The Vacation Trap: When Discipline Disappears

Every year, I use my birthday as a reflection point. It’s an opportunity to look back over the past fifty-two weeks and see where I started versus where I am now. Turning thirty-seven, there was no arguing that progress was made, but most of that progress was in my professional life. I wanted to truly commit to some changes in my personal life, focusing heavily on my health and fitness. I wasn’t thinking about a temporary diet; I was thinking about a permanent lifestyle change.

Knowing that change doesn’t happen without small, steady progress, I devised a plan to make year thirty-seven the healthiest of my life. I consulted a friend about his workout regimen and started by simply doing small, ten-minute workouts Monday through Friday. It was an easy habit to start. Next, I began tracking my calories, which led me to focus on my overall nutrition and macros. Slowly, step by step, I started to lose weight, feel more vibrant, and see real results. I was establishing undeniable momentum.

We decided to go on vacation for spring break to visit family down in Florida in late March, which added even more fuel to the fire. As the trip got closer, my discipline grew stronger. People at work and in my family were noticing. I felt like I had a tailwind behind me and nothing could stop me.

Then, the week before vacation, I got sick.

Sickness had been in and out of my house for weeks, and I had managed to avoid it—until I didn’t. I woke up sick on a Monday, and it completely derailed my week. I didn’t work out in the mornings, though I still tried to eat as healthy as I could. Because it was the week before vacation, work was demanding as I prepared to be out of the office. I was exhausted, my wife was exhausted, and my son got sick right up to the day we left.

I remember having a debate in my head about how I was going to maintain my routine on vacation. I realized that if I took my foot off the gas and just ate whatever I wanted, two things would be true: I would give up some of my hard-earned progress, and it would prove this wasn’t a lifestyle change, just a temporary routine. If someone decides to quit smoking, they don’t just give themselves a week off every year to go back to it. I wanted this to be permanent.

At the start of the vacation, I was highly disciplined. I ate a lot of grilled and blackened fish with vegetables and strong breakfasts. But I wasn’t working out. I was staying up late, enjoying vacation, and sleeping in. In fact, I made the conscious decision to turn off my alarm for the week. I told myself I was resting and recovering.

What became apparent afterward was that turning off that alarm was the start of the unraveling.

My whole system is built around getting up early and knocking out a series of lifestyle improvements before anyone else wakes up. Every day, I read my Bible, read 20 pages of a book, work out, and plan my food intake. These steps springboard me into my day. What I realized on vacation is that these habits are exponentially harder to execute when I don't do them before the kids wake up.

By the third day of vacation, I slipped in an order of fries on the side. By the fourth day, fries were part of my lunch and dinner. By the fifth day, a bacon cheeseburger tasted so good. When we got back to town the next weekend, it felt like everything I had built over the previous five months was gone. I had to start all over again.

Medical consensus shows that 80% to 95% of people who lose weight on a traditional diet eventually regain it. Why? Because a "diet" is treated as a temporary state with an "off" switch. Once it is disrupted by a vacation, we almost universally revert to our old, automatic habits. Conversely, the National Weight Control Registry highlights a different reality: the most successful people maintain the same baseline systems on weekends and holidays as they do on a random Tuesday.

With all the intention in the world, I made one crucial mistake: I eliminated the keystone habit that allowed my lifestyle change to function. Getting up early. By eliminating this single step, I took the guardrails off. In the book Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin talk about the concept that "Discipline Equals Freedom." This was my exact experience. I tricked myself into believing that sleeping in was giving myself freedom. Instead, it just gave my old, comfortable habits the freedom to take over without me even noticing.

Change requires failure. Without an awareness of failure, we will not change. I recognized an area of my life I wanted to enhance and installed daily disciplines to execute it. I subconsciously thought I could eliminate just one of those guardrails and everything would be fine. It ended up being a small crack in the dam, and it only took a couple of days for the dam to break.

Lesson learned. Moving forward, I will work to maintain those keystone habits through vacations and holidays. Don't look for a quick fix, and remember: true freedom comes from discipline.