“How can you build a regular fitness routine?”
That is an interesting question, mostly because it assumes the person answering knows how to do that.
Let’s be clear. I am not Jillian Michaels. I am not a CrossFit coach. I am not one of those people who wakes up at 4:30 a.m., drinks a green smoothie, runs eight miles, lifts weights, journals, reads a leadership book and then tells the rest of us we just need to want it badly enough.
If I really knew how to build a regular fitness routine and stick with it forever, I probably would not be overweight, diabetic and occasionally visiting a cardiologist who looks at me like my body is a group project I have not contributed enough to.
So I will not pretend to be an expert.
But I do know what it feels like to need one.
Back in 2005, I had one of those moments that gets your attention. I climbed some stairs and was embarrassingly winded. Not “I just ran a marathon” winded. More like, “Sir, these were stairs, not Everest” winded.
I was 38 years old, weighed 212 pounds and had become bigger than I ever thought I would be.
Around that time, I saw an infomercial for something called the Six-Week Body Makeover. I bought it, probably half-believing it would end up in a closet with every other miracle plan ever sold on late-night television. But something about it clicked.
Before long, the pounds started falling off.
People have said the program worked because of drastic calorie cuts, but that was not how it felt to me. I was eating five or six times a day and burning calories like a furnace. Yes, I was exercising almost every day, but never for more than 30 minutes.
And it worked.
In four and a half months, I lost 52.5 pounds. I got under 160 pounds for the first time since the early 1990s. I felt better. I looked better. I had more energy. For a while, I was living proof that a regular fitness routine could change your life.
Then real life showed up.
First, I got tired of eating five or six times a day. The structure that had helped me lose the weight started to feel like a chore, so I stopped doing it.
Then my mom’s breast cancer came roaring back.
And I did what a lot of people do when grief and stress become too heavy. I buried them in unhealthy food. By the time Mom died in July 2007, I was already past 212 pounds again.
A few years later, I used the same plan to get close to 200 pounds, but I fell off the wagon again. Eventually, I roared all the way up to 250.
I am under that now, but not by a lot.
That is the part nobody likes to put in the success story. We like before-and-after pictures. We like the triumphant ending. We like the neat little story where a person gets serious, loses the weight, changes his life and never again has an emotionally complicated relationship with carbohydrates.
But that is not always how it works.
Sometimes you lose the weight and gain it back.
Sometimes the plan works, but the maintenance plan does not.
Sometimes you know exactly what to do and still do not do it.
Sometimes grief, stress, exhaustion, convenience and Little Debbie all form a committee and vote against your long-term health.
The real challenge is not finding a plan that works for six weeks or four months. The real challenge is finding a way to live after the plan has done its job.
Daryl and I were actually talking about this tonight. We both know we need to get healthier. I have been thinking about putting together a modified version of that old Six-Week Body Makeover plan, because I know some parts of it worked for me. The frequent meals helped. The exercise helped. The structure helped.
But this time, it cannot just be about losing weight quickly.
It has to include a better way to taper off once we get where we are going. It has to be something we can actually live with. It has to account for real schedules, real stress, real fatigue and the fact that neither one of us wants to spend the rest of our lives eating like we are training for a role in a movie called Middle-Aged People Who Have Finally Had Enough.
And we will need support.
Not just each other, though that matters. We need people who will encourage us, check on us, pray for us, challenge us and maybe occasionally slap the metaphorical cookie out of our hands. Not literally. Probably.
That may be the biggest answer to the question.
You build a regular fitness routine by making it regular before you make it heroic. You start with something you can repeat. You do not have to become a gym bro, a marathoner or a person who owns seven kinds of resistance bands. You just have to begin building habits that your future self will thank you for.
Walk. Move. Plan your meals. Drink water. Get help.
Keep going.
And when you fall off the wagon, do not set the wagon on fire and move into the bakery. Get back on. That is the part I am trying to remember now.
I have done this before. I know change is possible. I also know that losing weight is not the same as building a life that keeps the weight off. That is where the real work begins.
So how can you build a regular fitness routine?
Carefully. Humbly. Honestly. With support. With grace for the days you fail. With enough structure to keep you moving and enough flexibility to keep you from quitting.
And maybe with fewer snacks in the house.
Which is unfortunate, because snacks have done nothing to deserve this level of betrayal.
Enjoyed this? Subscribe and get future reflections, bourbon notes, and assorted nonsense delivered straight to your inbox.
Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt
