Ep #192: Why Progress Feels So Hard in Weight Loss, Strength & Habits

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, Episode #192. You might not be stuck because you’re doing too little. You might be stuck because your effort is scattered. Let’s talk about how to simplify and put your energy where it actually matters.

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, where you’ll learn how to build both a strong body and a strong mind by eating, moving, and thinking. I’m your host Physician, Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland. 

Hey, how are you? What’s new? What’s good? So, what’s good here? Well, today, I want to keep this pretty simple and just give it to you straight. The last few episodes have been a mix of teaching related to nutrition and fitness and layered with mindset work to make eating and moving more doable. But today, I want to strip it down even further. What I mean by that is this: I want to help you stop pouring energy into the things that don’t actually drive results so you can focus the time and energy you do have on the things that actually matter.

Here’s where this comes from. I’m in my sixth year of coaching full-time, and in that period, I’ve worked with a lot of women around the same core themes: weight loss, exercise, habits, burnout, and especially confidence. I love coaching on all of these things. The women I’ve coached all have different lives, different careers, different circumstances, but very similar sticking points. And here’s what I’ve realized: It’s most definitely not a knowledge problem, and it’s not a try-harder problem. The women I work with already know what to do, and they are not afraid of working hard at all.

The issue is where the focus goes. We tend to get pulled towards the wrong variables. We focus on the details that feel controllable, or impressive, or urgent. And in doing that, we drift away from the handful of fundamentals that actually drive progress. I said ‘we’ for a reason. I want to be really clear here, I am not exempt from this. I’ve done it. I still catch myself doing it. When something feels uncertain, or slow, or uncomfortable, it’s really tempting to zoom in on the details. It’s tempting to tweak or optimize because that feels productive.

But productive and effective, they are not always the same thing. After years of watching this same pattern repeat in my clients and in myself, I think it’s worth calling it out directly. So, today, we’re going to simplify. We’re going to talk about what actually moves the needle in your weight, your strength, your habits, your burnout, and your confidence. And we’re also going to talk about what you can stop pouring so much of your mental energy into. All right? So, let’s go.

First, let’s talk about weight loss because this is where I see the most distraction and where I most commonly see women worrying about things that ultimately do not matter. Honestly, it makes sense because there is so much noise in this space. Between social media, influencers, podcasts, and news headlines, everyone’s got an opinion. Very often, the biggest voices are also selling a program that you can buy. So, it’s no wonder that people get confused.

So, we end up obsessing over the perfect macro split. We convince ourselves that if we shave a little more carbs and add a little more protein, things will finally fall into place. Only to come back next week and wonder, ‘No, maybe I need a little more fat and a little less protein.’ It can go on forever. I’ve seen it go on forever. People can get really stuck on this and think that if they just get the percentages down, that weight loss will follow.

Or, similarly, people fixate on what type of diet they should follow. We spend a lot of time obsessing over whether we should be low-carb, high-carb, Keto, vegan, plant-based. You can be certain that no one agrees about what the best diet is. Unfortunately, we’ve been led to believe through manipulative marketing and messaging that it has to be a certain way, or else you’re not doing it right.

Or, we get caught up in meal timing and think that we have to do intermittent fasting, or else it’s not going to work. I find this to be especially true for the peri- and menopausal women I work with. There has been an explosion of messaging—some of it helpful, some of it not helpful—suggesting that there is one specific way you’ve got to eat in order to manage weight gain. Then, intermittent fasting became a big deal, which led many women to think that they had to do it or else they were missing out on weight loss. But that is absolutely not true.

Here’s why we get pulled into all this. This is why we get so caught up in finding the right macro split, or the right diet, or the right meal timing. Those things feel controllable. They feel precise. They feel smart. There’s something comforting about believing that if you just find the right ratio, or the right method, or the right window of time to eat, that everything will finally click. It gives you a sense of control in a process that can feel slow and, frankly, very uncertain. It also feels productive. Tweaking macros feels like work. Switching diets and eliminating whole food groups feels decisive. Debating your meal timing feels like strategy. But often, what this really is, is a way to stay busy while avoiding the simpler, less exciting, less glamorous work of consistency.

Here’s the reality: You can have the perfect macro split and still overeat. You can choose the right diet and still be inconsistent. You can fast for 16 hours and still undo it in the eight hours that you do eat. None of those variables override total intake, protein adequacy, sleep, or consistency over time. Those are refinements, but they are not the foundation.

So, what actually matters? If those aren’t the drivers, what is? Well, first, it’s protein. Meaning, eating enough of it. I do not mean counting every gram of protein to the point of obsessing over it. I mean making sure that it’s a centerpiece in your meals so that you stay full and satisfied. I mean aiming for protein to be at least one-quarter to one-third of your plate for meals. I mean aiming to have protein at breakfast instead of a breakfast full of carbs. I know we talk a lot about protein here, but it’s only because it’s just that important. When protein is too low, hunger goes up, cravings go up, and consistency becomes that much harder.

Second, awareness of your total intake also matters. This does not mean you have to pull out your MyFitnessPal and log every single calorie you put in your mouth—not at all. But if you have no idea what or how much you’re eating, you’re not going to get anywhere. So maybe that means a food diary where you write down what you’re actually eating. Or if tracking works for you and you don’t obsess about it, maybe you use a tracking device for a short time. Really, the tool matters way less than the awareness.

Third, what matters more than anything is consistency. Whatever diet you choose, whatever macro split you’ve got, whatever meal timing you do or do not use, great. But none of that matters at all if you cannot be consistent with it. I see so many women follow a diet perfectly for a few weeks and then abandon it entirely because it was never sustainable in the first place. So it really matters that you find a way of eating that is doable for you so you can be consistent with it. If you cannot maintain it, it does not matter how optimal it looks on paper.

Let me also add in sleep here. You can be doing everything right nutritionally, but if you’re chronically sleep-deprived, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Hunger hormones shift, cravings increase, decision-making is harder. So please, we have got to find a way to get you sleeping. At least seven, but ideally eight to nine hours of sleep per night, okay? This is not optional if weight loss is your goal. So, those are the things that matter. Adequate protein, awareness of your intake, consistency, and sleep, okay? Not whether you do intermittent fasting or eat a vegan diet.

So, now, let’s move on to building muscle. When it comes to strength training, we love complexity. Similar to the confusion about weight loss, I credit this to the loads of influencers and so-called wellness experts who make strength training seem much more complicated than it really is. We get convinced that we need the perfect program, the right split, and constant variation to promote ‘muscle confusion’ so our bodies don’t adapt. To be clear here, muscle confusion is bro-science. It is a marketing term to make fitness influencers sound smart, but it’s not a scientifically backed physiological process, okay? You don’t have to get caught up in finding the exact right program that targets every single muscle on your backside to get a perfectly rounded booty. You don’t have to stress over that.

You also don’t need to measure the effectiveness of a workout by how sweaty you are or how sore you feel the next day. Sweat reflects your temperature regulation, not muscle growth. Soreness is how your body responds to a new or unfamiliar stress like weightlifting, but it is not a requirement for progress. In fact, as you get stronger and more consistent, you may feel less sore over time, even as you’re making bigger gains in the weight room. So, if you’re using soreness as a metric of effectiveness, you might be using the wrong signal. You do not have to finish your lift feeling completely annihilated, and you don’t have to have trouble sitting in a chair the next day in order for your workout to count, all right?

Here’s the problem with getting pulled into all that: Your muscles do not respond to novelty. They really don’t care how creative your split is and if you do push, pull, legs, or upper body, lower body, full body. Your muscles don’t grow exponentially larger just because you shocked them with a new sequence of exercises. Muscle responds to mechanical tension or, even more simply, lifting heavy stuff. Muscles respond to being asked to do hard work. So if you bench press 100 pounds consistently, your body adapts. If you want it to continue adapting, you have to ask for a little more stress, like 105 pounds on the bench press, in order to grow. That’s it. But when we keep switching programs or chasing variation just for the sake of variety, we often interrupt the process that allows adaptation to happen.

So, if novelty, sweat, or soreness are not the drivers of building muscle, what is? Well, muscle is built through progressive overload, or gradually asking more of the muscle over time as it adapts to the weights you’re lifting. That might mean increasing the weight, adding reps or sets, reducing your rest time, slowing your tempo, or increasing your range of motion. There are lots of ways to do this, but the principle is the same. Progressive overload only works if the muscle is actually being challenged in the first place. That means you’ve got to train hard enough—not recklessly, not with sloppy form, not to the point that you’re wrecked for a week, but close enough to failure that if I asked you to do five more reps, you couldn’t. Maybe you could do one or two more with good form, but not five. And those last few reps should feel slow. They should feel heavy. They should feel challenging, but not impossible. That is the kind of training that your muscles will respond to.

The bottom line is, you don’t want to be doing bicep curls with the same 10-pound dumbbells for years if your goal is to build muscle, okay? And then the other piece here is consistency. Muscle is built by regularly training all major muscle groups, not just the ones you like. So, that means do deadlifts. Or if you can’t do deadlifts, find a hip hinge movement pattern that you can do, and do it regularly. It also means squatting, pushing, pulling, and don’t skip your lower body exercises, even if you’re a runner, okay?

If you zoom out, building muscle is actually pretty straightforward. You don’t need novelty, you don’t need to annihilate yourself, you do not need a perfectly engineered split. You need gradual progression, adequate intensity, and enough consistency to produce change. That is it, and the rest is detail.

What’s interesting is that this same pattern shows up outside the weight room too, not just in how we train, but in how we build habits in general. When it comes to habits, most of us are not missing discipline. We think we’re missing time. Clients will tell me, ‘If I just had more time, I could eat better, or exercise, or meal prep,’ or fill-in-the-blank. But the reality is, most of us are busy. Most of us are totally overscheduled. Most of us are not able to make sweeping changes to our schedules in order to create huge stretches of time.

Or, we think we’re missing motivation. We tell ourselves that we need to feel ready, or energized, or inspired. We wait for things to slow down, which they never do. Or, we wait for the right week, but that week never comes. And sometimes we just think we need a better system. Maybe you’ve told yourself, ‘Once I get organized, this will be easier.’ Like if you have the right planner, or the right app, or the right meal prep system or containers, this would be easier.

Here’s why all of this feels true: Time genuinely does feel like the barrier. When your days are full and your brain is totally stretched, it makes sense to believe that if you just had a little more space, you’d finally be consistent. Motivation feels super powerful when it’s there. Of course, you feel energized and ready. Habits feel easier. Organization feels responsible. It feels productive. It feels like being an adult. If you could just map it out better, color-code it, or schedule it properly, of course you’d follow through, right?

But here’s what I’ve seen over and over again: More time does not automatically create action. In fact, the busiest women I coach are often the most consistent. It’s not because they have more time, but because they’ve decided in advance, ‘This is when I work out. This is how my meals are structured.’ And then, they execute. They follow through. Motivation, we know this, it’s unreliable. It comes and goes. If your habit depends on how you feel that day, it is not going to last for very long. Better organization is certainly helpful, but only if that leads to repetition.

So, here’s your key takeaway: The life you have right now is the life your habits have to survive in, not some idealized version of your schedule, but the messy, real-life schedule you have going on in front of you today. That’s where your habits have to hold up.

So, if more time, more motivation, and a better system are not the drivers of habit change, what is? Repetition. It’s doing the behavior in the life you actually have and not waiting for the perfect conditions in the life you wish you had. Here’s why repetition matters so much: Habits are built through reinforcement. Every time you repeat a behavior, you strengthen the neural pathway that supports it. You show your brain again and again, ‘This is what we do.’ Because your brain does not care about intention. It responds to evidence.

The uncomfortable part is that repetition is boring. It is not dramatic. It feels pretty ordinary actually, and that’s exactly why it works, because it’s small, but it’s doable. Ordinary, repeated consistently, that is super powerful. The women I see who build lasting habits, they are not making sweeping overhauls. They’re choosing behaviors that are small but doable and repeatable. And they also plan ahead. I know I’ve said this many times, but it bears repeating. In order for a habit to happen, you need a plan. You can’t just wing it and expect a workout to happen. You can’t just figure it out and have a healthy dinner appear on your table. So, while the app, or the spreadsheet, or the color of your highlighters doesn’t matter, having a real, specific, thought-out plan does.

Then, once you’ve got that plan, in order to make it work, you have to remove the friction so that the choice you want to make is easier than the default. Friction is anything that makes the habit harder than it needs to be. Like having to decide what workout to do at 5 a.m. when you’re still trying to open your eyes. Or, opening the fridge for dinner and nothing is prepped. Or, relying on willpower at 9 p.m. when you are totally fried. Reducing friction means you lay your clothes out the night before if you want to work out early in the morning, and you know what workout you’re going to do. It means cooking proteins ahead of time so you don’t have to spend your Wednesday evening over a pan on the stove. It means having fruit visible on your counter instead of the candy bowl.

You’re not becoming a different person overnight. All you’re doing is making the behavior you want to do slightly easier, and then you repeat it over and over. So, when it comes to habits, stop waiting for more time. Stop waiting to feel motivated, and stop reorganizing your planner. Decide, plan, reduce the friction, and repeat. All right?

So now, let’s talk about burnout. This is one area where I want to be careful not to oversimplify. When someone is burned out in their career, the first instinct is relief: a weekend away, a vacation, cutting back for a week, a spa day. And yes, those things can all absolutely help, at least in the short term. They can help because they temporarily lower stress. They give your nervous system a much-needed break. They give you a pause and an escape from the environment that is causing the burnout in the first place. But relief is not the same as resolution.

We reach for relief because burnout feels awful. You feel empty. You get cynical. Numb. You become a machine, but in the worst way possible because you just stop feeling. When something feels that bad, of course you want a break. Of course you want escape, and that reaction makes sense. I also want to say something else clearly here. In so many professions, especially healthcare and academia and other helping professions, burnout is not just an individual problem. There are broken systems, productivity pressures, documentation and procedural burdens, staffing shortages, metrics on top of metrics, and as a result, good, competent, caring people are being asked to carry far more than what is sustainable.

So that is real, and it’s not a personal failure to struggle inside that. Pretending that the system doesn’t contribute to burnout is naive. As a physician, I have seen some of my incredibly capable, amazing colleagues walk away from medicine, not because they lacked resilience, but because the system was asking for more than they could possibly give without completely eroding themselves. And while healthcare is a very visible example, I know that this is not at all limited to medicine. Many industries are structured in ways that reward overextension and normalize depletion, and that comes at a huge cost.

So yes, systems matter. At the same time, changing an entire system is a long, complex process. Most of us do not have immediate control over that. While you can advocate and organize and push for structural change, you still have to decide how you’re going to operate inside the current reality of the existing system. And with that said, burnout is managed by matching your demands with your capacity. Capacity is about honesty. That means being aware of how much you can actually handle right now, emotionally, physically, and mentally. Not how much you used to handle, not how much your colleagues handle, not how much you think you should be able to handle, but what you can carry now without completely losing yourself or resenting your life.

And what protects your capacity? Boundaries. Boundaries are the decisions that say, ‘This is enough.’ They’re not dramatic. They’re not confrontational by default. In fact, they’re often quiet. Boundaries are what stop you from continuously taking on more than you can sustainably give. It might be not volunteering for the extra committee. It might be blocking one evening per week. It might be deciding that not every note has to be A-plus perfect.

Permission is what allows you to uphold your boundaries and honor your decisions without spiraling into guilt. Because for so many of the high-achieving women I work with, the hardest part isn’t naming or even setting the boundary, it’s tolerating how it feels afterward. Permission is what lets you survive disappointing someone. It allows you to let something be good enough. It’s what lets you be a good doctor, or leader, or mother without needing to be superhuman.

So without those three, honesty about your capacity, boundaries, and permission to hold them, burnout becomes cyclical. You push, you push harder, you crash, you recover just enough to get by, and then you push again. So, while you may not be able to fix the entire system this year, you can decide what it costs you. And you can decide what you are and are not willing to carry. And even that, that structural shift, that alone can change your trajectory.

Finally, let’s talk about confidence. A lot of women I work with tell me during their initial consultation that one of their goals is to feel more confident. This is another place where we tend to misunderstand what actually builds it. So here’s what I really want you to hear: When it comes to confidence, we often think we need to feel more confident before we act. We think we have to feel more ready first. Like, ‘Once I feel more sure of myself, I’ll speak up.’ Or, ‘Once I feel ready, I’ll apply.’ Or, ‘Once I feel less awkward, I’ll put myself out there.’ But we all know how that goes. If you look for a reason to not be ready, rest assured, you’re going to find one.

We also tend to think that confidence comes from positive self-talk. ‘If I just remind myself I’m capable, I’ll be good.’ ‘If I just say the right things to myself in the mirror.’ Or, ‘If I just believe harder, then I will be more confident in myself.’ So, let me pause here for a minute and clarify because positive self-talk is not useless. The way you talk to yourself most definitely matters. If your internal dialogue is constantly tearing you down, that will absolutely undermine your confidence. So yes, working on how you talk to yourself is important. But positive self-talk alone does not create durable confidence. And here’s why: You can repeat, ‘I am confident,’ all day long. But if you consistently avoid hard conversations, skip the application, back out of the workout, or don’t follow through on your commitments, your brain takes note.

Because confidence is not built through repetition of words. It’s built through repetition of action. And sometimes we look for confidence externally in the form of validation from other people, praise from your boss, a strong performance review, someone telling you did a great job. Like positive self-talk, external validation is not bad. It feels good because it’s reinforcing. It tells you that your effort landed. It gives you feedback. But if validation becomes the source of your confidence, it’s unstable because it depends on other people. It depends on outcomes you don’t fully control.

You can do excellent work and still not get recognized for it. You can prepare thoroughly and still receive criticism. You can pour yourself into something and still have it fall flat. And if your confidence rises and falls based on external response, then you are constantly at the mercy of someone else’s opinion. And that is exhausting. Confidence, it is not something you can outsource, okay?

Confidence that lasts is built differently. Confidence, it is not a feeling first. It’s evidence first. So what does that mean? It means you do not build confidence by convincing yourself you’re capable. You build confidence by proving to yourself that you can handle hard things. And how do you do that? You take action. You do something. You do the thing you said you were going to do. So confidence is built when you keep promises to yourself. When you say you’re going to work out and you do. When you say you’re going to apply and you hit submit. When you say you’re going to have the uncomfortable conversation and you follow through.

That’s really what we’re talking about here. Confidence is not bravado. It’s not charisma. It’s self-trust. It’s a quiet knowledge that when you say you’re going to do something, you know you will. And that when something uncomfortable does show up, you don’t back down, you don’t shrink, you rise to the occasion. And then, you do it over and over again. You build your confidence through reps. That means you keep showing up. You do things before you feel 100% ready, and then you show yourself that you survived them and you were just fine.

Here’s the part that’s uncomfortable, but I want to say explicitly: Confidence generally comes after action, not before it. It comes after you’ve spoken up a few times and realized you didn’t die. Or, after you’ve lifted the heavier weight a few times and you didn’t fall over. Or, after you’ve had some hard conversations and realized you didn’t implode. Confidence is built through creating repeated evidence that you can rely on yourself. That’s what confidence really is, self-trust.

So, if you’re waiting to feel confident before you act, you might be waiting a long, long time. Act first, build evidence, and let confidence catch up because it will.

So, if you zoom out and look at everything we talked about today, the pattern is the same. In each area—weight loss, strength, habits, burnout, confidence—we tend to focus on the things that feel controllable, urgent, or productive. And those things aren’t meaningless, but they’re not the foundation. The drivers are usually simpler. They’re less exciting, less dramatic. They require repetition and patience. And because they’re simple, they’re easy to overlook.

When you’re busy and stretched thin, you don’t have unlimited energy. And if you’re going to invest time and effort to change your life, it makes sense to spend it on the things that actually matter and give you the results you’re looking for. The women I see who create real change, they’re not doing everything. They’re not perfectly optimized. They’re not chasing every new program or system. They’re just clear about what actually moves the needle, often after a lot of trial and error, like most of us, and they stay there long enough for it to work.

That is the difference. So it’s not about being more disciplined or more intense or more informed. It’s about being willing to simplify and then tolerating the boredom of doing the fundamentals consistently. It’s about resisting the urge to keep tweaking. Because most of us don’t need more information, we need more focus. We need to stop scattering our effort across 10 different variables and instead, commit to the two or three that actually drive the outcome.

And that kind of clarity can feel almost underwhelming at first. It’s not flashy, it doesn’t feel dramatic, but it is powerful. And it’s sustainable. And if you want help staying focused on what actually moves the needle, that’s what we work on in coaching. We don’t overhaul your entire life. We get clear on what actually matters for you and then build around that. Check out my website, head to www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact, and let’s talk about how coaching can help you. All right? Thank you again for hanging out with me, and I’ll catch you again next week.

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Hey if you want to build muscle but don’t know where to start, I’ve got you covered. Head over to CarrieHollandMD.com/buildstrength and download my free guide to help you maximize your strength training. Inside, you’ll find the essential exercises for building muscle, plus simple one, two, and three-day workout plans you can follow with just dumbbells and a bench.

You’ll also find strength training tips to help you train smarter and see real results. My goal is to help you get strong and this strength-training guide will help you do it. Go to CarrieHollandMD.com/build strength and check it out.

Thank you for listening to the Strong Is a Mindset podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build both a strong mind and a strong body by eating, moving, and most importantly, thinking, check out CarrieHollandMD.com.