If you've spent years thinking you're just not the disciplined type, the question worth asking might not be how to become more disciplined. It might be what part of your current system is asking too much of you, and what a less ambitious version would look like.
For years, I told myself I wasn't a disciplined person.
And I had the evidence to back it up. Diets that lasted until the first dinner out. Gym memberships I stopped using by week four. A few years back I even did one meal a day for a stretch, eating nothing until dinner and then eating whatever I wanted, which worked for a week or two before I quietly drifted back to normal eating (not recommending this in any way).
Every January I'd start something and every February I'd quietly stop, and I'd file it under "I'm just not built that way."
About month ago (I know it's not a long time), I started eating better and working out. I've lost 3kg. And the thing I keep turning over in my head is that this is the longest I've ever stuck with the eating side of it, and the reason isn't that I finally found some willpower I didn't have before.
I just stopped trying to make it hard.
The thing I changed wasn't me
Every previous attempt at eating better looked roughly the same. Pick a diet with rules. Spend ten minutes trying to log a homemade meal with five ingredients. Eventually skip a day. Then skip a week.
The rules were never really the problem. The problem was the friction of recording what I ate. By the time I'd fought with the an app long enough to log lunch, I was already negotiating with myself about whether I really needed to bother for dinner.
This time I built something that takes about ninety seconds. I have an old coffee gram scale on the counter — a cheap one I bought years ago for pour-overs. Now it sits next to the kettle. I weigh whatever I'm eating, then drop the weight and a description of the food into a ChatGPT chat I keep open on my phone, which gives me a calorie estimate back in a few seconds. I jot the number down. That's it.
I want to flag something here, because I'm not trying to sell anyone on this setup. I genuinely don't know how accurate the numbers ChatGPT gives me are. It's not a calorie database. It's a language model making an educated guess based on whatever's in its training data, and I'm sure it's wrong sometimes, possibly by a lot. There are proper apps and databases that would give me more reliable numbers. I'm not using them, because every time I've tried to use them I've quit within two weeks. The whole point of this piece is that the system that's slightly worse on accuracy but that I actually do every day is, for me, beating the system that's better on paper but that I can't stick with. That's a trade I've made consciously, not a recommendation.
What I do think is that I'm getting a roughly accurate picture of what I'm eating, every day, instead of an extremely accurate picture for nine days and then nothing.
The scale comes with me
The other change, which sounds slightly unhinged when I say it out loud, is that I take the scale with me when I eat out.
It lives in my bag. There's a salad bar near me I go to a few times a week, the kind where you build your own bowl from a counter of ingredients, and the only honest way to know what's in it is to weigh it. So I do. I put the box on the scale, type the contents into the chat, and that's lunch logged before I've sat down.
The first couple of times I felt like a maniac. Now I don't think about it. The staff don't care. Nobody has ever said anything. And the alternative — eyeballing a salad bar bowl and pretending I know how many calories are in it — is the kind of self-deception that quietly sinks every previous attempt I made at this. The scale stops me from negotiating with myself about portions, which turns out to be where most of the damage was always being done.
I think this is the part of the system that's actually making the difference. Anyone can be honest with themselves about food at home. The hard bit is being honest about the meal you didn't make.
The workout half has been the same shape
The exercise side has been easier, partly because I lowered the bar there too.
Most previous attempts involved a gym. Sign up, plan to go four or five times a week, get up early, pack a bag, drive somewhere, change, work out, shower, go home. The actual exercise was maybe forty minutes of a two-hour ordeal. For about ten days I'd be a person who did that. Then a meeting would run long, or it would rain, and the whole thing would crack.
This time I didn't join a gym. I work from home, so I just do workouts in the apartment I'm already in. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. I sometimes even have my tv on when working out and watch it when resting between sets. The whole thing is over before the version of me who would have talked himself out of it has finished his coffee.
I'm not putting much weight on the workout side of this, honestly. The eating is what's actually moving the scale. The workouts are mostly there because they make me feel better and they're easy enough to do that I don't dread them.
The friction was the whole problem
Looking back, I'd been blaming the wrong thing for years. I thought I lacked discipline. What I actually lacked was a setup that didn't require enormous discipline to execute.
The old version of dieting asked me to wrestle with a clunky app every time I ate something. That's not a diet. That's a small data-entry job with a diet buried inside it. And I was treating my failure to complete the data-entry job as a character flaw.
The new version asks me to put food on a scale and type a a few words into a chat. The friction is so low that the version of me that's tired can do it without negotiating, and the scale being portable means there's no situation where I've "got nothing to log with" and have to fall back on guessing.
What I think I got wrong before
I used to think discipline was a quality you either had or didn't. The disciplined people were the ones who logged every meal and never missed a workout. The rest of us were the ones who tried and failed and tried and failed, and eventually accepted we weren't wired for it.
But I think I had it backwards. The people who appear endlessly disciplined probably aren't grinding through enormous resistance every day. They've likely arranged their lives so the resistance is low. They look disciplined from the outside because they're showing up consistently, but on the inside it's often not requiring the kind of effort I used to assume it was.
The annoying thing is that I'd actually read this idea years ago. James Clear makes this argument in Atomic Habits — that "you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems", and that the most reliable way to change behavior is to make the desired behavior easier rather than to summon more willpower.
I remember nodding along when I read it. I underlined things. I told people about it. And then I went straight back to setting ambitious goals and trying to muscle through them, exactly as before.
I don't think I was being lazy. I think there's something about reading an idea and actually applying it that are two very different operations, and the gap between them is where most self-improvement books quietly die. You can know the principle and still not do anything with it for years. Sometimes you have to fail at the old way enough times for the new way to become the obviously easier option, rather than the slightly suspicious-sounding alternative.
The version of me that was trying to be disciplined was using willpower to overpower a bad system. The version of me that's quietly losing weight has a slightly less bad system, and is using about the same amount of willpower I was using before. Maybe less.
The bottom line
It's only been a month. 3kg isn't a transformation. The real test is whether this is still happening in six months, and I'm not going to pretend I know it will be.
But it's the longest I've ever stuck with a proper diet, and the reason isn't that something changed inside me. The reason is that I stopped trying to do the version that kept failing and started doing a smaller, easier version I could actually keep doing. The scale in the bag, the chat on the phone, the workout in my living room. Three small things, none of them impressive on their own, that together took the whole project from impossible to almost automatic.
If you've spent years thinking you're just not the disciplined type, the question worth asking might not be how to become more disciplined. It might be what part of your current system is asking too much of you, and what a less ambitious version would look like — one designed around the version of you that's tired on a Wednesday after work, not the version of you that's motivated on a Saturday afternoon.
That's the version that has to actually do it.
