently, this is a game changer. The post was titled The Laziest Thing I Do Every Morning that makes me 10 times more productive the rest of the day. In it, I basically break down how I now drive one minute down the hill, park my car, take my morning walk, so that I don't have to walk back up the hill at the end of my walk. And I know this sounds so insanely lazy, right? I'm in good shape. I can handle walking up a big hill. So why don't I just walk up the goddamn hill? Why don't I do that? And for a while, this is exactly what I told myself. And I pushed and pushed and I would push myself to walk up the goddamn hill. And I hated every single minute of it. And eventually I stopped walking outside altogether because in my mind I had decided if I wasn't willing to walk back up the hill, then I couldn't go walk outside. And listen, this isn't even an issue about not getting enough steps in every day because I crushed that goal, right? Like my walking pad is amazing. It helps me get like 11,000, 12,000 steps most days. So this wasn't about me needing to get more steps in. This was so much more than that. I needed to get outside, get some fresh air, get some sunlight on my eyes before hours of staring at screens all day. My outdoor walk wasn't just about steps, it was about so much more. It was really about my mental health. And now, because I started to define not wanting to walk back up the hill as a lazy, I was missing out on all the benefits of the outdoor walk altogether. But here's the thing: I'm not lazy. I know this. I know I'm not lazy. You know I'm not lazy. I do hard things every freaking day. I wake up super early. I push myself to failure lifting really heavy weights. I have hard conversations with clients where I have to delicately push them while also supporting them. I put myself out there and try new things, like starting my own business as a single mom with no additional financial support. Like I do hard things all the time. I maintain a positive relationship with my ex-husband and co-parent my kids, right? I'm a rule follower for Pete's sake. I do the hard things. And I'm sure, just like most of you, you're doing the hard things too. So to consider myself lazy for not wanting to walk back up the hill, this is based on conditioning, right? Conditioning that we've received about how things are supposed to be done, how they're supposed to look. And underneath this, the question of what would others think if they knew? What would they think if they saw me driving to park a minute down the hill? And once again, this is another example of the importance of building that muscle of not caring and not giving a you know what, about what others think about us and the benefits that that has. I will continue to preach this over and over. The more you can care less about what other people think of you, it's gonna improve your entire life. And this is actually a skill that requires a specific mindset, one that other coaches in this space don't always talk about and that often holds women back. We have to stop caring so much about what other people will think, about how we are doing it, about how we are living our lives, and just enjoy and live our goddamn lives, right? So when I posted about driving to my walk on Instagram, someone could have commented that, well, that's not exactly environmentally friendly, which funny enough, I drive a hybrid car from 2022 that has less than 30,000 miles on it, but that's not the point. Or someone could have said, hmm, that's a bit princessy of you, right? To avoid getting sweaty. Someone could have just said, just walk up the hill, Lauren. It's really not that hard. And listen, I actually didn't get any of those comments. I could have. And if I did, I generally do not care about any of that. And I say that not as someone who has never cared. Listen, I'm a recovering people pleaser over here. I have cared a lot. And I've spent a significant portion of my life caring probably way too much about what other people thought about my choices. But I've realized that the more I have let go of that, the more I've been able to build a life that actually works for me. A life that now includes driving to the walk and doing the things that make me feel good and sustainable instead of doing things in a way that makes them look quote unquote right to someone scrolling past my Instagram post. Because the truth is, nobody who matters is keeping a score on whether I walked up the hill. What actually matters is whether I consistently show up in a way that I feel good about for me. And sometimes it's not even that deep, right? It's not even as deep as not allowing ourselves to make the habit more doable. I can't tell you how many times I've onboarded new clients and they're embarrassed with their lack of steps. And like so many of us, they have jobs that keep them sitting all day. And they just didn't even realize how low their step count was. And now that they know, they want to do something about it, but they can't figure out where or how to fit it in with their packed schedule. And this is when I'll actually go through their entire day with them from feet hitting the floor and rolling out of bed to head hitting the pillow and falling asleep, so that we can figure it out. And often we do find a few pockets, but they're not sure how they're gonna make that happen. They will look at me and often say, wait a minute, I don't know how I'm gonna fit that in between those meetings because like I'm not gonna be wearing my leggings. And the first time I heard this, I like, I thought to myself, wait a minute, wait. And so I asked them, I'm like, wait, what do you mean? And they said it again. And when they said it again, I asked this question Do you feel it's necessary to wear leggings to walk? And then their eyes lit up, like, holy crap. And they laughed when they realized, of course, of course, I can walk without wearing leggings, like, duh. But in their minds, they had associated a walk with exercise. And exercise meant wearing specific clothes that they wouldn't be wearing during their workday. And this light bulb moment I have seen over and over, and not just with steps, but also with other situations where we have built this idea in our minds about how things should look or how they have to be done to be done right. Like healthy meals and meal prep are two perfect examples that they have to be done a certain way, a certain time of day. Like Sunday meal prep is a perfect example of this. In order to be done right, it has to be done on Sunday and it has to be done by meal prep. But what if you just took a walk at lunch in your Antaylor slacks? What if you didn't even need to meal prep on a Sunday because you planned your meals that were simple enough, it didn't require it? What if you let go of this idea of how things should be done in order to build a system that you'll actually do and do consistently? Would you allow yourself to let it be easy? Would you allow yourself to let that happen? And I get that the easier version often feels wrong. It almost feels like cheating. Like if you drive to the walk, are you gaming the system? And I think this feeling comes from something deeper than just the habit itself. I think it comes from the role that difficulty plays in our sense of identity. For a lot of us, and I include myself in this, we equate doing hard things with being serious. Part of how we prove to ourselves and to others that we actually care is making it be hard. The hill isn't just a hill, but walking up it is evidence that I'm not lazy. The Sunday meal prep, it's not just a day of the week, but we think it's evidence that we're someone who has their shit together and does meal preps in pretty little containers. The workout clothes are not just clothes. They're a sign that you're doing the real exercise, the exercise that actually counts. But when we remove those markers like driving to get the walk-in, buying convenience foods that don't require us to meal prep, or wearing tailored pants instead of leggings, we sometimes feel like we're not being serious anymore. Like we've let ourselves off too easily. But the difficulty of a habit is not what makes it effective. It's the consistency that drives results. And the easier version of a habit that you do every single day will always produce better results than the harder version that you can only do when the conditions are perfect. So, what does this actually look like to remove the friction? Because I don't want this to be an episode that feels like good in theory, but leaves you unsure of how to actually apply it once you're done listening. I want you to leave this episode knowing, okay, here's how I can try this out. I want you to think about one habit that you keep giving up on, that you keep thinking about, but you are abandoning it. And I'll do this with you because I've got my own too. I'm not perfect around here. For me, it's reading, reading for enjoyment. I will start it and then I stop. And it never seems to stick. I can never do it regularly enough throughout the year that I would call it a true habit. And I do enjoy it, and I just can't seem to make it stick. So that's what I'm gonna work through now while you work through your own. So think about one yourself, one habit that you're struggling to do consistently. And I want you to ask yourself this one question. What is the version of this I would actually do every single day? Not when I feel like it, not when the conditions are perfect, not when I have the right clothes on or the right amount of time or the right amount of energy, but every single day, regardless of what that day looks like. This could be your bam, your bare ass minimum. I've talked about this before, but that bam is the version you're going to build your system around. It's not the quote unquote correct version. We're gonna build a system around the consistent version. So for me, it was driving to the walk. And for you, it might be something completely different. When I think about reading, I probably just need to allow myself to believe that five minutes of reading, quote unquote, counts, because that's often what happens is that I decide that there's not enough time and then I don't read at all. I'm sure many of you have done this at times when it comes to workouts or other things. Or maybe it's that I need to make sure that I have better lighting in my bedroom so that when I grab my book, I actually can read it now that my eyes are getting worse with my glasses. So maybe it's the lighting. Or maybe I need to just allow myself to stop reading a book that I don't really like and just start a new one, right? So many times I'm in a book and I'm just kind of like, uh, I don't know. But I feel like I've got to finish it because I started it. I don't know. For my avid readers, maybe you can share a few tips with me. But those are the things I've been noodling on about how I can make this more doable and a little bit easier on myself. And the point of this all, it's not to lower your standards because you're still gonna have to do the thing and you're gonna need to do the thing at a level that's gonna deliver results. But we're building habits around the life that you actually have, not some dream life that you wish you had. And when you do that, and when you remove the friction between you and the habit, you start doing the damn thing. And this becomes a pretty big deal when you apply this thinking to other habits in your life, things that you have been doing inconsistently because you made it harder than it needs to be. Every friction point you remove makes consistency possible. And what I've seen after coaching hundreds of women, the ones who really truly feel good in their bodies, who lose the weight and keep it off, they do not have more discipline than anyone else. Like they really don't. They don't love walking up the hill in my neighborhood more than I do, right? But they've removed enough friction so they can just do it and not attach any meaning to it about how they are doing it. They've allowed themselves to drive to the walk without attaching meaning to it. They walk in their slacks at work without thinking that that feels off. They buy pre-chopped and pre-bagged bags of greens instead of big heads of lettuce. Although I know we're in the middle of this parasite situation, so we're probably not buying bagged lettuce right now, but you get what I mean. And they feel good. They probably feel pretty incredible because they've showed up consistently in this imperfect version of what doing the thing looks like, rather than only occasionally in the correct version. So here's what I want you to think about today. The version of the healthy habit that you actually do consistently will always produce better results than the perfect version you never do. So this week, why don't you give this a try? Pick one healthy habit that you've been doing it consistently. And maybe you've done it, but you're not doing it at all. And I want you to ask yourself, what is the version of this I could actually do every single day? Write it down. Like literally write it down and do that version this week and notice what changes when you stop requiring that habit to feel so hard. When you stop making it feel like it has to be done in a certain way to count. Like for one of my clients recently, this, and I see this over and over. She was convinced that it was too lazy to buy things like pre-chopped vegetables, the convenience-packed veggies. She was convinced that that was way too lazy and that she should just chop her own broccoli, she should peel her own carrots, she should mince her own garlic. But guess what? Life would continue to life for her, and it was. And so she wouldn't even eat the vegetables. And then they would just turn into that messy green goop in the drawer in her refrigerator, and she was angry at herself. Like, what is wrong with me? She would literally say this. I'm just so lazy. Why can't I just do this? And I had to push hard. Like I really did. And I had to convince her to just experiment and just try, allow herself to buy the frozen garlic cubes you can get at Trader Joe's, to buy the bag vegetables that were already chopped up that she could just throw in the microwave. And guess what? It changed everything. When she allowed herself to experiment with this for one week, she came back and she was like, Why the hell did I not do this sooner? Seriously, she was like, seriously, why didn't I do this sooner? And I know she's not alone. And I see this over and over with clients who, once they allow themselves to do the thing in a bit of an easier way, even if it feels a little bit lazy at first, they feel so much relief. Then they question why the heck they hadn't done it sooner. Before I let you go, I want to say one more thing. Everything I just described, like figuring out the version of each habit that can actually fit in your life, removing the friction that has been stopping you, and then building a system around the life that you actually live instead of the one that you wish you had. This is exactly what I do with women, particularly in my one-on-one coaching. Because I know that most of you can hear this episode. You can completely agree with everything I said and still go back to making the habit harder than it needs to be. And not because you didn't understand it, but because changing the way you think about what counts and what doesn't count requires more than one podcast episode. It requires someone who knows your specific life. Like if you're a lawyer with billable hours and two teen boys, and a stepdaughter who is with you half the time, and a husband who kind of gets it, but also kind of makes things a bit more complicated, and a boss whose expectations shift constantly, and you've never had to think twice about what you ate until the last three years, and everything seems to change, and now you've gained 10 pounds this last year and nothing's working. Like I get that, right? This is a specific situation. And you can enter exactly what that looks like for you, but you have all these different variables. And for that client here, telling her to just find an easier version of her morning walk, it's not enough. We need to figure out what her morning actually looks like. Whether morning is even the right window for her. Whether the walk happens at 6 a.m. before anyone is awake, or it's happening at noon between client calls, and how is she going to do that? Or at 9 p.m. after she's had some time with the kids, whether it happens in her neighborhood or her parking garage or her office building between meetings, whether it is happening in her suit, that level specificity. And then we need to do this for everything else, like her nutrition, her workouts, sleep. And most importantly, she's gonna have me by her side to regroup after that Thursday night when her stepdaughter got upset and her husband wasn't helpful at all. And then dinner plans fell apart, and the DoorDash app was right there. That is what working one-on-one with me looks like. I do not hand you over a generic plan or a cookie cutter template someone else used. It's a completely custom system built for you. And if you've been listening and thinking, I know I need to make things more doable, but I can't even start to think about what an easier version might even look like. That is exactly what I'm here for. I have a limited number of one-on-one spots available right now, and I want to make sure that the right women are in them to work with me. So if you've been thinking about it, head to the show notes and apply today. Tell me a little bit about your specific situation, like what you've been trying, what has not been working, what your life actually looks like. And then I'll personally reach out and connect so we can talk through whether it makes sense for us to work together. Because you deserve a plan that fits into your actual life, not the life that has the right window with the right clothes and the right amount of time. Like that's just not gonna happen. And I'd love to make this happen for you. And I can. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of This Life Gets Good. I am truly grateful you chose to invest your time to listen. Your feedback matters here. And if you found this podcast to make a difference for you, please take a minute to share a review. Once a month, I'll select one lucky listener who shares a review to win a live one on one strategy call with me, where I'll personally coach you on your exact next steps to see weight loss results and finally feel hot again. And if this episode made you feel seen, share it with a friend who deserves to feel that way too.