What To Do When You Take A Step Backwards On Your Health Journey

Being on a health journey is a wonderful thing. It’s a sign you’re ready to face life in a way that makes you truly happy, and fulfills you both physically and mentally. It’s also a sign you take your own health and needs seriously, and you’re not willing to compromise on them for the sake of something else.

Both of these factors are excellent to have in your life, and they’re likely to make you a lot happier and healthier in the long run.

However, there will come a time when you take a step backwards on your health journey. It happens to everyone, and it’s unrealistic to think it’ll never happen to you. In fact, you could even be harming yourself by believing that you’ll only ever make progress – this kind of mindset adds pressure, and will make these backward steps a whole lot harder to deal with.

So let’s think about backward steps for a bit. What can they look like? How common can they be? Even the smallest of things can feel like you’re headed in the wrong direction on your health journey.

For example, maybe you’ve missed your workout for a few days now, and as time goes on, you feel less and less like you want to pick it up again? Or maybe you’ve been craving chocolate lately, despite promising yourself to cut it out of your diet completely? All in all, it’s getting harder and harder to convince yourself to stick to your goals.

If that’s the kind of situation you find yourself in right now, let’s go through a few things down below. Remember, a backwards step doesn’t mean your health journey is over, and it’s OK to feel like you’ve let yourself down. But once you’ve dealt with those feelings, it’s important to get back up on the horse.

We’re not here to push you, but we can help you renavigate, and find the passion you once had for your health journey all over again.

Forgive Yourself

Never let a backwards step make you feel like you’ve wronged yourself. You’ve been thrown off course, and now you’ve got to get back on it, but you haven’t done something irreparably bad. There’s plenty you can do now to get on track again, and that’s the thing to focus on right now. Don’t let your energy go toward internal blame. That inner voice that tells you off, and might even call you names, is not a moral judgement on your character. It’s not really anything at all, in truth! It’s simply your own level of confidence being knocked in the same way, and there is absolutely nothing to be gained by letting it berate you.

So forgive yourself instead, redirect all that trash talk going on inside, and think about what it is you could do next. You can do this by following steps like these: stop when you’re in the middle of lecturing yourself, think to yourself ‘what am I really going to fix by giving into this?’, and then turn that attention outwards.

Then, district that inner voice by focusing on the question just below.

Work Out What Went Wrong

Most of the time, when someone takes a step backward on their health journey, it’s because something ‘went wrong’ and knocked them off course. It’s important to work out what this thing was, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent it from happening again.

And if it turns out that you couldn’t possibly prevent such a thing from ever getting on top of you again, think about what you can do to mitigate the side effects of it. A bad night’s sleep, for example, can make it much harder to get up at your usual time to go to the gym.

However, ensuring you always sleep well will be impossible! As such, if you’ve had a bad night’s sleep and miss your alarm, or simply think it’s better to prioritize your rest and get some more of it, change the time you go to the gym that day.

You can also cut down the time you would usually spend at the gym, and that’s perfectly fine too. Remember, something is always better than nothing!

But sometimes, it’s the goal itself that’s wrong. You could be working toward something that is a little too lofty for what you can realistically commit to, and you’re letting yourself in for a fall by sticking to it. That can often be the case when you’re trying to make big lifestyle changes, and you’re keen to see some fast progress from the health regime you’ve put yourself on.

Losing weight in a short period of time is a good example of this scenario. Usually, it’s only safe to lose a pound per week at maximum, but you may be training double time to try and lose up to two or more.

You can always tweak the way you approach such a goal, in terms of using weight loss pills to aid your progression, as these can be easily combined with a workout routine and new diet. But if you’re trying to do something that’s physically impossible, and is so for most people, rethink the goal itself to get back on track.

Start Off Small Again

Starting small means you get to be kind to yourself in the moment. You get to step back into calm and gentle waters, find your sea legs again, and rebuild that sense of motivation you’ve been missing for a little while now.

Starting small will always be the best way to get back on your health journey, and never let anyone tell you otherwise. You don’t have to ‘make up’ for the gym sessions you miss by pushing yourself too long and too hard at the next one. You also don’t need to punish yourself on your cheat day by not eating any of the things you really want to.

None of these big, dramatic actions are really going to help. They could even hinder you, and they certainly won’t make your health journey feel like a good thing to go on.

So instead, put one foot in front of the other and simply follow the line as it goes along. That could mean looking up a simple 15 minute workout on Youtube, just to get you back into the swing of things, and that’ll always work better.

We All Take Steps Backward Sometimes

That’s the most important thing to remember right now. You’re not the only person to have trouble sticking to the health journey you’ve set for yourself. Many people have had to go back to square one before, and put in all that effort over again because something got in the way.

And while this is incredibly frustrating, and it’s tempting to knock yourself down over it, try not to resort to that! Instead, focus your emotions and energy on figuring out where things went wrong, what you can do to support yourself, and how to get back on track without ending up exhausted.

If you redirect your mindset in this way, you’re much more likely to find any future backwards steps a lot easier to handle. They’re not the be all, end all of a health journey. They’re just another thing to face head on and cope with in the moment. Don’t define yourself by them, and don’t write off all the progress you’ve made because of this one small mishap!