You’re starting the journey of making changes in your life. You’re going to lose weight or start exercising or really anything else in life. And now comes the hardest part: where to begin. When you’re new to something, you’re in quite the pickle. It’s not just that you don’t know things. You don’t even know what you don’t know. It feels like you’re clinging to one of those circular lifesavers, drifting around in the ocean with no land in sight. You want to get home, but which way do you even start swimming? Here are some basic basic ideas to get you started.

Do something you know will help you reach the goal. It doesn’t matter how small that thing is. Say you’re trying to lose weight. Even if you don’t know the first thing about dieting or calories or macronutrients, you almost certainly know something that will help you. For example, you probably know that drinking soda isn’t helping your cause. If that’s the case, drop the soda and switch to water. It’s a small thing. It isn’t going to shake the earth. But it’s going to get you started. The best part about this is that when you do this, you’ll get some results. Maybe you lose a pound or two. Maybe you crave sugary drinks less and less after a while. Or, even better and also more likely, you realize that you can make changes in your life. You’re not subject to the whims of the gods of bodyweight and doughnuts.

Ask a friend who’s been there. If you’ve already done that and seem to have hit a wall, this is the next step. There are hundreds of people out there who have been in your exact situation. You’re far from alone. In all likelihood, you know at least one of them. Now would be a great time to invite them for coffee, beer, or whatever social lubricant you see fit, and pick their brain about how to best get to where you want to go. These people are usually very happy to share their experiences and struggles with you. The important thing to remember here, though, is that just because a thing worked for him or her, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you. Everybody is somewhat different and if your friend did the ketogenic diet and it worked, it might not for you. This is why it’s important to give the thing a real, honest try and, if it fails, abandon it. Then, go try something else. You have to actually follow it, though. You can’t half-ass it or make a bunch of modifications to it, and then complain that it doesn’t work. After all, you didn’t really do it. If you don’t want to go through the trial and error process, however, you can always…

Hire a professional. Finding somebody that really knows what they’re doing to help you out can make all the difference. Whereas you might know next to nothing about the subject, this person has years or decades of experience. Instead of figuring out everything yourself, this person can give you simple directions on what to do. Your job then becomes not figuring things out, but simply doing things, which saves you lots of precious time and energy. And this isn’t a foreign concept to you either. You do it all the time with your car, your taxes, your teeth, etc. So why not do it with your fitness? Thanks to the miracle that is the internet, finding a professional has never been both easier and harder. Now you have access to hundreds with just a few keystrokes. The problem is vetting them. When hiring a professional, there are a few things to remember:

• They shouldn’t try to change your goals unless your goal is physically impossible or outright dangerous.

• They ask you an absolute ton of questions before making recommendations. Anybody who gives you recommendations without gathering information (unless they’re the really obvious things like “Sleep about eight hours a night,) isn’t making the thing match you.

• They can back their recommendations up with reasons that aren’t “because I said so” or “that’s just the way it is.”

• If what he or she is having you do isn’t working (again, this assumes that you’re actually doing what you’re being told to do,) then he or she will try something different, or modify the current strategy.

• Shameless plug: I am one of them.

Though it might be tempting to wait until you’ve gathered all the right information or figured out the perfect strategy, sometimes simply starting is the best thing to do. Too often we wait and wait until the “right time” to do something, all the while letting time that we could have used to make progress slip by. It’s never too late to get started, and progress is progress, no matter how small.