5 Things I Would Do Differently If I Could Start Over

I’ve been thinking lately about all the time I wasted trying to figure out my health. Not in a regretful way — more in a “if only someone had just told me” kind of way.

Because the things that actually worked for me were not complicated. They weren’t the lemon detox diet I survived on for a week in my twenties, or the soup diet I lasted about three days on. They were pretty boring, actually. And that’s kind of the point.

So here are five things I would have done sooner, and what I’d tell you to do now if you’re still in that cycle of trying things and feeling like you’re going nowhere.

1. Start strength training

Not cardio. Not light resistance bands. Actual lifting.

I spent years on the cross trainer, going to attack classes, doing what everyone around me was doing — which was pretty much all cardio. The weights section of the gym felt like it belonged to someone else. So I stayed away from it for a long time.

What nobody told me back then is that muscle is your metabolic engine. The more lean muscle you have, the more energy your body burns at rest — not just during workouts, but lying on the couch, sitting at your desk, going about your day. And when you’re trying to lose weight, muscle is what protects your metabolism from slowing down. Without it, you can lose weight and lose muscle along with it, which makes the whole process harder over time.

But beyond the metabolic stuff, I genuinely wish someone had explained what it feels like to be functionally strong. Being able to carry your groceries properly, pick up your kids without your back complaining, not feeling wiped out by physical tasks. That stuff matters in real life.

When I finally did start lifting, there was something addictive about it. Feeling yourself get stronger is a different kind of motivation. You want to keep going because you want to see how far you can take it.

If you’ve been avoiding the weights section because it feels intimidating, start simple and start light. You don’t need to know what you’re doing on day one. You just need to start.

2. Prioritise protein

For most of my early adult life, my meals revolved around pasta and rice.

I wasn’t thinking about protein at all,  not until I started studying nutrition. And looking back, the amount of mental energy I spent trying to stick to diets and avoid certain foods would have been dramatically reduced if I’d just been eating enough protein.

Here’s why: protein is the most satiating macronutrient.

When you’re genuinely eating enough of it, the 3pm sugar cravings, the after-dinner grazing, the constant thinking about food — a lot of that just fades.  It fades because your body isn’t looking for anything else.

And it goes beyond hunger. When you’re trying to lose fat, you want to be losing fat — not muscle. Protein is what preserves that muscle in a deficit. It also supports your training, giving your muscles what they need to actually repair and grow.

You don’t have to count every gram forever. But just making sure there’s a quality source of protein in every meal is one of the most practical changes you can make.

Before you start cutting anything out of your diet, ask yourself honestly: am I actually eating enough protein? Most of the time, the answer is no.

3. Stop starting over

The fad diets, the “I’ll start again on Monday” cycle, the “I was really good this week until the weekend” thing.  I did all of it for years.

I remember doing the lemon detox diet and being so excited about the weight I lost. Then I started eating normally again and it came back.. plus more.  I’ve had stints of being vegan, done the cutting carbs thing, done the cutting fat thing. And every single time, I’d start with that excited feeling, this is the one that’s going to work — and within a few weeks it had fallen apart.

I’m generally pretty good at sticking to things so it wasn’t a commitment issue. The problem was that every single approach was too restrictive to maintain. They weren’t built for real life. They were designed to be temporary, and I was trying to make them permanent.

Restriction works in the short term. That part’s true. But the moment you can’t sustain it, you go back, often further back than where you started, and your relationship with food suffers along the way.

What I wish I’d understood sooner: the goal isn’t to find the perfect diet. It’s to find a way of eating you can actually live with — not just for six weeks, not until your event, but for your whole life.

The moment I genuinely understood that, something shifted. The noise in the back of my head about what I should be eating, when I should start being “good” again, it just went quiet. Because the way I eat now is just the way I eat. It’s not a diet. It’s not temporary.

If you can’t imagine eating the way your current plan tells you to in five years’ time, it’s probably not the answer.

4. Go for more walks

My parents walked almost every morning when I was growing up. I rejected it constantly because getting up early in central Victoria in winter sounded like the worst thing possible.

Even as I got older and started walking more, I still wrote it off as not “real” exercise. It was what you did when you didn’t have time to go to the gym.

I had it completely backwards.

There’s a concept called NEAT — non-exercise activity thermogenesis — which is basically all the energy you burn from movement that isn’t formal exercise. Walking, cleaning, carrying kids around, going up stairs. Research shows NEAT can account for a significant chunk of your total daily energy expenditure — sometimes more than a gym session. The problem is that modern life has gutted our NEAT. We sit at desks, sit in cars, sit on the couch. And a 45-minute workout doesn’t undo eight hours of sitting.

Regular walks throughout the day add up in a way most people seriously underestimate. And there’s everything else walking does — for stress, for mental clarity, for actually thinking through whatever you’re carrying around in your head.

There’s something about moving at a gentle pace, especially outside, that clears things in a way nothing else really does.

Stop waiting until you have time for a “proper” workout. Throw on your shoes and go. It counts.

5. Learn what’s actually in your food

Not in an obsessive way. Not calculating every macro or reading every label with a magnifying glass.

I mean actual food literacy. Understanding what you’re eating, what it’s made of, and what it’s doing in your body.

For a long time, I followed plans without understanding the why. I was told to eat this and avoid that, and I just did it. The moment the program ended, I was lost, because I hadn’t actually learned anything. I’d just followed instructions.

That’s exactly why I build an education component into my programs. When it ends, you know how to keep going. You’re not standing in the supermarket having no idea what to do without someone else’s meal plan.

Understanding your food changes how you look at it. When you understand why ultra-processed food is engineered to override your fullness signals, you stop blaming yourself for wanting more of it. When you know what fibre does and why hitting 30g a day matters for weight loss, you start actually wanting to eat more of those foods, because you understand what they’re doing for you.

That knowledge sticks with you. A meal plan doesn’t.

If I could go back, I’d tell myself: spend less time following someone else’s rules and more time understanding the why. Once you have that knowledge, you’ve got it forever.

None of those five things are extreme. No detox. No cutting entire food groups. No 5am wake-ups (unless that’s your thing). Just the basics done consistently.

And I know that’s frustrating to hear when you’re in that place of feeling like you’re doing everything right and still going nowhere. You want it to be more complicated than that. You want there to be some secret you’ve been missing.

But the secret, if you want to call it one, is that the basics are the advanced things. It’s just the day-to-day fundamentals, done most days, over time.

If you’re not doing any of these five things yet, don’t try to start them all at once. Just pick one — the one that feels most doable right now and focus on that for the next couple of weeks until it’s just part of how you live. Then add the next one.

That’s sustainable change. One habit at a time.

Need some extra guidance?

For more detailed guidance, check out my Ultimate Weight Loss Guide , easy to follow weight loss principles, 25+ recipes and more to help you on this journey.

Ditch the quick fixes and embrace a realistic, healthy approach to fat loss.

🎙️ Listen to The Simple Weight Loss Podcast

Check out the full episode on this topic.  I cover it all in episode 8 of The Simple Weight Loss podcast.

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