When the People Closest to You Undermine Your Progress
- Shane Kokas
- Feb 20, 2014
- 4 min read
It was a Tuesday evening session. My client was about a quarter of the way through the workout when she stopped and looked at me.
"Shane, do I look bad? Do I look unhealthy? Honestly."
I told her she looked great and was having one of her stronger sessions. Then I asked what was behind the question.
"My family told me I've lost too much weight. That I look unhealthy."
I've been training people in Edmonton for over 15 years. That moment has stayed with me, not because it was unusual, but because it wasn't. I've heard versions of it more times than I can count.
The names and circumstances change.
The pattern doesn't.
You make a real change. You commit to something. And then someone close to you — a spouse, a sibling, an adult child, a longtime friend says something that lands like a verdict.
You're overdoing it.
You don't need to do that.
You looked fine before.
Are you sure this is healthy?
And suddenly, the momentum you've been building has to survive a conversation you didn't ask for.
Why this happens — and why it's not really about you
I want to be honest about what's actually going on when this happens, because it rarely has anything to do with your health.
When you change — when you start moving differently, eating differently, showing up with more energy and intention it shifts the dynamic around you.
People who love you can feel unsettled by that shift without fully understanding why. Your progress holds a mirror up to choices they're not ready to examine. Your commitment can feel, to someone who isn't making the same choices, like a quiet judgment of theirs.
None of that is your problem to solve.
I experienced a version of this early in my career. Right out of college, trying to build my client base, I received an email from someone I didn't know that said:
"Maybe if you lost weight, you'd have more clients."
I also remember a single day when two different people commented on my body — one told me I looked wide, the other told me I looked trim.
Three hours apart. Completely contradictory.
Both said with total confidence.
That day clarified something I've held onto ever since:
Outside opinions about your body are subjective. They reflect the person giving them far more than they reflect you. Taking them as data — as any kind of objective measure of how you're doing — is a mistake.
What this looks like specifically after 50
For people in their 50s and 60s making meaningful health changes, this pressure has a particular texture.
You may be changing after a health scare, a diagnosis or a doctor's recommendation. You may be the first person in your household to start paying close attention to what you eat and how you move. Your changes are visible in ways that affect the people around you — at the dinner table, at family gatherings, in how you spend your time.
The comments you get in this context often come wrapped in care.
"I just worry about you."
"You're already healthy enough."
"You don't have to do all this."
They're not always malicious. But they can be just as derailing as the ones that are.
Here's what I tell clients when this comes up — and it comes up often.
You are not required to justify your health decisions to anyone. Not your family. Not your friends. Not the person across the table who has opinions about your meal. The work you're doing is for your strength, your independence, your quality of life over the next 20 or 30 years.
That's yours. It doesn't require a committee vote.
Three things that actually help:
Deciding in advance that the comments will come. Because they will. When you expect them, they lose some of their power. You stop being blindsided and start being prepared.
Keeping the focus on how you feel rather than how you look. Comments about your appearance — positive or negative — are easy targets for other people's projections. But "I slept better this week," "I carried my groceries without stopping," "I made it up those stairs without losing my breath" — those are yours. Nobody can take a position on them.
Staying connected to your reason for starting. Not a vague goal, but the specific thing that made you decide enough was enough. Write it down if you have to. When someone's opinion starts to shake your footing, go back to that reason. It's more solid ground than anyone else's approval.
The client from that Tuesday session kept going.
She came back the next week and the week after that. Over time the comments from her family quieted, not because she argued her case, but because her results became impossible to dismiss.
More energy. More strength. More confidence in how she moved through her days.
Her family eventually came around. They usually do.
But she didn't wait for their permission to start, and she didn't need their approval to continue.
Neither do you.
If you're ready to build something real, regardless of what anyone around you thinks about it, that's exactly the kind of work I do with clients across Edmonton.
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