A few months after a significant cardiac event, I found myself thinking about weight loss…well the exercise physiologist delicately suggested it. My heart event was related to a virus and a crappy week that pushed my health to its limits. But when you are poked and prodded during assessment and long-term recovery, they’re going to point out a few home truths.
So the sudden plan to lose some weight wasn’t in a dramatic, new-year, this-time-I-really-mean-it way. More in a practical, middle-aged, post-health-scare kind of way.

I knew my waist measurement was higher than I wanted it to be, and I knew it wasn’t a factor in my health but reducing it would probably improve my long-term health. I also knew movement was an important part of recovery, and it was time to step it up. All of the information was there.

And every time the thought arrived — I need to lose weight — I felt flat. I think I even rolled my eyes a few times.

The goal was too big to hold. It was like standing at the bottom of a mountain and looking all the way to the top, and then quietly deciding to do it tomorrow instead.

The moment the framing shifted

At some point this week a principle from James Clear’s Atomic Habits came back to me: make it easy.
I was reviewing some of his ‘laws’ for a work project, considering habits in the workplace. When the ‘make it easy’ factor for building new habits came into my head, that reframe did more work than any amount of resolve had managed.

I wasn’t actually trying to solve a weight problem. I was trying to solve a habit problem, and those are two very different things. Weight loss isn’t something you can do today. But I could stretch for five minutes, or I could do a short strength session. I could even dance to a couple of songs or just walk around the block.

Weight loss was the outcome. Habits were the system. And systems are something I know how to build.

AI as a thinking partner, not an advice machine

What happened next surprised me a little.

I had a day off today and was keen to work out how to tackle this goal. I decided there may be ideas or options that I haven’t thought of, so I opened Copilot and started talking through my situation. I started a chat looking for exercise advice, but what I got was more useful than that. I just told AI my situation and what I was struggling with. I almost vented to it. The chat gave me somewhere to think out loud, with something that asked reasonable questions back.

As the conversation went on, a pattern started to surface. The problem wasn’t motivation. The problem was friction.

It turns out I don’t actually like walking

This was one of the first things to fall out of the conversation.

When I imagined “exercise”, my brain automatically produced a picture of walking.
A few years ago I gained a permanent injury in my foot and can no longer run, something which I used to love.
When I think of walking my brain quickly produces a list of objections. It’s cold. It’s winter. It’s raining. I’d have to leave the house. I’d have to decide where to go. It’s a bit boring.

Meanwhile, when I talked about the strength exercises prescribed by my exercise physiologist, the feeling was completely different. I liked them. Not because they were more interesting, but because they were structured. Someone had already made the decisions. I just had to follow the instructions.

That was a clue, and it was pointing at something other than fitness.

The barrier wasn’t the exercise. It was the transition.

I work from home and I usually wear a business shirt during the day. Which means exercise doesn’t start with exercise. It starts with finding clothes, deciding when, changing, putting it off, and then feeling vaguely guilty about it.

On paper that’s trivial. In practice, every one of those steps is a decision point, and every decision point is somewhere the whole thing can quietly stall.

This is task initiation, and it’s one of the Executive Functions that tends to get mislabelled as character. When starting something requires a chain of small decisions, the difficulty isn’t in the activity at the end of the chain. It’s in the chain. What looked like a motivation problem was a transition problem wearing a disguise.

Once I could see that, the useful question changed. Not how do I want this more? but how many steps can I remove before I get there?

Designing for the life I actually have

One of the more grounded ideas in Atomic Habits is that habits have to fit your real life rather than your imagined one.

My fantasy life exercises daily, loves running, meal preps beautifully and springs out of bed ready to train. Whereas my actual life contains recovery from a cardiac event, work commitments, ADHD, neurodivergent kids, school drop-offs, lunchboxes and a Melbourne winter.

Any system that competed with that reality was going to lose. It needed to fit inside it.

Five minutes, while the kettle boils

What emerged wasn’t a fitness plan. It was closer to a rhythm.

Every morning now has a small habit stack:

• wake up
• drink water
• put the kettle on
• do five minutes of mobility while it boils
• make coffee.

That’s the whole thing. No special clothes. No equipment. No weather dependency. No motivation required, because the kettle is doing the remembering for me.

By the time I’ve had my first coffee, I’ve already moved. It’s a small win, but it sets the tone for everything after it.

A fifteen-minute appointment with myself

The second change came from looking at my mornings more honestly.

My first instinct was to schedule strength work at 6:45am to try and fit it in before kids get up and routine starts. But 6:45am flows into making lunchboxes, breakfast time, and kids getting ready. I really felt that putting a new habit there would have been setting it up to fail.

By around 7:15am, the major logistics are done and my eldest is back in her room getting ready. That’s the actual window.
Fifteen minutes. Not an hour. Not a gym session.

And the important part is this: the habit isn’t some specific strength training. The habit is showing up at 7:15am to do something. Some days that’s strength exercises. Some days it’s a morning yoga video, or Pilates, or brief mobility work, or something else entirely.

The goal was never perfection. It was consistency.

Making it something I’d actually want to do

The other thing that became obvious in the conversation was how differently I felt about different kinds of movement. This surfaced through my interaction with AI. It gave suggestions, I gave honest responses, it noticed tone and themes.

Yoga? Yes. Pilates? Interesting. Just Dance on the Nintendo with one of my kids? Absolutely.
Daily walking through a Melbourne winter? Not so much.

That’s the other side of the same principle: a habit needs to be attractive as well as easy.
And I realised I don’t need to become someone who loves walking. I need to become someone who moves regularly. They aren’t the same person. Walking isn’t the only path to weight loss. I just need to consider what is possible, what could work and what do I enjoy.

So the menu now includes Yoga With Adriene, Pilates videos, Just Dance, family walks, photography walks and short strength sessions. The variety is what keeps it going.

The scale became the scoreboard

The most unexpected part is that weight loss stopped being the centre of the story. And I love that.

I still want to reduce my waist measurement and improve my fitness and my long-term health. But those outcomes no longer drive what I do on a Tuesday morning.

What I check now is much smaller. Did I do the five minutes of mobility? Did I do the fifteen minutes? Did I move a bit today?
And did I find time to do more?

The scale became the scoreboard. The habits became the game.

What I keep coming back to

A few things have stayed with me from all of this.

• Weight loss is an outcome, not a habit. You can’t do lose ten kilograms, but you can do a five-minute stretch.
• Friction matters more than motivation. Weather, clothing changes, timing, decision fatigue – those turned out to be the real obstacles, and none of them respond to trying harder.
• Design for the life you actually live, not the one you’d like to be living. And after a health scare, the objective isn’t always to get fit as fast as possible. Sometimes it’s to build something sustainable while you’re still healing.

The AI part is worth naming too, because the value wasn’t in the advice. It was in the reflection and having somewhere to think out loud until the assumptions and barriers I hadn’t noticed came into view. That’s a different use case to “give me a workout plan”, and I suspect it’s the more useful one.

When I started that conversation, I thought I needed a weight-loss plan. Through ideation and reflection, it turned out what I actually needed was a system that made the healthy choice the easy one.

So instead of focusing on a number that’s months away, I’m focusing on the next small action. Put the kettle on. Stretch for five minutes. Move for fifteen. Repeat.

Sometimes progress doesn’t start with a bigger goal. Sometimes it starts by making the goal smaller.