Why You Know Exactly What to Do and Still Can't Make Yourself Do It

I have been thinking about diet culture a lot lately. And not because I want to talk about food. But because there is something in it that explains almost everything I see in my work, and I could not stop thinking about it until I got it out.

Here is what I mean. Everyone knows the basic principle of losing weight. Eat less, move more. Right? The information has been around our entire lives. And yet the diet industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and people spend years, sometimes their whole lives, cycling through plans and programs and coaches trying to solve something that on paper is the simplest equation in the world.

So what is actually going on?

Because here is the thing I keep seeing, in every area of life, not just food. You know the conversation you need to have. You know what needs to happen. You know the habit you need to build, the decision you keep pushing out, the outreach you have been avoiding for three months. You know. And something in you just will not go there.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield studied this for years and found that up to 57 percent of our intentions never actually turn into action. More than half. And it is not because we do not want it. It is because somewhere between the intention and the doing, discomfort shows up. And we live in a world that has been literally engineered so we never have to feel it.

Food at the door. Entertainment on demand. Every answer instantly. And quietly, our brains have been trained to read discomfort as a signal that something is wrong. Maybe now is not the right time. Maybe I need a better plan first. Maybe this is just not for me.

And look, most of the time that voice is not wisdom. It is avoidance that has learned to sound very reasonable.

So. In my work with women, the avoidance almost always comes back to one of two places. And this is where it gets interesting.

The first is when the resistance is old. Like, actually old. It is carrying something in it that belongs to a past experience, something that left a mark and quietly became a conclusion about what is safe, what is possible, what someone like you does.

And here is the part that gets me every single time, sometimes that belief is not even yours. It belonged to someone around you. A parent, a teacher, someone who said the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. And it got passed to you so early you stopped questioning whether it was actually true.

This kind of avoidance does not feel like avoidance. It feels like knowing. Like having a very good reason. And trying to push through it with more motivation or a better plan does not work, because the belief is not sitting at the level of strategy. It is sitting way deeper than that.

And that is exactly the work I do with women, going to the root of where that belief came from and clearing it from there. Because once it moves, everything else moves with it.

The second kind is simpler, though not easier. It is just the muscle that has not been built yet. Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania spent years figuring out what actually predicts success, and what she found is that it is not talent and it is not intelligence.

At an Ivy League university, the students with the highest grades were not the smartest ones. They were the grittiest. The most persistent. She says effort counts twice, and she means it literally.

Talent tells you how fast you can improve. But without effort applied consistently over time, talent just sits there going absolutely nowhere.

And here is the part that I think most people completely miss.

The real first effort has nothing to do with the action itself.

It starts with understanding which of these two things is actually running the show for you right now. Because one needs to be worked on at a subconscious level, at the root, where the belief is actually stored. And the other needs you to build the muscle, to show up before you feel ready, enough times that a different story about who you are starts to take hold.

Both of those are effort. Neither of them look like hustle. Neither of them look like pushing harder or doing more. They look like being willing to actually look at what is in the way, and doing the work that that turns out to be.

And here is what I know from watching this shift happen again and again. Once someone does that work, the action stops feeling like a fight. It starts feeling like who she is.

If this is landing and you know this is your work to do, book a free call with me and let's look at what is actually running the show for you.