Don't Eat the Whole Elephant: Why I'm Changing One Thing at a Time

You know the old question — how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I've heard that phrase my whole life and never thought much about it until I actually tried to overhaul my entire life in one week after my bypasses.

It didn't work. New diet, new exercise routine, new supplements, new sleep schedule, all at once, starting Monday. By Thursday I was exhausted just thinking about everything I was supposed to be doing, and by the following week most of it had quietly stopped.

Why the "all at once" approach fails

I evaluate systems for a living, so eventually I looked at this the same way I'd look at a piece of equipment that keeps failing under load. The problem wasn't willpower. The problem was the load itself — I was asking myself to build five new habits simultaneously, with no foundation under any of them.

Behavioral researchers have written entire books on exactly this. James Clear's Atomic Habits popularized the idea that small, consistent 1% improvements compound over time into something much bigger than a single dramatic change ever could. BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits makes a related point — that starting a new habit so small it feels almost too easy removes the willpower barrier entirely, which is exactly what I'd been getting wrong.

What I actually changed first

When I restarted, I picked two things. Just two: a scoop of Super Greens in the morning, and a cup of the organic coffee instead of what I'd been drinking. That's it. Nothing about my evenings, nothing about exercise, nothing about anything else.

Once that felt automatic — not "I'm trying to remember to do this" but just something I did without thinking, the way you don't think about brushing your teeth — I added one more thing. A short walk. Then another lap at lunch. Each new habit stacked onto the one before it that had already become invisible, the way habits do once they're real.

That's the whole strategy behind the 90-Day Papa Fuel Challenge, if I'm honest. It's not about doing everything right starting day one. It's about doing one or two things consistently enough that they stop being effort and start being who you are.

Where I'm at with this now

I'm currently building out daily tracking for exactly this reason — logging the walk, the lap around the work property at lunch, the weigh-ins, one small entry at a time, the same way I built the habits themselves. Not all at once. Bite by bite.

If you're standing where I was — looking at everything you feel like you should be doing and feeling tired before you've even started — start with one thing. Just one. Let it become boring and automatic before you add the next one. That's not a lack of ambition. That's how it actually works.

Want to see how I'm structuring the small stuff day to day? Check out the free Supplement Tracker, or read the full story here.