If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know that it can be a difficult process filled with pain and suffering. You might put in a bunch of effort and get nothing for all the trouble. Or worse yet, you make big changes and maybe see big results, only to have your weight shoot back up to where you started or even higher. All you’ve gotten for your trouble is disillusionment and a few extra pounds. After a while, you start losing faith in your ability to make these sorts of changes in your life. You start to think that perhaps you’re damned to this size and state of health. OK, enough doom and gloom. If you’re reading this, then you don’t want to simply be fated to stay the same until the day you die. You’re interested in getting out of this hole you’re currently in before it becomes a grave. So, let’s first look at why making these changes is so hard. Then we’ll look at a few strategies you can use to make them stick.

It’s no secret that making changes is often painful. There’s a reason for that too. By deciding you’re going to change something about yourself you’re essentially admitting two things: I’m responsible for my current not-so-awesome state of being and I’m responsible for fixing it. The first one is particularly rough because what you’re admitting to yourself is that the way you’ve been doing things for the last however many months/years is wrong in some form or another. Acknowledging that you’ve fallen short of what you deem good or ideal is not fun.

The good news, though, is that you’re now aware of it and can move on to the second admission: you’re responsible for fixing it. Here we find more bittersweetness. On the one hand, you can succeed and be the source of great pride in what you’ve done. On the other, you can fail and once again fall short of what you deemed good or ideal. This is daunting and it’s the reason so many people have put off making changes in their lives. The other problem is that if you do try your hardest and fail, you have failed truly. This means that you can’t turn around and say “Well, I didn’t try my best, so if I did I’d succeed” leaving your sense of awesomeness intact. You’d actually have to admit you weren’t “good enough” to get the job done. Again, not fun.

Of course, that’s just at the conceptual level. There are plenty more problems at the practical level. One of the biggest one is that you’re surrounded by chaos, a whole lot of things you have little to no control over. For example, you love cookies and you have the misfortune of working in an office that leaves cookies out in the breakroom for the workers. Every time you go into the breakroom, those cookies are like the Sirens calling you to your doom. Or you work an insane schedule where the idea of regularly timed meals is about as realistic as having a pet unicorn. You don’t get to dictate the food left out in the breakroom or the hours that you’re needed at work. There are a thousand things you can’t do a damn thing about. But this brings us to the second part of this piece: the strategies.

I wrote a whole article on this a while back, but I’ll briefly recap here. The first thing to do is find little things you can control and fix. Aim up, but aim low. Do not vow to make some massive change. The higher the goal, the farther the fall if you fail to meet it. And since you’ve probably failed already, you know what I’m talking about. What this looks like is instead of saying “I’m going to change from my current crappy diet to all healthy, clean food and exercise 12 times a week” say “I’m going to stop eating (whatever one item you know isn’t good) and replace it with (something that’s better.) I’ll also go for a ten minute walk every morning.”  Is that big and impressive? Dear god, no. But doing something small right is more valuable than not doing something big. Focus on that little thing until it becomes a habit, truly a part of your life and way of living. Then find the next little tweak. Repeat this process over and over. Eventually you’ll have taken enough little steps up that you get to the big goal.

But, you’re only human. You will slip up. This brings us to the next strategic bit: what do you do when you falter? Too many times people focus on perfection instead of progress. I struggled with this for a long time. Ironically, it was only when I aimed for good instead of perfect that things got truly better. Say you’ve decided you’re not going to be eating Oreos anymore and you’ve replaced them with beef jerky and fruit. Your record is immaculate, but one day you realize you forgot to get beef jerky and now you’re at work and hungry. You hold out as long as you can, but you ended up cracking and having the Oreos. There are two ways to deal with this. You can either lament the fact that you’re an imperfect being and flog yourself for it or you can accept that you’ve screwed up and ask how you can do better next time. The first one often leads to an Oreo binge because, since the purity has been tainted and the blood is already on your hands, what does is matter how much? The second leads to moving on and making the future brighter. If you opt for the second one, you’ll look at what happened and come up with a plan to make it less likely in the future. You see that the problem was you ran out of jerky quickly because you didn’t have much on hand. From now on you’ll buy beef jerky in bulk and keep it at work. Sure, the office might start referring to you as the Beef Jerky Squirrel, but at least you won’t be blowing your diet any time soon.

If you’ve been in a cycle of yo-yo diets, maybe these ideas and strategies can help you break it. Having the mindset of “everything has to be perfect or to hell with it” isn’t going to get you far, unless you’re looking to have anxiety around food. And making big, unsustainable changes won’t help either. Yes, doing little things and accepting the fact that you’re a mere mortal instead of some picture of perfect divinity are lame. But if you’re looking to get lasting results, maybe lame is the way to go.