Why You Keep Falling Off the Wagon — And How to Get Off It for Good

A few years back I went on a road trip and got a flat tire. So I popped the other three.

Obviously I didn't.

But when a client described their pattern of missing a couple of workouts and then stopping completely to "start fresh next week" or eating something unplanned at lunch and deciding the whole day was a write-off — that's exactly the analogy I reached for.

One flat tire. Three slashed.

It doesn't hold up logically when you say it out loud. But in the moment, when you're frustrated and tired and the plan has already been disrupted, it feels completely rational. I know because I used to do it myself.

A few drinks at a party — might as well hit the snack table.

Pizza for dinner — ice cream seems reasonable now.

Miss Monday's workout — no point going Tuesday, I'll restart next week.

I kept that pattern going until I recognized it for what it was:

self-sabotage dressed up as logic.

The real problem isn't falling off. It's the wagon itself.

Here's what I've come to believe after 15 years of coaching people in Edmonton: the wagon is the problem.

The moment you frame your health as something you're either "on" or "off" — fully committed or completely abandoned, you've built a system with zero tolerance for being human. And human beings are not consistent.

Life isn't consistent. Work gets intense, families get demanding, sleep gets disrupted, seasons change, motivation fluctuates.

None of that is failure. It's just life.

The "wagon" mentality treats any deviation from the plan as a fall — which means the only available response to imperfection is to climb back on.

And climbing back on requires a fresh start. And fresh starts require a Monday, or a new month or January.

So you wait. And while you wait, you might as well, you know the rest.

For people in their 50s and 60s, this pattern often has decades of history behind it.

You've been on and off more times than you can count. Every restart feels heavier than the last because the gap between where you are and where you want to be has been accumulating for years.

The wagon isn't just frustrating anymore — it's exhausting.

The fix isn't more discipline. It's a different framework entirely.

Change the expectation before you change the behaviour.

The expectation most people carry into a health or fitness plan is perfectionism — that if they follow the plan correctly, every day will be a good day. When a bad day arrives, it doesn't fit the model, so the model gets abandoned.

Replace that expectation with this one:

Your best effort will look different every single day and that's acceptable.

There was a week I couldn't get to the gym. Every session I'd planned fell through — work, a family situation, a day where I just didn't have it in me. So I went for a 30-minute walk. Not what I planned. Not intense. But it was the best I had that day, and I did it.

That walk didn't set me back. It kept the thread alive. And keeping the thread alive — even when it's thin — is the entire game.

A missed workout is one flat tire. It doesn't require you to slash the other three. You change the flat and you keep driving.

Stop trying to eliminate your favourite foods.

The other version of wagon thinking shows up in nutrition and it sounds like this:

"I'm cutting out all sugar, all processed food, all alcohol — starting Monday."

Most people can white-knuckle that for a few weeks. But complete deprivation doesn't teach you how to live differently. It just delays the moment when the restriction becomes unsustainable and when it does, the rebound tends to be proportional to how hard the restriction was.

I've never told a client to permanently eliminate the foods they love.

I eat burgers. I have chocolate almonds. I enjoy a glass of wine.

None of that derails my training because none of it is forbidden — which means none of it has the psychological power that forbidden things accumulate.

The goal is not a life without your favourite foods.

The goal is a life where your favourite foods are something you enjoy deliberately, not something that controls your choices because you've been denying yourself for weeks.

When nothing is off-limits, bingeing loses its logic.

There's nothing to binge toward.

What consistency actually looks like

The clients I've worked with in Edmonton who have built the most durable results — the ones still training years later, still feeling strong, still making progress are not the ones who were perfect.

They're the ones who stopped treating imperfect weeks as failures.

They missed sessions and came back the next day instead of the next Monday.

They had a rough weekend and ate well on Sunday instead of waiting for a fresh start.

They stopped measuring themselves against an ideal and started measuring themselves against their own previous week.

That shift — from perfection to persistence, is the difference between people who keep starting over and people who simply keep going.

You don't need to get back on the wagon. You need to stop believing the wagon is the only way to travel.

If you're tired of the cycle and ready to build something that actually holds, that's the conversation I'd like to have.

Book a free consultation at shanekokas.com/contact