Chances are, a friend of yours has sung the praises of a specific diet or exercise plan, then insisted you give it a go. They likely cited incredible personal results: “I lost 5kg in a few weeks… I’ve never felt better… I don’t recognise myself in the mirror.”

There’s only one problem: as experienced coach Dan John once told me, “everything works for a while”.

This week, I’m going to explain why this is the case, and how realising this can save you time, money and suffering.

Think of your body like a set of balanced scales. When you alter your regular behaviours in any way, these balanced scales tip and physiological adaptations soon follow. In other words, changes trigger changes.

If we start eating less, we are likely to lose weight. If we start moving more, our body is likely to become healthier and more mobile.

As ever with the human body, there is more going on beneath the surface, such as compensatory mechanisms, but I’ve found this foundational principle holds true.

However, whatever your health and fitness goal, there are multiple ways to pull the same lever.

Let’s take intermittent fasting as a case study. Viewed exclusively through a weight loss lens, giving someone fewer hours in the week to eat will probably lead them to eat less. If someone eats fewer calories than they burn, the number on the scale will go down.

But you might also achieve this by trimming down the size of your meals or swapping processed snack foods for less energy-dense, nutritious alternatives – regularly replacing a chocolate bar with a piece of fruit, for example.

A 2017 paper compared several popular diets, from the Mediterranean diet to low-fat and low-carbohydrate options. The aim was to find the best approach for managing your weight and improving your health. It concluded that “optimising adherence is the most important factor for weight loss success”.

In short: the diet you follow is less important than how closely you follow it. The best move you can make for your future health is to find a sustainable way of eating that nourishes you, then stick with it for the long haul.

The same applies for exercise – there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

If you run regularly, your heart and lungs will become more efficient. But they will also benefit from that weekly dance class that leaves you breathing harder, or even a walk that raises your heart rate.

If you lift weights regularly, the working muscles will become bigger and stronger. The same is true of any exercise that challenges your muscles appropriately, whether it uses a resistance band or your body weight.

If you jump regularly, your bones will strengthen and your body will become more powerful. Higher-impact sports can also help, and tend to be rather fun too.

The real magic of exercise lies in regularly moving your body in ways that are challenging and enjoyable – so much so that you keep coming back for more.

There are, of course, optimal ways to achieve certain performance goals. Strength and conditioning coaches make it their life’s work to identify these. But optimal is for athletes – enjoyment is for everyday exercisers.

So why do I think sharing this information with you will revolutionise your approach to diet and exercise? The answer is three-fold.

Firstly, it saves you money, allowing you to see through sales pitches for exercise plans and products marketed as miracle solutions. Secondly, it eliminates the chase for exercise perfection and grants you near-infinite freedom to create a healthy life you actually enjoy. And finally, it highlights the value of any healthy act.

However big or small the act may be, every expert I have interviewed agrees on the immense value of simply doing something rather than nothing.

Every healthy choice you make tips the scales in your favour for better future wellbeing. An hour-long workout is great; so is taking the stairs rather than the escalator. A week of veg-heavy meals is great; so is lobbing an apple in your bag in the morning rather than a bag of crisps.

Do what you can, do that consistently, and you’ll find the benefits soon add up.

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