I have always found that there are missing links in the health and wellness success path. I watch as people fill their carts with processed food and packaged meals, and have a degree of empathy and compassion for them — maybe it’s all they know. A series of learned behaviours that are reinforced by environment, whereby those unhealthy foods are cheaper, easier to get, and so strategically crafted that they just happen to make you crave them more.

I watch other people show up at the gym, moving and exercising and attending classes, only to throw it all away with poor food choices that are easier and convenient. These people know better. They know that vegetables are a better answer, they know that eating whole foods is preferred, they know that water is better than a “recovery” drink. But it doesn’t make it any easier.

I don’t think anybody knowingly decides they want to make themselves unhealthy or choose unhealthy foods. It becomes a function of ease and convenience, and in many cases wrongly acquired knowledge or mis-information. In many cases it’s not about people not knowing what to do — lack of knowledge is rarely the reason for lack of success or progress. Instead, it’s about not knowing how to structure their life to be able to make the choices to do that.

There are hurdles and barriers that show up in the path of everybody’s journey to be healthy. The response has always been to seek out a one stop, quick fix solution. This is nothing new. If there weren’t missing links, and there weren’t these gaps, or hurdles that individuals faced, there wouldn’t be any problems. Obesity wouldn’t be a problem, Big Pharma wouldn’t exist, and food manufacturing companies capitalizing on the vulnerabilities of individuals wouldn’t have a place to stand.

What needs to be new and altered is the way we approach it and deal with it. There are plenty of experts and gurus in the field offering information: you can find a nutrition expert or an exercise scientist; you can find research and studies and endless content on the foods to eat and how to eat them. Much of this however is conflicting information, and it is written as a cookie cutter recipe that “works for me” . . . so of course it will work for you.

And yet this is the farthest thing from true. When an individual seeks this information and it doesn’t work, what else are they to believe but that they are the problem — not good enough, not strong enough, not enough willpower, not committed enough to change — and then fall down into the spiralling depths of doing it all over again, with every single new program that shows up, only to come up every time with the same self-shaming answer.

What’s missing in all of this is the human aspect. The empathy and connection aspect. The compassion and understanding and the recognition that as an individual, we are all individual.

The missing part of why it’s not working for each individual is that things need to go deeper than just the facts and scientific articles. There is a place for evidence and science, research, and studies, but there is also a place for nuance, trial and error and individualisation.

If you are reading this thinking you are not good enough, don’t have enough willpower to change or at the end of your rope with trying to figure out how to do this whole healthy thing, this is for you. If you feel like you are constantly fed different information about how to make a change, this is for you. If you think you have no idea how to do it and feel like you should, yep, this I for you.

Everybody’s journey is different.

Embrace the eccentricity that exists in recognising that you are creating a new version of yourself in everything that you do. Nobody can know what that is or what it looks like more than you. Reach out for help, ask for what you need, but know that the beauty lives in who you become on that journey. This is not a path that can be written out and pre-determined, but it is one that you can follow through and figure out.